A good sign for Ati

[OpenGL guy]

I enabled Truform support in the UT 2003 demo and I'm getting my first lock-up/crashes since installing this Sapphire 9700 Pro Monday night. The game lets me play for about 10-15 seconds before blue screening and rebooting my system (XP Pro). Disable it (tess. set at 1.0) and the game plays fine. Moreover, the performance hit was probably close to 33%, guessing from the frame rate counter (which went from averaging low 40s to high 20s).

Can you please give some more system info? CPU, RAM, driver revision, etc?

 

[noko]

I think TRUFORM is a useful and IQ enhancing feature which should be used more and more. If you want good organic shapes you are going to need lots of poly's and that is what TRUFORM gives.

 

[John Reynolds]

Can you please give some more system info? CPU, RAM, driver revision, etc?

P4 2.4B, 512MB of Kingston 1066 RDRAM, ASUS P4T533-E mobo, Catalyst 2.3 with 0121 D3D patch, nothing is overclocked.

 

[Nagorak]

IMHO, truform won't really be useful until displacement mapping is heavily used.

The trend these days is to go with lo-res models and normal maps (the technique Carmack is using in Doom3) and stencil'ed shadow volumes, and TruForm just mucks this up. Back patching old games isn't that visually impressive. I can hardly tell the difference in-game when playing counterstrike with truform on or off.

The normal map trick looks astrounding, the only place it doesn't look good is at the silhouette edges, and this is where TruForm could help. Seems to me that if you are using low-res imposters, you'd want to control TruForm so that it is only enabled on triangles whose normals are nearly perpendicular to the eye.

Ignoring the lighting, the models in Doom3 look very unimpressive. They are visibly jagged and designed in a way that accentuates the crappiness of their look. At least from what I've seen of UT2003 the models have blockiness in believable places. Meanwhile in screen shots of Doom3 we see the big tub'o'large guys that really look like blocks'o'lard. So, if this is supposedly the wave of the future, I'm very unimpressed.

I suppose as developers start to use a little bit higher poly models, it should be cool though. We'll have to wait and see.

 

[V3]

Is there any particular reasons, why those normal maps can't be used along with truform ?

 

[Nagorak]

Is there any particular reasons, why those normal maps can't be used along with truform ?

It messes up the shadows so they don't match the model because the shadows can't be Truformed. Which, in my opinion, is a silly reason not to use Truform on the models. I mean, in the past we had little circles passing for shadows, so at least this way the shadows would more or less look like the models (and no one is going to be looking at them that closely anyway).

 

[FUDie]

It messes up the shadows so they don't match the model because the shadows can't be Truformed. Which, in my opinion, is a silly reason not to use Truform on the models. I mean, in the past we had little circles passing for shadows, so at least this way the shadows would more or less look like the models (and no one is going to be looking at them that closely anyway).

A bigger problem is with self-shadowing.

 

[Xmas]

Is there any particular reasons, why those normal maps can't be used along with truform ?

Another problem, besides self shadowing and finding the silhouette edges, is that the low-res model and the normal maps are generated as a pair that match each other. The normal maps 'simulate' the shape details that get lost when reducing model resolution. TruForm really affects the shape of an object, so the normal maps don't match the model any more.

It's not that big an issue though.

 

[jb]

I enabled Truform support in the UT 2003 demo and I'm getting my first lock-up/crashes since installing this Sapphire 9700 Pro Monday night. The game lets me play for about 10-15 seconds before blue screening and rebooting my system (XP Pro). Disable it (tess. set at 1.0) and the game plays fine. Moreover, the performance hit was probably close to 33%, guessing from the frame rate counter (which went from averaging low 40s to high 20s).

JR,

I had a simular issue when I enabled Truform in the Ut2003.ini For me the fix was to also enable the truform check box in the driver control pannel (I did both the opengl and D3D). Once I did that it no longer locked up or crashed. However I have an AMD on Win2k so I have differnt spec which means it may not help you

 

[demalion]

I don't get where the "Disable it (tess. set at 1.0)" idea originates from. There are 2 Npatch related settings, one for activation, and the other for tesselation level. My understanding of the level is that it is simply the number of times the shape is tesselated. So, a setting of 1 has the shape being tesselated once (which is doing something), while a setting of 0 would be the same as no tesselation (tesselation 0 times). Since it seems to work that way for me in UT2003, and similarly in Half-Life, I'm pretty sure this is right.

More interestingly, however, the value is a floating point value, and I recall mention of the 9700/DX 9 supporting gradated fractional tesselation based on distance. I'm now off to find a math page about tesselation to see if I can get a firm grasp on exactly what non-integer tesselation values mean. Based on the sample picture on ATi's site and my vague recollections, I'm guessing that results in variation between the number of polygons added, though the shape represented is preserved...what I don't get right now is how this is done.

 

[Bjorn]

Ignoring the lighting, the models in Doom3 look very unimpressive. They are visibly jagged and designed in a way that accentuates the crappiness of their look. At least from what I've seen of UT2003 the models have blockiness in believable places. Meanwhile in screen shots of Doom3 we see the big tub'o'large guys that really look like blocks'o'lard. So, if this is supposedly the wave of the future, I'm very unimpressed.

I suppose as developers start to use a little bit higher poly models, it should be cool though. We'll have to wait and see.

I think this has been said lots of times but the thing with Doom3 is that you have to see it in motion to appreciate the lighting, shadows.....

As for me, (having played the demo and a beta version of UT2003) i must say that Doom3 looks a LOT better. Some maps in UT2003 is good, but some of them looks really old. The problem is that "static" feeling that i get. Maybe it's because of the Doom3 video which has spoiled me a bit.
I agree that some characters looks kinda blocky in screenshots though. But you don't notice that in the video at all. I know that i don't at least.

 

[John Reynolds]

I had a simular issue when I enabled Truform in the Ut2003.ini For me the fix was to also enable the truform check box in the driver control pannel (I did both the opengl and D3D). Once I did that it no longer locked up or crashed. However I have an AMD on Win2k so I have differnt spec which means it may not help you

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll double-check that when I get home.

Edit: Swung home real quick on a lunch break and the demo does the same thing regardless of how Truform is checked in the driver panels.

 

[jb]

doh,

sorry then for the trouble.

 

[parhelia]

Anyone tried Truform in Renegade? It rocks!

 

[jb]

JR,

I had a chance to install the final version of UT2k3 today and it was locking up. I installed the new cat drivers and that took care of the locks ups (except the intro). I am pretty sure but you do have the new drivers right?

 

[Doomtrooper]

New drivers link

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4081.html

 

[jb]

Yea thats the ones I just downloaded. No biggie. It plays the game fine just crashed on the intro (note intro does not play normally, i had to load it at the command line).

Gonna to try this as well which I found on the unreal tech site


You need to have DirectX 8.1b installed to play the game successfully. If you get a crash on startup or at a random time during gamplay, this is likely to be the cause. Download it from Microsoft's DirectX site (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/downloads/drx81.asp).

 

[Dave Baumann]

You need to have DirectX 8.1b installed to play the game successfully. If you get a crash on startup or at a random time during gamplay, this is likely to be the cause.

Probably more likely to happen if you have an AMD based system...

 

[Doomtrooper]

Probably more likely to happen if you have an AMD based system...

Them's fighting words

 

[Dave Baumann]

No, there's just a very good and specific reason why DX8.1b arrived.