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NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2

Posted by simoniker on from the gordon-forgot-to-put-contact-lenses-in dept.

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]."

5 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by lightspawn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by Telastyn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Let's see... a quick trip to the underdogs, and a quick browsing of my game directory shows 14 games released in 1993 that work wonderfully on my win2k machine. [1 that does not... Fantasy Empires]

      Meanwhile, I have 2 dreamcast systems [1998 release] that are non-functional, and about a dozen NES and Intellivision carts that refuse to work anymore.

  2. Round here, we call that a foot-shooting by Snowspinner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Round here, we call that a foot-shooting by SD-VI · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, the most popular graphics card for high-end gaming right now is the ATi Radeon 9700 series. But I do agree with your point, and I think they will too; companies don't like losing profits.

  3. Overblown by elmegil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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