Discussione about unused old chips features

HW per-pixel translucency sorting?

 

What sucks about Truform is playing old games that support on a 8x00 series card. You'd think it'd have been supported by now...

 

Tbuffer effects were ugly or not worth the performance hit.
NV15 was too slow for general per pixel lightning.
I remember some not interesting dolphin demo for Truform and never saw anything in real world.

 

NV15 features were all supported by NV10, the driver that enabled them were launched with the geforce 2 which was marketed with the "new" features.
The one game that uses them is.. Doom 3, which was said in reviews to be playable on the fastest NV1x boards in 640x480 (geforce 2 Ultra, geforce 4MX 440/460), if you disable specular lighting which doesn't have too much of a visual impact.

the "Giga Texel Shading" stuff used are the register combiners, which I remember someone likening it to "pixel shader 0.5".

 

I was referring to CLX2 (DC) and the later PMX<can't remember the number> for the (PC). The trans sort feature was dropped from later PC chips because very few developers ever made use of it <shrug>.

 

do any games use the d3d version of truform ?

 

A little off topic but how about the entire T&L unit on Savage 2000 chips heh. I recall that S3TC compression was broken on GeForce 3. Wonder if there were any other hardware mishaps.

 

UT2003, Rainbow Six: Raven Shield.

 

Dungeon Keeper supported this on Matrox cards. Haven't played it recently so I don't know if it's used on the current cards.

It was broken on the NV1x too. Well, DXT1 at least. IIRC, all the other formats were fine.

Npatches were cool. I think I only played a handful of games that supported them (Return to Castle Wolfenstein?).

EDIT: Seems there were more games that used it. Too bad I was using 3dfx/nVidia back then.

 

i cant get slave zero working on xp also expendable used ebm
iirc the thrid party opengl renderer for ut also supports truform as does the deusex ogl renderer
its surprising no one has made a sort of wrapper to convert truform calls into the d3d eqiv

 

Serious Sam and Morrowind have truform support. For Morrowind, you need the FPS Optimizer to enable it.

Dungeon Keeper 2 can use bump mapping on modern cards just by using the command line options to enable it as with G400.

 

I'm still waiting for Tessellation to be enabled in games. I bought a 2900XT and now have a 4870. I feel sorta ripped hehe.

 

not until directX 11 I guess. games developers probably don't want to create whole geometry assets that can only be used with a particular vendor, so I think tesselation won't be used till nvidia and Intel GPUs on the market support it (and even then it may take a while)

 

PowerVR and Matrox suported internal 32bit rendering. 3Dfx suported internal 24bit rendering and only nVidia and ATi used 16bit... But later GPUs (R300-R580) used 32bit anytime MSAA was enabled.

 

Anybody know what the differences are between 8500 Truform and the tessellation hardware found on the R600? Or is it essentially the same hardware?

 

Truform is fixed function. The R600 tessellator is programmable.