Dirty tricks in graphics

I.S.T. said:
What happened there?
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Ooohhhhh.. "Glowing Lightsabres and Shadows Only available with the incredible power of Geforce 6 series!"
Features include Bump mapping, "reflecting plastic" and Bloom Filtering.

Once found out, nVidia made the excuse that it's SM3 only!!!!1111 (versus Radeon X's at that time)

then they found out it had nothing to do with that, it was a pure vendor check.
 
neliz said:
Can I blame nVidia then for now sponsoring Valve and I'm having issues with Edge-Detect AA in Source engine games?
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Sure, be my guest :)
I haven't really played much lately so I haven't personally experienced much "cheating" in the past few years.

To balance that HL2 story there is also a story about Doom3. As NV at that time didn't have as powerful shaders using texture lookups was often faster alternative. For specular lighting D3 used a texture lookup and it worked quite nicely on NV. On ATI it was found that a simple shader replacement that found proper values through maths instead of lookup it worked even better:
http://www.driverheaven.net/gaming-discussion/58411-doom-3-hack-ati.html
 
How about that 'dirty trick' of adding PhysX effects to games, which can only be run properly with a PPU or a certain brand of GPU? :)
 
Scali said:
How about that 'dirty trick' of adding PhysX effects to games, which can only be run properly with a PPU or a certain brand of GPU? :)
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That's no dirty trick, not in my books anyway. Though it seems that PPU won't do anymore either, at least not in all games (Batman requires newest PhysX drivers, and PPU doesn't work in Batman with those, and apparently not in any older title either)
 
Kaotik said:
That's no dirty trick, not in my books anyway. Though it seems that PPU won't do anymore either, at least not in all games (Batman requires newest PhysX drivers, and PPU doesn't work in Batman with those, and apparently not in any older title either)
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Amazing huh? It's no Longer PhysX then but just a geforce G80+ feature..
 
neliz said:
Amazing huh? It's no Longer PhysX then but just a geforce G80+ feature..
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This still needs to be confirmed though, I've seen 2 people mentionig it so far, and could be just some driver bug or something, too.
 
no-X said:
I can remember Splinter Cell at the time of NV4x/G7x - the game didn't use SM3.0 on SM3.0 compatible cards - it was enabled only if the card supported HW FP16 texture filtering. FP16 texture filtering wasn't in SM3.0 specs, it was kind a nVidia's exclusive feature at that time.
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Also Chaos Theory only shipped with SM1.1 and SM3.0 shader until ATI stepped in.
 
Scali said:
How about that 'dirty trick' of adding PhysX effects to games, which can only be run properly with a PPU or a certain brand of GPU? :)
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As was stated it would be a dirty trick if the ATI cards were also capable of it, but it was blocked purely due to vendor ID.

Oh, but instead, Nvidia have just blocked the ability to use an Nvidia card as a PPU processor when an ATI card is detected in the system.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
As was stated it would be a dirty trick if the ATI cards were also capable of it, but it was blocked purely due to vendor ID.

Oh, but instead, Nvidia have just blocked the ability to use an Nvidia card as a PPU processor when an ATI card is detected in the system.

Regards,
SB
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By the looks of it, they've also blocked PPU's (PPU users can't get physx working in batman and the newest drivers break phys support in older titles too if you're using Ageia PPU)
 
Kaotik said:
By the looks of it, they've also blocked PPU's (PPU users can't get physx working in batman and the newest drivers break phys support in older titles too if you're using Ageia PPU)
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Well that one isn't too surprising. Who knows whether the aging Ageia PPU is still capable of whatever changes Nvidia may (or may not) have made to PhysX. If it's all CUDA now and the legacy Ageia PPU code has been ditched, then it may not be possible. Or if all new features are CUDA only.

Hard to hold that one against them without more knowing whether the PPU actually is capable or not. Is there way to trick the driver to test it?

Regards,
SB
 
Kaotik said:
That's no dirty trick, not in my books anyway. Though it seems that PPU won't do anymore either, at least not in all games (Batman requires newest PhysX drivers, and PPU doesn't work in Batman with those, and apparently not in any older title either)
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Are you sure about that?
The most recent driver (from yesterday as it seems) on the nv-page says both: optimized for driving batmobiles and support for PPU:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_9.09.0814_whql.html

Haven't tried it myself, though.
 
Edit: Ignore this post.

The problem was on my side, re-installed the drivers (190.38) and problem is gone, now its running again in D3D 10, i suspect using nHancer to tinker with some options) might have leading the game into D3D9.


[strike]Seems Battleforge is another to get in the shame list, apparently not sure why, now when i run it it will run in D3D9 leaving SSAO disabled, wich previously before the last patch or 2 not sure, it would run in D3D10 and i could enable or disable SSAO now its just grayed out.

Now im not sure if this is due to something else, but i havent made any drastic changes software is the same (vista 32 and latest WHQL drivers), so it leads me to assume this was deliberatly made!

If so, not cool!

Anyone here with a D3D10 nvidia graphics card to test it? Maybe the problem is on my side.[/strike]
 
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Try right clicking on the icon in Games Browser and check if there's separate "play in DX9" and "play in DX10" options
 
kaotik do you have hawx ?

to run in dx10 you have to do that
but i installed it in xp so my gamebrowser doesnt have that option anyone know the command ?
 
Davros said:
kaotik do you have hawx ?

to run in dx10 you have to do that
but i installed it in xp so my gamebrowser doesnt have that option anyone know the command ?
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I had HAWX demo, it's quite common under Vista/7 that the game has those options under right click.
Under XP you of course can't bet anything but DX9
 
no xp doesnt have dx10 but ive got a dual boot xp/vista
but because i installed in xp i have no shortcuts in vista
ive tried h:\games\hawx -dx10
 
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