Fanciest DirectX 8 game

I already use his OGL renderer under Vista, and it works great. And I've "adopted" Unreal to work within Unreal Tournament's engine (and associated compressed textures)

 

some more:

Enclave
Vietcong

 

Man, Vietcong has one hell of a way with trees. By far one of the best and most 'realistic' simulations of dense jungle i've ever seen (don't mention Crysis, sigh). Textures were very nicely detailed, and surprisingly the way in which they did their water/stream/waterfall effects were cool...it was like they had a recorded video of a stream of water and just magically slapped it onto the surface of the river to create a realistic stream. I liked it.

Just an overall beautifull game to strolling through the jungle in. Until a punji-trap raps you across the chest, that is.

 

Enclave is more like a dx7 era game I think. It seems too old to use dx8. It certainly doesn't use any pixel shaders and stuff from what I recall. Just nice ordinary textures and well-done levels which gives it a great look overall.

Been ages since I last played it though.
Peace.

 

You sure you don't mistake it with another game? Enclave came out 2003 and surely did use shaders (not surprisingly, being a xbox conversion)...

 

The water had shaders:
http://mitglied.lycos.de/opposed/gifs/Enclave 2003-07-04 22-38-57-13.jpg

 

Wow. I thought it was roughly 2001-ish. It FEELS so long ago since I played it...
Guess that means it's time to fire it up again.
Peace.

 

i think i might fire up enclave again myself iirc you could play as several characters

 

Seriously though, here are some other notable DX8 games, though I don't think any of them are going to push the limits:

Hitman 2
Jedi Knight II
Dungeon Siege
Arx Fatalis
IGI 2
Hidden & Dangerous

 

Hey! With stencil shadows/self-shadowing, it brought systems to a crawl. The self shadows were kinda borked, but it added much more to the look of the game, especially with the lightsaber drawn.

 

Were there many games to even use PS1.4 at the time? IIRC, only the Radeon 8500 (& derivitives) supported it whereas the Geforce 4 only went up to 1.3.

 

Doom 3 probably..

ATi's own tech demos are probably the only thing pushing PS1.4 since ATi's stuff was the only chips supporting it during that era.
Peace.

 

iirc halo had a ps 1.4 option

from the config file:

// ForceShader - Forces the search for valid shaders to start at a value other than the max the card supports ie: ForceShader=14

found this interesting one :
// PrototypeCard - Warning for known prototype video cards (For example prototype XBOX GF3 test cards)

 

Pretty sure H&D1 was actually DX6 or 7, it was released quite some time before even DX8.

 

just remembered :

Bloodrayne

 

BTW, since some are making the distinction between a DX8.1 game and a DX9 game running on DX8.1 hardware: Are there anything of significance that you couldn't (reasonably) accomplish (visually) using the older D3D that you can using DX9 while limiting yourself to the features exposed by the older hardware?

 

I recall Max Payne 2 mirror reflections requires PS1.4. It certainly wasn't present using a GeForce4Ti.

 

You're right, my Googling has failed me... DX6 (blame this guy). Different sites report the sequel as requiring either DX7 or DX8/DX8.1... I could have sworn I had it around here somewhere, but damned if I can find it now.