SDL1 version too old

[glebm]

We'd like to try out a game (DevilutionX) with SDL1 instead of SDL2 to see how it affects performance but the SDL1 version here is too old (1.2.8). Would it possible to update SDL1 to at least 1.2.10, or, ideally, the current upstream https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL-1.2?

[uyjulian]

The plan is to replace with sdl12-compat

[glebm]

We've seen actual SDL-1.2 perform much better than SDL2 for software-rendered games on other platforms.
sdl12-compat is just a wrapper around SDL2, so it wouldn't affect performance.

[uyjulian]

I would prefer to fix the performance issue rather than attempt to do stuff that may not be relevant to issue.

The performance will depend on the system interface exposed by SDL, not the SDL library version.

At least try to use sdl12-compat to ensure the issue is not with the API usage difference.

[glebm]

On these other platforms, I think the main difference is that SDL-1.2 allows drawing directly to the framebuffer, whereas SDL2 always requires GPU support, so there is an additional copy on every frame.

So for old school software-rendered games, SDL2 is always slower than SDL1.

[uyjulian]

You can avoid using the GPU pipeline in SDL2 by using SDL_GetWindowSurface. In fact, this is what I do in one of my projects to avoid requiring WebGL support. https://github.com/krkrsdl2/krkrsdl2/blob/abe7762cef00240c323e38cc37e159052d60e013/src/core/sdl2/SDLApplication.cpp#L719

[fjtrujy]

We've seen actual SDL-1.2 perform much better than SDL2 for software-rendered games on other platforms.
sdl12-compat is just a wrapper around SDL2, so it wouldn't affect performance.

Is that something specifically of PS2? Or is it a general assumption?
Honestly knowing how poor was done the PS2 SDL1.2 port, I don’t expect to have better performance that current SDL2 port.
Anyway if you want to upgrade it to the latest 1.X version, please do it and create the PR, it is going to be really welcomed