DirectDraw and Software Emulation

There exists a version of ddraw.dll that is often touted as improving the performance of Yuri’s Revenge. This “magic” DLL forces DirectDraw into software emulation mode, which doesn’t use any hardware accelerated GPU functionality. This means special effects that are not emulated are simply omitted, potentially improving performance. Ares uses software emulation mode by default, making this DLL unnecessary. However, Windows Vista and later come with DirectX 10 - which does not support software emulation - so Ares will not default to software emulation mode on those versions of Windows (otherwise users would just get a completely black screen).

New in version 0.1.