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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]."
...or even a result of the aforementioned driver optimization hacking?
Informatus Technologicus
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
Sure... and when you get graphics quality anywhere vaguely close to HL2 let me know. And no, 480 interlaced doesn't cut it. At all.
Which is something most console gamers forget -- the actual resolution of console games is horrible. You're basically running at 640x480 interlaced, which is a resolution that no PC would run at nowadays. Yes, there are a few games (mostly Xbox) that can do HDTV, sometimes even at 1280x720p, but they're few and far between because of low developer support and insufficient hardware power.
The "10 year old" bit is so offtopic for this thread it's funny.
given that I've had a couple problems with my gamecube, I looked into getting it fixed, since it's still under warranty, I don't have to pay a dime. offtopic, but in looking into getting my gamecube repaired, I discovered that nintendo still supports the original NES and carts for it. You have to pay for repairs, but they are fairly cheap, it's about $40 to repair an NES system, and about $10 to fix a non-working cart. I can't say the same for any other console manufacturers, but I thought this was pretty cool.
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.