gf4 demos on a gf3 - drivers

[borzwazie]

So, just for kicks, I downloaded the Wolfman demo and tried running it on the 23.11 drivers, on my GF3. All you could see of the Wolf was the eyes and the tounge.

I tried updating to the 27.42's and lo and behold, I could see the demo correctly! There were a few glitches with the lighting (bright white patches) but the demo otherwise looked correct.

Has anyone else tried this on a GF3? Problems? No problems? What drivers did you use?

What new functionality is this demo supposed to show off?

 

[EvilEngine]

It works fine for me too, theres only a minor white "flicker" that seems to happen under certain lighting positions, but otherwise runs fine and looks cool.
Visiontek GF3 and 27.52

 

[up]

As Nvidia pointed out:

Demos: Wolfman

Another first for NVIDIA - real-time volumetric fur rendering on a fully animated character model. But this is no cute, furry dog - 61 bones, 100,000 polygons, and eight fur layers make the NVIDIA Wolfman a rendering challenge that makes other graphics cards run away screaming!
While the GeForce4 Ti’s dual programmable Vertex Shaders rip through the task of animating the Werewolf’s skin and fur, the advanced Pixel Shaders of NVIDIA’s nfiniteFX II Engine are shading each individual hair strand using a self-shadowed, per-pixel anisotropic lighting model.

Features:

Real time volumetric fur rendering

Per-pixel anisotropic lighting using Pixel Shaders

Matrix palette skinning using Vertex Shaders

Fully self-shadowed using shadow maps

8 blended fur layers

61 bones, 4 bones/vertex

97,000 polygons/frame


RTFM LOL

 

[duffer]

Eep! What a scary picture!

Most of the improvement in the GeForce4 ti series are in the speed department, rather than in the new feature department.

From what I can tell, the only really new feature in the GeForce 4 is the 1.2 and 1.3 pixel shader support. Perhaps the Wolfman demo doesn't use 1.2 or 1.3 pixel shaders.

(If I recall correctly 1.2 and 1.3 only add a few minor additional instructions over what's available in 1.1)

There's also a chance that the Wolfman demo was intentionally designed to work on GeForce3 cards as well as GeForce4 cards.

 

[Mystiq]

Is there any possibility someone could hack this demo up to run on a Radeon 8500? I'd like to see.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

What I don't understand...

Is that nVidia has always towed the line "Our GeForce3 Pixel shaders (1.1) can do everything that ATI's pixel shaders (1.4) can do. So there's no real advantage to having them."

Now, however, we're suppossed to believe that PS 1.3 (nFiniteFX II) of GeForce4 has some advantage over PS 1.1.

Ahh...good ol' Marketing...

 

[borzwazie]

software fallback?

Is it possible there's a software fallback mode? I have an 800MHz Athlon and a VisionTek GF3. I don't think this demo was running more than 25-30 fps, tops. It's not a particularly large scene, so my load was fairly high.

Is my GF3 emulating the GF4 hardware in some way? I recall you could force GF2's to run GF3 stuff in software, back in the day GF3 drivers were first released, although it ran really slowly.

 

[duffer]

Nah, there's no software fallback mode. The demo runs slowly on your hardware because the GeForce3 is just much slower than the GeForce4.

There really isn't any difference between a GeForce3 and a GeForce4 other than speed and a few new pixel shader instructions.

The reason the demo takes so much time is the animation done with vertex shaders (which run twice as fast on the GeForce4 as on the GeForce3) and the hair (which requires rendering the hair polygons 8 times.)

So the demo is probably vertex shader bound, rather than being fill rate bound. How does your frame rate change when you change the screen resolution from 640 x 480 to 1280 x 1024? I bet it doesn't slow down 4x.

Re: How come they added new features if ps1.1 is just as good as ps1.4? I think there's a difference between saying "we can do everything they do", and saying "we can do everything as fast as they can do". More instructions in your pixel shader may allow you to do more effects faster.

 

[pascal]

Tested the Werewolf with GF3ti200 and Asus 27.42 final driver. The same problem described by EvilEngine.

 

[MfA]

Kinda sucks that with all that power and all those features they still cant smooth skin a model.