Author Topic: The DX8.1 Engine Upgrade  (Read 21778 times)

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Offline Nico

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stupid question number... her... I've stopped counting them:
does the radeon series support T&L?
SCREW CANON!

 

Offline Fry_Day

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Of course the Radeons support TnL. That's why they aren't called Rage . Well, that and that the Rage series was horrible :)

Edit: Fixed grammatical error. Also, I didn't say so, but the Rage 128s (Rage FURY, Rage MAXX) were okay chips, but they were both late (supposed to compete with TNT1, but released a short time before the TNT2), and plagued with driver problems (Flickers and other visual artifacts) and bad OpenGL preformance, which I guess is another driver problem.
« Last Edit: September 01, 2002, 10:43:55 am by 791 »

 

Offline Sandwich

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Quote
Originally posted by Fry_Day
Well, that and that the Rage series were horrible :)


*winces* Ouch, don't remind me. :shaking:
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Offline Nico

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Quote
Originally posted by Fry_Day
Of course the Radeons support TnL. That's why they aren't called Rage . Well, that and that the Rage series were horrible :)


YES!
SCREW CANON!

 

Offline vyper

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Heh, didn't know that! :)
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Offline Fafner

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Quote
Originally posted by RandomTiger
I hope we dont have too many voodoos. I dont think direct X8.1 is going to get on well with them.

"Voodoo 3 only supports DirectX up to version 7 natively" PC Gamer

I just cant get my DirectShow8 code working properly on a voodoo 2.

You can get third party drives for v3 but I doubt they are perfect.

Serves you all right for buying voodoo's though. You should have bought TNT's (1 or 2) instead. But you bought voodoo's because their boxes were prettier and your stupid mates told you to, DIDNT YOU? (fools)


Quote
Originally posted by RandomTiger
Im surprised you havent had any problems yet. Which drivers do you use, offical ones or third party? V3's only officially support up to DX7.

If you have drivers that are stable, reliable and complete for directX8 we could do with knowing which ones they are, perhaps v3 owners wont have to get left behind.

Voodoos are a nightmare to program for, I've had many bad experiences with them that have increased my hate of them.

Up until a few months ago I was using a TNT2 and still could play Max Payne, Medal of Honour, AvP2, black and white.


Yea well I bought a TNT2 Ultra and always regretted that I didnt get a Voodoo3 so I could have played Freespace in glide :wink: . Later on I bought a Voodoo5 5500, even though I knew the Geforce2 GTS was slightly faster in most games, coz I wanted Glide and 3dfx's superior FSAA.

My Voodoo5 can run all new games I've tried so far like Aquanox, Jedi Outcast, MOH and Red Faction. According to Mark Rein at Epic the coming UT2003 will work well Voodoo5, even Voodoo3's will run UT2003 at low resolution/low detail.

Concerning drivers, DX8.1 compatible Voodoo5 drivers are under development by the folks at 3dhq, they have had problem with hosting, but their site is rumoured to be up again in a week or so. When this happens I can give you the link for contact if you are interested. Here is a news post from Beyond3D about these drivers:
Quote
Originally posted at Beyond3D
Posted: Wed Jul 17, 2002 7:34 pm   Post subject: Back I am, more news on 3dhq

Latest developments on the 3dhq (formerly 3dfx-Underground) Voodoo Series driver development, straight from the horse's (or Aquouess's) mouth:

The 1.09 Final driver's latest additions include the following:

Direct3D has now been updated, and is now pretty much fully DirectX 8.1 compatible. The WinXP service file 3dfxvsm.sys has been fully updated to work for DX8.1... meaning issues in games such as Grand Theft Auto III and Rally Championship Extreme have been resolved.

Already complete are the OpenGL updates, courtesy of Aquo's own ICD, which includes several special features, for example Anisotropic Filtering (yes, it IS real) and full OpenGL 1.2 compatibility.

Expect the 1.09 Final driver out... as soon as it's finished

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1649

:) Fafner
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Offline RandomTiger

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Quote
Originally posted by Fafner
Yea well I bought a TNT2 Ultra and always regretted that I didnt get a Voodoo3 so I could have played Freespace in glide


What was better about glide?

Quote

Concerning drivers, DX8.1 compatible Voodoo5 drivers are under development by the folks at 3dhq


Meanwhile DX9 is in beta.

 

Offline Bobboau

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just about everyhing is suposedly beter in glide, but most notably was the ND colors, were you would have glowing red parts of ships on shival ships and blue glowing lights on some others
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Offline Fafner

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Back when Freespace2 was released there were performance issues on most comps with the high detail setting (i think athlon 800 was the fastest there was back then, i was running a cel466 :D ). When this was debated at the Volition bulletinboard I remember a Volition representative saying that FS2 was optimized for Glide and he adviced ppl to buy Voodoo 3's if they wanted to use high detail with ok framerate.

Today glide is offcourse outdated and more can be accomplished with DX if you are updating the engine, no argument there. :)

And yea I know Dx9 is beta, it will be a while before we'll see dx9 games though. And as far as I know the Radeon 9000-series is the only dx9 compliant graphic card around.

:) Fafner
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Offline wEvil

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Quote
Originally posted by Fafner
And yea I know Dx9 is beta, it will be a while before we'll see dx9 games though. And as far as I know the Radeon 9000-series is the only dx9 compliant graphic card around.


OOOOHhh, the MISinformation.

The Matrox Perhelia 512, the 3Dlabs P10 and the ATI Radion 9k's are all DX9 compliant as far as i'm aware, since they're all essentially the same design.

 

Offline Fafner

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ohhh, my bad...:o
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Offline Fry_Day

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Two errors there - The Parhelia doesn't fully support dx9 (and it's speed is crappy anyhow), and the Radeon 9000 does NOT support dx9 - it's a stripped-down Radeon 8500.

Edit: Fixed a humiliating typo :)
« Last Edit: September 04, 2002, 10:26:20 am by 791 »

 

Offline Fafner

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So then its the Radeon 9700 and... that are fullty DX9 compliant? (not sure if the 3dlabs p10 has been released?)
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Offline Fry_Day

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I don't think the P10 has been released yet either.

The Radeon 9700 is fully DirectX 9.0 compliant.

Btw, did you know that the X-Box is derived from the name 'DirectX-Box,' which was the original name?

 

Offline DTP

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thats, kind a old news. read it in some preview article with about the X-box in a local(denmark) PC/console magazine.

X-Box was not so hard to link to the DirectX name
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Offline Fry_Day

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Erm, I just wanted to say that this topic is getting more and more pointless, so it needs to be un-stickied or something

 

Offline RandomTiger

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OK, lets try and get it back on track. WHat is the difference between DX9 and DX8. Is there anything that will help us or things that will cause problems?

 

Offline Fury

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I doubt there is really anything in DX9 that is really usefull.
Most video cards and drivers currently supports DX8, DX9 support would be such a waste.

 

Offline wEvil

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There are HUGE differences in the two.

DX9 will support, amongst other things, 128bit floating-point pixels (meaning you get nice per-pixel glows, reflection, specularity, diffuse, hell - even Global illumination in hardware!)

However compliant accelerators need to be these new-fangled programmable things.

DX8 and 7 cards do not support this level of programmability.

Still havent found out about the Dsound support tho :(

 
I'm going to go out on limb here and actually like, say something closer to the topic of this thread.

I've just finished putting in the framework of the new D3D8RENDER class which will contain all the new D3D8 functionality. It's linked to the gr_screen structure and stuff, and compiles properly. The resultant exe still crashes because there is no code in the framework, but its there now for others to work on.