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NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2
Sevn writes "Apparently, there's a hardware anti-aliasing bug in many new graphics cards that's surfaced in relation to Half-Life2. The details are on a forum post at HalfLife2.net. It seems that many ATI cards will be able to work around the problem, but nVidia users may not be able to. Here is a link to the original X-bit Labs story." The X-Bit Labs article explains further, citing issues with "...Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing, a popular feature that dramatically improves image quality in games... This is a problem for any application that packs small textures into larger textures. The small textures will bleed into each other if you have multi-sample FSAA enabled [in DirectX 9.0]."
Just remember: people buy consoles - and console games - because they know they'll work. In a few years, even, if they take good care of the hardware and not abuse the media. How many of your 10 year old games refuse to run on your current hardware? Your future hardware?
...just rename the half-life2 executable to something else
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
...or even a result of the aforementioned driver optimization hacking?
Informatus Technologicus
Wasn't Half Life 2 the game that was rumored to be an nVidia-only game? I thought nVidia wanted to do that to strike back at ATI but of course it didn't fall through.
the Political Inquirer
It would be wise of Valve, I think, to put all necessary resources into getting a fix for this. Since it's probably a bad idea to release a game that doesn't play well with the most popular graphics card.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
ATI's hardware supports centriod sampling in hardware. It will need to be exposed in future drivers to be useful to HL2 users.
So am I the only one who thought the original headline/article sounded like "NVidia won't work with HL2"? No, it just can't use FSAA. Whoopty do. Certainly a downer for us NVidia users, but I'm thinking the game will be worth it anyway.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
With DirectX set up, when hitting ESC to return to the menu I get a black screen. The options are there - but I can't see them or hope to click on them.
With OpenGL I see no text, it comes out as a block of colour.
I did a Google Groups search and the DirectX is a known problem (with no fix so it seems). But I'd like to go something better than Software rendering and I'm stuck with OpenGL - can I fix this? Any ideas?
Many thanks.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
nVidia is doing the foot shooting. Their AA is still an inferior GF4 class. Valve merely got caught with their pants down. Maybe the same way Carmack had assumed the NV30 would be able the run the ARB2 code path as well as the R300 did. This is just one more nail in nvidia's coffin. The R300 is 1 year old and still stands up to nVidia's best. Their response has been driver tricks and no full-precision in DX9. If this keeps up nVidia may no longer be the most popular.
A few days ago we had a story here about an interview on Gamespy with one of the Half-Life PR folks. In it, he stated:
[...] For folks who want the ultimate experience, they'll want the latest ATI card, and the fastest processor available from AMD or Intel.
Now the linked post states (w/r/t the anti-aliasing bug/feature):
As for NVIDIA GeForce and GeForce FX-series, there are practically no chances to find a workaround, according to Valve."
That's one hell of a coincidence. It seems like ATI is the only way to go for the best HL experience. I wonder how much all this advertising is costing ATI? Regardless, I'd like to give out a big fuck you to everyone behind this. (And while I'm at it, fuck Nvidia for that stupid "The way it's meant to be played campaign", as if every game nowadays is designed especially for Nvidia boards.)
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
You didn't actually have to read the article for that info. I didn't read the article and still knew all that.
Thank you for your attention to these matters.
-Adam
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""My captian... My Kin -rewind- THWAP! THWAP!" Die, boromir, DIE!""
:P
its captain... not captian... sheesh
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
For those who are saying that this is a move by Valve after saying how ATI was 'recommended' chip for HL2, do you seriously think Valve would want to alienate roughly 50% of their target population? Basically, Nvidia users experiencing a lack of a feature (albeit, realistically this is not going to impact anything at all gameplay wise and really can be gotten around by just running a higher res...) is not a 'power move' designed to pressure anyone. Think of the facts:
1. All cards can play HL2 without issue (that we know of)
2. FSAA works fine on ATI but fails due to issues on Nvidia.
3. Why would Valve punish Nvidia in such a petty, and ultimately wasted way since Nvidia users can still play the game, just without FSAA...
4. FSAA in no way alters the gameplay. In fact about 99% of the time I play w/ FSAA enabled on my R9700, I forget its even on, and vice-versa when its off.
My conclusion is that the chances of this being deliberate are pretty damn small, since Nvidia users can still play the game just without a relatively minor graphical enhancement. I hope they come up with a fix, and lets give Valve a little bit of credit here... though I still want my damn TF2!
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
This isn't a new problem, this is a generally known limitation. If you place multiple textures onto one texture, you need to place a border area on them so that the mipmapping, interpolation, and anti-aliasing features work. This is because they use neighboring pixels for the smoothing. I bet it happens even with FSAA off, it just probably isn't as noticeable.
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Why exactly would you enable full-screen antialiasing in Half-Life 2? "See, and if I set it to 8x, it's like PowerPoint with guns!"
FSAA will be disabled on the Xbox version then? I only played the original once or twice(because they cancelled the Mac version) and was looking forward to some Half Life finally.
Full-screen CowboyNealing is the future of graphics
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So this is a design flaw in DirectX 9? I suppose it must be since the article said it should be fixed in 9.1. It shouldn't be too surprising considering who writes the DirectX "standard."
This should affect Nvidia's stock price a bit. NVDA It looks like it's on it's way down again.
It's pretty amazing how a game can change a companies p/l margins and stock values these days but gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry so it's no joke. If anything Nvidia will come out with a new and better card which I'm sure will be geared towards Valve's HL 2 engine and a surge in sales will follow. Nvidia seems to be on the same course as 3dFX was. 3DFX used to own the video card market but became complacent and had no forward vision. Nvidia came from no where and stole the market and bought 3DFX out. I wonder if ATI will do the same to Nvidia? WHat comes around goes around..
HL 2 is a game that will probably be the biggest ever. I'm talking bigger than Q1/Q2/Q3, Bf1942, and even the original HL. I was never into HL but after the E3 movies I am. The big deal to me is a totally interactive environment. The old thinking or way of doing maps was to have a building made of a box covered with a flat texture. The texture consisted of windows, brick wood, etc.
Now take HL 2 and you have a building with more intricate and detailed textures, with bump mapping (so I've heard), and you can shoot out windows, go into the building and knock over furnishings, hide behind them, throw them at other people, get a coke from a vending machine then blow it up and watch all the sodas fly out from the inside of the machine. I am only scratching the suface in my desciption.
Another big deal is large scale maps with no visual loss of fps ala any quake engine game as well as others. Full facial animation, etc. I'm not sure if they have the body zone damage like SOF but I would think so. You can even duck under a running fan to lure an enemy into that if he doesn't duck it will chop off whatever bodie part isn't low enough.
I wan't to buy this game more for just exploring and the interaction than the gameplay. Take Vice City...even though it was interactive most places were the equivalent of a flat sprite form the doom days. Imagine that game with full interactivity. being able to go into any building, area and having that environment be the equivalent to the real world, materials, physics, etc. and you have a game that is going to take the FPS genre to another level.
Now all they have to do is take the gameplay to the next level...
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
When the game comes out, If it is worth it people will upgrade and not really care. Plus they will fix it. What are they going to do blow off everyone who runs a geforce? I will wait and see. Who knows, the chances of this game meeting the hype is pretty slim anyway.
I'm using a current Radeon card, along with two other friends too, and I frequently experience the blue screen of death or system freezes while playing almost ALL games to the point where they're barely playable. Even tuning down the settings to the lowest quality doesn't help, and frankly why should I have to do that as I bought a powerful card like this so I CAN max it out. It's not just me, my friends with ATI card's do too, and I suspect poor drivers as we've tried everything. While our friends with Nvidia cards have very little in the way of issues and almost no system lockups/blue screen.
Hearing about one game that has issues with Nvidia doesn't bother me compared to the umpteen other games I have problems with using my ATI card.
I'd love to support the Canadian IT industry here and buy ATI again but until the problems stop I'll be picking up a Nvidia card soon. I'd rather have a select few games malfunction with an Nvidia card, then 9 out of every 10 games crash frequently crash my system when I use my ATI.
1) Valve fixes HL2 so that it runs on NV.
2) NV releases a major patch so that HL2 runs on their chips.
3) Valve and NV cooperate and both work together to find a solution.
4) Neither company bends, and NV users have to buy ATI (bleh) or sit and spin.
Correct response: 3. Or am I wrong?
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=& threadid=3071
The gist: This isn't a big deal.
He nailed it. Valve has done this crap before. I'm glad I'm not the only person that rememebers. It would be nice if they took responsibility for their lack of coding prowess instead of blaming ATI or nVidia every time they are too lazy to fix their borked code.
Seriously.
They're confusing anti-aliasing textures (ie: making them smooth out instead of pixelate when up close) with FSAA (smoothing out the whole screen/scene, trying to reduce jaggedness, etc).
These are totally different.
Just read the response from Gabe that gedanken linked to:
Gabe Newell's response
~Rayme
Of the 50 or so member in my quake3 clan, most of them had radeons. It's not like it's the only game we play though. Almost everyone has gotten rid of their ATI cards at this point and gone in one of three directions. They either grab the ti4600 since it's dirt cheap now and still sick fast at most things, or they get the FX5600 around the same price for the DX9 support, but slower then ti4600 performance. And the bastards get the FX5900. And I've compared one side by side with a 9700 pro and there is no comparison. The FX5900 is just candy. A little loud, so you should waterblock it ASAP. Like a friend of mine says a lot, I don't remember the last time I could play 3dmark03 instagib. Benchmarks are for suckers. The fact of the matter is the FX5900 is faster in just about every real game there is. I'm part of the poor people faction that went with a ti4600, and I'm more than happy. As long as I don't plan to use FSAA at all, it will keep up with just about any game I'll want to play for a long time. As for ATI, there aren't many serious gamers that I know using them anymore. We have two holdouts in our clan, and they are using the "powercolor?" version
of the ATI cards, and swear they love them. They still disappear in the middle of matches at least 3 times a week and make it back a while later saying "sorry, had to reboot".
Gabe Newell has silenced the rumours about problems with the nVidia (non FX cards) on Halflife2.net this morning. Here's what he had to say about it:
. php?s=& threadid=3071
"Since people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue, I thought I'd update everyone.
1) How bad is the problem?
With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light maps from other polygons.
This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Daikatana, Sin, Elite Force, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on the X-Box, or any game that uses packed lightmaps with multi-sample anti-aliasing.
You would see these artifacts on polygon boundaries where the wrong lightmap is being sampled. It will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a polygon.
Gary McTaggart brought this up in an email because he is being pretty hardcore about graphics quality right now. This is not a new problem. If you've run a game that uses lightmaps with anti-aliasing turned on, then you've been seeing these artifacts the whole time.
Artifacts may show up more frequently in Half-Life 2 simply because we've eliminated lots of other artifacts, and because we have a lot of variation in scene lighting due to our art direction.
To put this in perspective, not doing tri-linear filtering on mipmaps is a lot worse.
2) What are potential solutions?
Support Centroid Sampling
Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinates
Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series. The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.
There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.
Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0.
3) How will this look?
We'll release one of the demo movies with the anti-aliasing artifacts in and one with the anti-aliasing changes."
You can find the whole post here:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread
Sorry, but in response to all of you complaining about being "unable to play without FSAA" - am I the only one who is looking forward to HL2 for the gameplay? i thought the original HL was awesome because the gameplay rocked - the weapons were great, the enemies were cool, and the environment was excellent. I've been looking forward to someone creating similar work. (and, no, I haven't played Halo, Deus Ex, or whatever the other one is that people typically cite for these qualities, so I can't say that it hasn't already been done)
Y'know, I thought of that article when I made the comment ... But I couldn't summon the energy to consider whether I was using the word correctly.
...
Well. Someone posts on slashdot that people buy console games "because the work" just after slashdot runs an article saying that many console games these days _don't_ work correctly. It's not too far off the definition the Guardian gives..
What adjective would you prefer?
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.