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Is nVidia Support for Older 3D Games Fading?
BrendaEM writes "A thread on Through the Looking Glass depicts the plight of fans of the original Thief Series and System Shock 2, who are asking nVidia fix rendering issues these 3D 16-bit games on their newer video cards and drivers. In the case of the original Thief series, in which the games build tension by their use of light and shadow, the rendering has been badly degraded from that which was originally intended. In another Slashdot article, the author asked the question whether or not video games were art. If one of the greatest video games of all time, with a growing wealth of hundreds of fan produced missions, as well as an entire full-sized expansion, does not play well because legacy support diminishes, then what will happen to lesser 3D video games?"
The problem with thief/sshock2 is that the 8800 series cards do not seem to do any dithering which leads to those ugly colors when using a 16bpp mode. The interesting thing however is that the cards claim they support dithering in D3D (D3DPRASTERCAPS_DITHER caps bit is set, which means "Device can dither to improve color resolution.") but they still just do not do it.
Makes me wonder if it is just something that's not implemented yet on the drivers or is it a hardware limitation. Either way the driver should not say it supports dithering if it doesn't.
I think that a new generation of emulators is probably a better idea for older games. I wonder what it would take to software emulate a 3dfx voodoo 1 card? Any such attempt could offload some of the work onto the real GPU, of course.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
What a totally retarded comment. If you had even .01% knowledge of how games are developed you would have not said that.
:) )
:)
100% of all the games have clever optimizations and hacks to improve performance on the then-lowest-common-denominator of System configurations. As a game developer myself I know that some(depends on how desperate the gamedev is) of these hacks are based on undocumented WinAPI behavior. Some of those APIs were not meant to be used outside of Windows "internals", but they are used; as getting the game to run 10fps faster (just as an e.g.) is more important than following WinAPI standards.
I don't really give a damn about MS, but one such instance is documented here. Our studio usually does not use such dirty hacks, unless we really have to. (No, I mean *really* *really*
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/24/45779.aspx
Would like to remain anonymous for now
There's no such thing as a "good" game. You didn't like it. Other people did. Maybe more people like FF7, than, say, ET, but art can be perceived in all sorts of ways.
With a Glide wrapper. A proxy library that makes available the Glide API functions, but internally does some voodoo and maps them to another 3D API like OpenGL or Direct3D.
Half-Life, as you may remember, had a miniGL driver designed for better performance on Voodoo cards. There was also the third-party WickedGL "drivers" that did the same kind of OpenGL-to-Glide translation for other applications, using a drop-in opengl32.dll replacement. In both cases, the application treated the card like OpenGL, but the card ultimately received Glide calls, which performed better.
A Glide wrapper is the reverse: take an application expecting Glide, and help it make OpenGL or Direct3D calls.
I use the latest version of the Catalyst drivers. Day Of Defeat and all other HL1 mods were unplayable in OpenGL, and barely tolerable in Direct3D. I proceeded to switch to the Omega alternative, and all is well now.
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