GeForce FX & UT2003: "Performance" Texturing A

[kihon]

Hmmm - just wondering what Epic think of nvidia not rendering the game as required by the game code. Is this what Epic intended the game to be? If not are they not lying when they added the "the way its meant to be played" screen?

 

[Doomtrooper]

Nvidia and Epic are 'partners', so I'm sure there was some 'support' there for these so called 'optimizations'

 

[Bambers]

Bambers - is that via application filtering or control panel selection?

That was with quality AF selected in the drivers.

looks like thats already been determined though

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Nvidia and Epic are 'partners', so I'm sure there was some 'support' there for these so called 'optimizations'

Haven't the Epic guys already stated that we should not confuse marketing campaigns like "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" with any coding or optimisations that might or might not take place.

The implication is that Nvidia pay for an ad at the start of the game, and that's as far as it goes. There's no more or less obligation for the developer to optimise code or work with Nvidia on the actual programming than without "TWIMTBP".

Of course, the Epic guys have proved to be political in the past. You should have seen the post Mark Rein made over at the Atari UT2K Forums in support of Nvidia after the 3Dmark2003 cheating thing blew up. Of course he had pretty much failed to grasp the technical details of the issue as per normal, but that's PR bunnies for you...

 

[kihon]

yeah - but if nvidia is not rendering the game the way its meant to be, surely epic are lying by putting "the way its meant to be played" in their game?

 

[Pete]

$$$ can probably redefine the way it's meant to be played.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

yeah - but if nvidia is not rendering the game the way its meant to be, surely epic are lying by putting "the way its meant to be played" in their game?

That's probably the way it's meant to be played on Nvidia hardware, ie. badly.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Epic is not just involved with that marketing campaign, Epic signed a deal way back before that campaign even started.

http://www.imgmagazine.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=808

Tuesday, September 5, 2000

NVIDIA, Epic Form Partnership


Epic Games, creators of Unreal and Unreal tournament, have created a partnership with graphics chip maker NVIDIA to optimize their future titles to take advantage of the special features of the GeForce 2 and forthcoming chipsets. Why does this matter to Mac gamers? NVIDIA has planned for some time to enter the Macintosh market with their GeForce 2 MX chipset, and Epic's graphics engines have already been ported to the Mac OS -- in fact, the Unreal engine is the primary stepping stone for third-party titles to come to the Mac OS this year.


This is a shift in strategy for Epic, which has previously debuted titles on the 3dfx web site. The Unreal and Unreal Tournament engines are closely aligned to Glide, 3dfx's proprietary graphics API, and are widely acknowledged to work better with that API than with the Direct 3D drivers for NVIDIA cards. It seems that Epic has decided to aggressively remedy this situation, which is good news for Mac and PC users alike.



Here is the official press release:


NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq:NVDA - news) and Epic Games Inc.
today announced a strategic partnership aimed at producing next generation applications that take full advantage of
NVIDIA's latest 3D technology, including the new features of the GeForce 256(TM) and GeForce2 graphics processing
units (GPUs).

``Epic's latest game, Unreal Tournament, is one of the most popular games in the world,'' says Sanford Russell, senior
director of partner management at NVIDIA. ``We see this as an opportunity to work more closely with Epic Games to ensure current and future Unreal Engine
products run their absolute best on NVIDIA hardware.''


NVIDIA has been working with Epic Games and other leading game developers worldwide to help them leverage the high-impact visual features of the GeForce
family of GPUs including geometry processing power and radical per-pixel shading features.


``NVIDIA's dominant position in the PC market and their selection as the graphics platform provider for Xbox, clearly make them the most important graphics vendor
from a business standpoint. But even more importantly, they're first in bringing to market the kind of advanced technology we intend to build our future products
around, and that's what really drives us from a design standpoint,'' says Tim Sweeney, founder and lead programmer for Epic Games Inc.


Prior to this announcement, Epic Games had already begun targeting major new Unreal Engine features for NVIDIA's GeForce 256 and GeForce2 GTS(TM). One
such example is the engine's new high-polygon, large-scale terrain system. This feature specifically exploits the hardware transform and lighting features of the
NVIDIA GeForce family of GPUs. Several additional features are planned that line up strategically with current and future NVIDIA 3D graphics processors.

As part of their efforts to work more closely together, NVIDIA will provide Epic with early versions of new hardware and drivers, as well as extensive testing of those
drivers with existing Unreal Engine products and new unreleased versions of the engine. To facilitate this, the agreement calls for regular technical reviews and
exchanges between the two companies, so that each one has a clear understanding of the inner workings of the other's software and hardware technology.


This partnership will not bear fruit for Mac or PC gamers until Epic's future titles (which are currently under wraps) begin to arrive, and by that time NVIDIA's GeForce 2 MX series of chips will have debuted on the Mac platform. If Epic's attitude towards cross-platform deployment of their engines and titles continues, we will likely enjoy the benefits of this partnership along with PC and console gamers.

 

[John Reynolds]

Didn't Rein once write that UT2003 was developed and tested solely on Nvidia hardware? If true, it's amazing how well that game played on 9500/9700s last fall. Not sure if that's a testament to Epic's engine or what.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Didn't Rein once write that UT2003 was developed and tested solely on Nvidia hardware? If true, it's amazing how well that game played on 9500/9700s last fall. Not sure if that's a testament to Epic's engine or what.

They did have some 9700s, but didn't bother test on them, hence the bugs that needed to be fixed after release, because the 9700 Pro did things to spec, and Epic had programmed around Nvidia driver bugs. They admitted this and had to eat crow when the first couple of patches fixed the bugs they had missed by not bothering to test with the 9700 Pros.

Ironically, here we are most of a year on, and the ATI cards still play the game at better speed and IQ than the barely available NV3x class cards from Nvidia. Personally, I think it's more of a testament to the driver quality that is coming from the "new ATI".

 

[vogel]

That's news to me, and I'm the guy who did all the compatibility work on UT2003 As posted before - we did do compatibility testing on R300 with UT2003 and I'm not aware of any R300 specific application bug aside from certain issues with distance fog (which was both a bug in our D3D/ OpenGL renderer and in ATI's D3D drivers). There were a couple of driver bugs ATI swiftly fixed before we went gold and driver stability also increased a lot in the months following release.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

They did have some 9700s, but didn't bother test on them, hence the bugs that needed to be fixed after release, because the 9700 Pro did things to spec, and Epic had programmed around Nvidia driver bugs. They admitted this and had to eat crow when the first couple of patches fixed the bugs they had missed by not bothering to test with the 9700 Pros.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Have you got any opinion or comments on whats occuring here Daniel?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

That's news to me, and I'm the guy who did all the compatibility work on UT2003 As posted before - we did do compatibility testing on R300 with UT2003 and I'm not aware of any R300 specific application bug aside from certain issues with distance fog (which was both a bug in our D3D/ OpenGL renderer and in ATI's D3D drivers). There were a couple of driver bugs ATI swiftly fixed before we went gold and driver stability also increased a lot in the months following release.

It's what was said at the time by some member of Epic's staff on their official forum just after the ATI brownout bug (different from the fog bug IIRC) was fixed a month or so after the release. I'd try to quote you a source, but your forum has been purged back to the beginning of the year (nothing earlier shows in the search), so those threads are gone.

 

[vogel]

The "brownout" bug was a bug in ATI's D3D driver I worked around. FWIW, the same problem with OpenGL was an application bug

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

It's what was said at the time by some member of Epic's staff on their official forum just after the ATI brownout bug (different from the fog bug IIRC) was fixed a month or so after the release. I'd try to quote you a source, but your forum has been purged back to the beginning of the year (nothing earlier shows in the search), so those threads are gone.

 

[vogel]

You could look into building a small box test level in UnrealEd to see what's going on. The screenshots would be much less confusing in that case... especially if you slap the right material on the walls.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

Have you got any opinion or comments on whats
occuring here Daniel?

 

[Dave H]

You could look into building a small box test level in UnrealEd to see what's going on. The screenshots would be much less confusing in that case... especially if you slap the right material on the walls.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

Have you got any opinion or comments on whats
occuring here Daniel?

Along these lines--I was thinking it might be a swell idea to recreate the "AF testing tunnel" using the editors for some of the more popular games.

 

[Althornin]

Along these lines--I was thinking it might be a swell idea to recreate the "AF testing tunnel" using the editors for some of the more popular games.

excellent idea

 

[Ollo]

You could look into building a small box test level in UnrealEd to see what's going on. The screenshots would be much less confusing in that case... especially if you slap the right material on the walls.

Any takers?

 

[Dave Baumann]

jb has already done th honours (thanks jb) I'm going to check it out tonight to see what it shows.

 

[WaltC]

Didn't Rein once write that UT2003 was developed and tested solely on Nvidia hardware? If true, it's amazing how well that game played on 9500/9700s last fall. Not sure if that's a testament to Epic's engine or what.

Yes, that is what Reign wrote originally... DV denies that was the case, however. According to Reign there was (parphrased) "a single R9700P prototype card in a box which remained unopened until after the game shipped." However, considering how well the game ran on my 9700P at the time, I would think that Reign was probably in error when he made that statement, and that DV's statement is most likely the accurate one of the two. Maybe Mark was talking about pre-shipping play testers as opposed to game development--seems a fair guess.