NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2

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NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2

Posted by simoniker on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @03:51AM 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]."

21 of 103 comments (clear)

The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by lightspawn · 2003-07-23 03:57 · 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 MikeXpop · 2003-07-23 04:20 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  All of them. It might be because my NES cartridges won't fit inside the PS2 slot tray. I'm not sure...
  
  --
  Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
2. Re:The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by Telastyn · 2003-07-23 04:23 · 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.
3. Re:The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by lightspawn · 2003-07-23 04:28 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  It might be because my NES cartridges won't fit inside the PS2 slot tray. I'm not sure...
  
  Yes, they do.
4. Re:The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by Zathrus · 2003-07-23 05:02 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
5. Re:The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... by qwak · 2003-07-23 06:06 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
Easy fix by neosake · 2003-07-23 03:58 · Score: 5, Funny

...just rename the half-life2 executable to something else

--
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
Is this at all related... by HaloZero · 2003-07-23 03:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

...or even a result of the aforementioned driver optimization hacking?

--
Informatus Technologicus
Round here, we call that a foot-shooting by Snowspinner · 2003-07-23 04:04 · 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 · 2003-07-23 05:49 · 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.
2. Re:Round here, we call that a foot-shooting by aliens · 2003-07-23 14:50 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  The game plays just fine on the hardware with the exception of a setting that very few even hardcore gamers use. This is important to a few enthusiasts, most others will never know the problem existed.
  
  --
  -- taking over the world, we are.
Overblown by elmegil · 2003-07-23 04:11 · 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
1. Re:Overblown by addaon · 2003-07-23 04:49 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Right. Let's say you have four 256x256 textures... you can pack them into a single 512x512 texture, which is often convenient, especially when the textures tend to occur together. Now, when a graphics card does texture mapping, it sort of assumes that the portion of the texture it's painting on one triangle spills over onto the other faces of the polyhedron... that is, that it's wrapping the texture, in some way, around the polyhedron. One of the consequences of this assumption is what we're seeing here. In multisampling FSAA, you look at a set of points, not just the pixel center, to figure out what color to display in the pixel. In the center of a face, this works fine; the points are all in the desired pixel, all on the same face, and you get the correct effect. Towards the edge of a face, though, some of the points chosen may be past the edge of the texture boundry. If the texture wraps (that is, continues), it will be more or less the same color; we may see a tad of color from something that, strictly speaking, should be on the next face, but this is a non-issue. However, what if we're at the end of the texture? Normally this is detected and special-cased; either they wrap around to the far end of the texture or, more likely, they just throw out the given point. However, here, we're at the end of what the programmer thinks of as a texture, but not what the hardware thinks of as a texture... so it averages in a little bit of totally wrong coloring in the pixels at the edge of a polygon, under certain conditions. Solutions? Hardware side: Have the card only pick pixels within the polygon, which should therefore also be within the texture; the above describes only if you have some mismatch, like getting points from the far side of pixels that are part of the polygon on screen, but only partially inside the polygon in fact. Developer side: Don't pack textures.
  
  --
  
  I've had this sig for three days.
2. Re:Overblown by addaon · 2003-07-23 06:40 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  You should. For reasons I don't fully comprehend, you don't. I suspect (having written and optimized a polygon-based renderer) that they're cheating a little here, which is far from rare (or inherently bad). Let's say an edge falls through the middle of the pixel. On the right hand side of that edge (say), the textures are well defined. On the left hand side, they're not. Now, how to we pick points for antialiasing? In the naive 4x model, we treat each pixel as four pixels, and things work fine. For each of those four pixels, the line either passes to the left of the center, in which case we use the texture of this object, or the line passes to the right of the center, in which case we use the texture of the underlying object. For this to work, we need to replicate the z-buffer 4x also; that is, we're basically making an image 4x bigger (2x by 2x), and then scaling it down. More advanced FSAA algorithms (like the horridly-named Quincunx, or whatever) use strange numbers of points (5, here), and use different selection criteria. Also, they minimize scaling up of the z-buffer, since it's expensive and should make little difference. That means, though, that for a given point we may not be able to tell if the line is to its left or its right; we guess, and if we guess wrong, there's a chance we take from the undefined pixel. Again, I'm not claiming to know the exact algorithmic details, but I'm pretty sure this is the root problem.
  
  --
  
  I've had this sig for three days.
Pick one before posting please: by stienman · 2003-07-23 04:41 · Score: 3, Funny
You can choose to talk about any of the following topics. Please stay on topic.
- Nvidia is dead!
- Serve's 'em right for tweaking their drivers!
- Who uses FSAA anyway! My card doesn't even have it!
- Valve should fix it
- ATI RULZ FOOLZ
- Will it still run on my Matrox Millenium?
- My friend went back to the future and all he got me was a lousy GeForce HX 9600 Iridium, and it still has this FSAA bug!
- How many software ''engineers'' does it take to build a buggy windows driver?
- But... But... Nvidia is diety! Why does my world have to fall apart now, when duke nukem forever is so close!
Thank you for your attention to these matters.

-Adam

"My captian... My Kin -rewind- THWAP! THWAP!" Die, boromir, DIE!
I doubt conspiracy by quantax · 2003-07-23 04:56 · Score: 3, Interesting

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
Improper use of textures by MobyDisk · 2003-07-23 05:29 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:Its bad when your sig is mispelled... by stienman · 2003-07-23 05:33 · Score: 4, Funny

"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
Uhh... by SD-VI · 2003-07-23 05:52 · Score: 2, Funny

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!"
Stock Drop but New Buys Coming by felonious · 2003-07-23 06:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

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...

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You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Gabe Newell's response by gedanken · 2003-07-23 13:01 · Score: 2, Informative

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=& threadid=3071

The gist: This isn't a big deal.