UT2003 visuals only on NVIDIA?

[jb]

Yikes!

Maybe you'd want to ask about 8500's atleast as a prelude to jumping all over him?

Not like I can speak for Dan, but I can verify that they had them. During the UT Mod summit last year Epic was kind of enough to hand out over 20 brand new video cards. There was a 50/50 mix of 8500 and GFti4200s in boxes. When those ran out Mark when into his stash and pulled out a few more for us that came from test PCs so he implied....So at least at some point the 8500 was in Epic's hands during UT2k3 developement Not saying they used it...just had access to it...

 

[jandar]

I cant recall off the top of my head, but the Radeon 9700Pro could do Software and OpenGL under Windows XP across two monitors so long as the OpenGL app was windowed.


Windows limits multihead gaming naturally, the Parhelia has its drivers work around it.

 

[WaltC]

I'm fairly certain either you misunderstood something or Mark posted something with a slighty bad choice of words

Thank you for chiming in there, Dan! I'm surprised you missed that thread back then...*chuckle* It was quite large and IIRC Mark was the originator. Glad to hear Mark was mistaken in his initial impression (although he seemed fairly confident about the 9700P "never leaving its box" prior to release of the game.) I really think at the time his concern was one of allaying initial reports he'd heard that the software wasn't running properly on the 9700P and he wanted to assure people that if this was the case it would be corrected quickly. (It wasn't actually the case for me.)

We had R300 boards several months before going gold though it's true that we didn't use them as main development machines as the drivers weren't stable enough at that point. ATI took care of the problem before UT2003 went gold though.

Yes, as I bought the 9700P early on in September, I recall the driver release from ATi which listed "fixes for UT2K3" (or words to that effect) which I installed prior to buying the game.

Most people didn't want to switch cards/ change configurations at that point in development and most artists used device spanning for multi- mon back then which AFAIK ATI still doesn't support

I wasn't at all surprised by that--Bioware's NWN was in the same boat--and unlike UT2K3 it was clear that NWN had been built specifically around nVidia chips (things like a "Quincunx" FSAA setting in-game made that obvious.) Lots of games were well into their development cycle prior to ATi shipping the R300 products.

I've been doing compatibility work for UT2003 and I've certainly ran the game on R300 and reported bugs to ATI. I can't remember whether our in-house testers used an R300 or not though ATI had access to the game for QA and Infogrames' testers tested on R300 cards as well.

FWIW, none of the R300 stability problems were bugs in the game.

Well, as I reported to Mark in that thread, I never had any R300-related stability problems with the game... In fact, I've never experienced any stability problems with the game (which is why I suspect the majority of the Infogrames forums problems at the time were more individual system config problems than anything else.) Caveat here is that I play exclusively single player. Thanks again for the insight!

 

[vogel]

Correct. You can't span one D3D device across two monitors (device spanning) with ATI's drivers though NVIDIA has been supporting this feature for as long as I can remember. This is useful if you want to run the Editor accelerated across two monitors.

Update: If anyone knows how to do that with ATI's drivers please let me know

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.

I'm pretty sure Ati does have multi-mon as I am running 2 monitors at the same time right now, are you refering to Ati not having a specific feature in it's MM capabilities?

 

[CarstenS]

Another thing I have just been benching UT2003 on the GFFX 5200 and the filtering mode (Quality setting) looks absolutely atrocious in motion.

Weird.

Can you expand on that? I am in a similar situation but in my setup the FX5200 looks absolutely great, albeit a bit slow compared to the fps-monsters people have grown accustomed to nowadays.

 

[DeanoC]

OT: Creature Labs

DeanoC: You worked on Silent Hill 2 for the PC, right? Guess that means you work for Creature Labs. SH2 is quite a departure for the company isn't it?

For the ex-company, you mean. Creatures Labs is bankrupt as of a few weeks ago. More than 50 jobs, IIRC, were lost. There are still some negociations for the selling of the assets, AFAIK.

RIP, CL! Hmm, were you still working there, DeanoC? Lost your job?

Woah, never realized SH2 was a Creature Labs port for the PC, anyway. Never bought it, and never was too interested in it either.

Although I was a huge fan of the Creatures series a few years ago - did a lot of agents, was one of the webmasters of one of the big sites, frequented the chats & forums a lot - you get the idea.


Uttar

Indeed CL is no more, I actually left just before Christmas (after SH2 shipped) but I kept in touch with the guys. On the actually 'death' day most of us went and sat in the park and got drunk. Everybody is just sorting out jobs etc, a few have moved over to Frontier.

CL did a few non Creatures projects to try and get enough cash to survive, I worked on most of them (never worked on Creatures). SH2PC was the last product released by them. For a lot of its life, CL never know if it was a A-Life research company or a games company. After the initial success of Creatures they went down the A-Life research side of things, after they had burnt through a fair few million quid they started to go back to games again (Creature Labs is an 'old' games company, previously known as Millenium and Logotron before that. The only surviving part of Millenium now is SCEE Cambridge).

Anyway this is off-topic, if you want some gossip PM me

 

[Tahir2]

Another thing I have just been benching UT2003 on the GFFX 5200 and the filtering mode (Quality setting) looks absolutely atrocious in motion.

Weird.

Can you expand on that? I am in a similar situation but in my setup the FX5200 looks absolutely great, albeit a bit slow compared to the fps-monsters people have grown accustomed to nowadays.

I must confess to being a bit rash in my original statement. Both App and Quality look bad without Aniso added. However this is subjective but what I experienced was mipmap banding. I also experienced texture corruption and the first map in UT2003 did not render very far into the distance. This may be a system problem or some setting.

I am going to be retesting the GFFX 5200 thoroughly on a clean system at work and may have a review of some sort in the near future.