Games & N-Patches aka TruForm

[silent_guy]

Mr bauman if your listening next time one of your engineers say "Hey gamers no longer need feature X, lets remove support for it", will you kindly grab them by the throat and slap them silly...

There was a time in the eighties when Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was considered the ultimate PC compatibility test. Eventually, humanity has been able to get past this.

As a shareholder (S&P500 fund! ), I hope that Mr. Bauman will spend his resources intelligently and won't support obsolete 12 year old technology that's still used by 0.01% of the customers. Unless they're willing to pay for it. A lot...

 

[DavidGraham]

So I guess I can forget about enabling it in software? , too bad , today's hardware is more than capable of handling 10 times the amount of any old TruForm.

 

[AlexV]

Then why did they drop the support? I think maintaining it is a trivial task.

Drivers tend to be rather complicated affairs more often than not, and something for a modern GPU is likely to be a straight out quagmire. Having another failure point that is tied to an irrelevant feature is not something you want, so the more cruft that gets taken out the better, from a development and maintenance point of view.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Newer products do not support TruForm, nor do they claim to; much like other old technologies on older products (i.e. they do not support similar AA mechanisms found on Radeon 8500's either).

 

[nikos64]

The hardware was there until R700. The driver support for this, was gone long before.
But I was able to run the Unigine Heaven benchmark with tessellation in OpenGL mode in my HD4850.
No luck with Serious Sam though...

 

[Dave Baumann]

The hardware was there until R700. The driver support for this, was gone long before.
But I was able to run the Unigine Heaven benchmark with tessellation in OpenGL mode in my HD4850.
No luck with Serious Sam though...

Xenos/R600/R700 switched over to the VGT engine, which is the precursor to the DX11 tessellation engine used/evolved since Evergreen. Specific OGL extensions where available for those, but I doubt it relates to "TruForm" N-Patch support.

 

[3dcgi]

Xenos/R600/R700 switched over to the VGT engine, which is the precursor to the DX11 tessellation engine used/evolved since Evergreen. Specific OGL extensions where available for those, but I doubt it relates to "TruForm" N-Patch support.

Correct. The tessellator introduced with Xenos was different from the old R200 n-patch engine. It supported n-patches, but the low level programming of it was different. Those OGL extensions are still supported by AMD hardware today though all legacy support will come to an end eventually. Anyone writing new code today should be using native OGL and DX11 tessellation.

 

[swaaye]

Only R200 seemed to be reliable for Truform. RV2x0 doesn't truly support it in hardware AFAIK. I think I remember BSODs with R300. However those were also still the times of really shaky ATI drivers.

 

[Blazkowicz]

My experience my Truform was a friend using a R350, in Day of Defeat (HL1 mod), it made the framerate slower so you had to bring the console and type ati_npatches 0.
We couldn't notice any visual difference. (then I showed him how to cheat a bit by removing the rain in that map, and stopping the map's background noise)

Sorry for bumping a decade old thread , I got my hands on C&C Renegade , I couldn't enable curved surfaces (TruForm) on my GTX 660Ti nor HD 6770 , so was the support for the technology dropped from modern AMD GPUs ? If so ,Can it run on software mode then ?

I ran Renegade on a Voodoo5, it was very fast and looked fun but was buggy. Some polygons or stuff were fully transparent, maybe the game crashed on me I don't remember. The ennemy AI was also extremely lacking, making the game no challenge (it was even easier than HL2)
It all looks like that game was force rushed before it was finished.

Eventually we'll need a D3D software renderer focused on running older games, DX2 to DX7 or 8, some kind of compatibility suite also including DirectDraw, DirectPlay and stuff like that.

 

[Davros]

Agreed, but Nick wont bloody make one

 

[entity279]

I ran Renegade on a Voodoo5, it was very fast and looked fun but was buggy. Some polygons or stuff were fully transparent, maybe the game crashed on me I don't remember. The ennemy AI was also extremely lacking, making the game no challenge (it was even easier than HL2)
It all looks like that game was force rushed before it was finished..

But man was LAN multiplayer fun!

 

[swaaye]

My experience my Truform was a friend using a R350, in Day of Defeat (HL1 mod), it made the framerate slower so you had to bring the console and type ati_npatches 0
We couldn't notice any visual difference.

Yeah I remember that with 9700 too. It seemed that however they were doing it on post R200 cards was not very efficient.

 

[hoom]

I had thought that AMD had done/talked about some kind of code to enable truform via the DX11 tessellation stuff?

Maybe thats just what my mind wants to believe though

 

[punchinthejunk]

My experience my Truform was a friend using a R350, in Day of Defeat (HL1 mod), it made the framerate slower so you had to bring the console and type ati_npatches 0.
We couldn't notice any visual difference. (then I showed him how to cheat a bit by removing the rain in that map, and stopping the map's background noise)




I ran Renegade on a Voodoo5, it was very fast and looked fun but was buggy. Some polygons or stuff were fully transparent, maybe the game crashed on me I don't remember. The ennemy AI was also extremely lacking, making the game no challenge (it was even easier than HL2)
It all looks like that game was force rushed before it was finished.

Eventually we'll need a D3D software renderer focused on running older games, DX2 to DX7 or 8, some kind of compatibility suite also including DirectDraw, DirectPlay and stuff like that.

That's a good idea. Perhaps if it could split the workload between the GPU's compute hardware and the CPU then it could be more accurate and faster.

 

[Davros]

my god I hope not