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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
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.
Thank you for your attention to these matters.
-Adam
"My captian... My Kin -rewind- THWAP! THWAP!" Die, boromir, DIE!
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.
"its captain... not captian... sheesh :P"
Boromir was known for his terrible spelling problem when he had more than 2 arrows through his torso.
-Adam
hehehe... good comeback :)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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
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.