SC:CT patch 1.04 adds ps2.0

Yes, by turning off tone mapping on the Nvidia card, as tone mapping does nothing on ATI cards.

That works great for screenshots, but you can't dynamically adjust the effect based on the light sorces in the game enviroment, which is what happens with tone mapping.

 

Is there a way to alleviate the blocking/artifacting seen on nVidia cards running SM3.0? I can't find screenshots at the moment, and I don't have it installed currently, but this bugged the crap out of me. It was also quite noticeable in SWAT 4.

 

What blocking with SM3? There was some nasty blocking in the SM1.1 path but I can't I saw anything like that with SM3.

 

You mean the blocky effect if you stand real close to a (bumpmapped) texture?
I see it too (7800gtx) I thought it was supposed to look that way if you mean that anyway...

 

That sounds about right. I didn't notice it playing the demo on my 9700 Pro, but it was really annoying when I played the full game on my new 6600GT. I remember there being an article about it when the game first came out, but I can't find it now.

Edit: Here's an example: http://img211.echo.cx/my.php?image=banding6bf.jpg I'm not sure what SM version this shot was taken with, but I noticed similar problems with SM3.0, and similar problems in SWAT4 (which appears to use SM3.0 for a few things).

 

That shot just shows the way the lighting is done in SM1.1, if you can dig up a SM3 shot you will see the lighting is nice and smooth, as is SM2. As for SWAT4, I know it uses some DX9 features but I never heard anything about it useing SM3.

 

Then how come I saw this same problem running SM3?

 

IT isn't the banding caused due SM1 (at least the thing I mean).
It's square formed textures, it looks like old software rendered stuff only visible real close..

 

Yeah Skinner I'm pretty sure I know what you are talking about, it shows up on sharp edges of displacement maps. I was just responding to the seprate issue of the lighting blockyness as that is what Nupraptor was pointing out in his pic.

Any number of reasons are possible, my best guess would be that you had the game or your drivers improperly configured.

 

Mmk then. I guess it must be my fault that both SC:CT and SWAT4 exhibit this problem, both with several different driver versions and configuration settings.

 

Again, I don't know what your problem is, but if the lighting in Chaos Theory looks blocky like the shot you posted instead of smooth like this, you arn't using SM3.

 

This is not hardware related I guess, so the X800 renders it the same?

 

Yeah, it is just the way the game does it, doesn't matter who's hardware you use.