Half Life 2 and mods re: mixed mode

[jjayb]

I noticed in Anand's article he said that new games using Half life 2's source engine will not benefit from the nv30 mixed mode path Valve put in. Is this also true for any mods that are created? So in effect, you may run the game fine at 40fps with the mixed mode on a 5900 but a mod for half life 2 will default to using the dx9 path and be slower?

What about the doom 3 engine. Will Carmacks nv30/r200 modes carry over with the engine or will developers who are using the engine have to hand write shaders to get better performance on the nv30 all over again?

 

[kyleb]

well it comes down to shaders, so mod makers will have to write mixed mode shaders to get decent performace out of fx cards just like any other developer.

 

[Natoma]

Mods will be fine. Only completely separate games will have the issue stated by valve.

 

[kyleb]

well not really, i mean if someone made a map with all custom shaders, and wrote them all at full precision; it may run well on a radeon but fx cards would choke.

 

[Natoma]

well not really, i mean if someone made a map with all custom shaders, and wrote them all at full precision; it may run well on a radeon but fx cards would choke.

Oh ye of little faith. You simply must have forgotten about Nvidia's mystical magical 50.xx driver wonderfulness which translates full precision to happy land 16bit FP.

 

[kyleb]

ya but you still have to worry about writing the shaders so that they don't end up looking like shit in mystical magical happy land 16bit FP.

 

[THe_KELRaTH]

ahha... Nvidia have solved that problem too with their Screen capture detecting so you'll still get near ATI quality stills

 

[Joe DeFuria]

well it comes down to shaders, so mod makers will have to write mixed mode shaders to get decent performace out of fx cards just like any other developer.

Yes and no.

I believe that in reality, it depends on whether mods use their own shaders, or used "prebuilt" shaders available in Half-Life.

I assume that the Source Tools will allow mods to create their own shaders. If they do that, they would have to be able to do their own shader optimizations for nVidia cards.

Note that for commercial mods, they would likely have to licenseany Art (and presumably shader) that they borrow from the Half-Life game itself.