More rendering strangeness...

[BoardBonobo]

I've tested the det 44.03's with 3DMark01 and get the same rendering error in the high detail dragothic section as was reported on another site.

Basically when any AA or AF is applied the dragon dissappears and so do the people (the archers, toasted citizens etc). Without any AA or AF the dragon shimmers in and out of existence and so does the lower half of the toasty citizens and the rear portion of the archers helmets.

Also the nature scene fps are way lower than they used to be.

In what way could this be related to the rendering isses in '03.

 

[demalion]

It could be related to a similar emphasis on performance increases, at any cost, in the most visibile card benchmark, but only successfully for the cards they are trying to ship (not GF 4's anymore), especially to give a good impression of NV35 as being a big improvement.
This seems similar to their prior approach in 3dmark03 where the non-FX cards had significant display issues due to the driver changes, perhaps due to the "common path" part of those changes only working properly with some "specific path" parts (i.e., the "FX specific" cards). In this case, they would seem to be either primarily focusing on 3dmark 03 performance, or were assuming reviewers wouldn't mention the 3dmark 2001 issues.

For instance, for the nature test, these 5800 results seem similar to results for previous drivers (I really hate the non-indexed adfest that is x-bit ). Not the same hardware, but GT 4 in 3dmark 2001 should be primarily GPU card workload limited.

By the way, X-bit published the Dragothic benchmark results for the 43.80 drivers (which they said are identical to the 44.03) for the 5800 and 5900...does the dragon disappear for those cards as well? They ran tests with AA, AF, and AA+AF, but made no mention of such.

 

[tertsi]

Tested with 5800 Ultra + 44.03 (also 43.45 and 43.51) Detonators (HQ, AA 4x, AF 8x) and the dragon is visible at timeframe 29:79.

 

[chavvdarrr]

yes, guys from ixbt.com (digit-life) also say 44.03& 5600/5200 "have" the dragon .... must be combination of drivers&OS ?!

 

[BoardBonobo]

Hmm, I was using 44.03's on a Ti4400 running under Win2K Pro SP 3. 3DMark won't even run on my old GF2MX with the 44.03's.

 

[Tahir2]

Boardbonobo:

I have tested this on a GFFX 5600, 44.03 drivers, WinXP SP1 + all critical updates, K7n2G-L motherboard (NF2), using the latest NF2 drivers (2.41) except using standard IDE drivers. DX9.0a installed on a completely new fresh copy (my HD corrupted a couple of hours ago and wouldn't even let me use my Ghosted images.. d'oh!).

Result: No disappearing or shimmering Dragon in low/high detail.
Tested with 4x, 4xS, AF at 4x, AF off, no AA at all.

All render the Dragon, and townspeople... can see the fire of the arrows and Dragon.

Weird issue but it looks more like a specific issue/bug rather than something repeatable on *most* hardware/software setups.