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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]."
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