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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]."

8 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 MikeXpop · · 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 Zathrus · · 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.

  2. Easy fix by neosake · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    "When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
  3. 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.

  4. Improper use of textures by MobyDisk · · 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.

  5. Re:Its bad when your sig is mispelled... by stienman · · 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