[AV8R]

So recently I rolled back my graphics driver to version that was released around 2010 so I could enjoy an older game that would not run with stability on a newer graphics driver version. Upon testing some of my other games for compatibility with the older driver, the final games I tried were FSPort and FS2. What I found surprised me - certain effects in the games looked better with the older driver than with the newer one. 

One example is, when pounding a capital ship with lasers (using a newer graphics driver), when the ship's hull reached 0% hull integrity, the body would start to explode and break apart as usual. Using the old graphics driver yields a visual surprise - when the hull integrity would reach about 10% (maybe 5%, I didn't catch the exact percentage), each laser hit would cause sparks and bits of glowing debris to be ejected from the hull of the ship. As the hull got closer to 0%, each shot would produce more sparks until when 0% was reached the entire hull had a glowing hornet's nest of sparks and glowing bits dancing around it as the ship began to explode then break up. It was really impressive!

I don't know if any of you have seen or recognize this effect but it started to make me think - what other effects are being programmed into FS2 and FSPort, which add so much visual dimension to the game, that are being crippled/lost when graphics card manufactures tweak their code just to get a few more frames per second? All the while ignoring the work a programmer had to put in to make sure those graphics effects were being fully implemented/experienced by the gamer.

[The E]

Can you confirm that that effect is not present on recent drivers? Because the code that generates that effect hasn't changed, and GPU drivers are generally not in the habit of dropping anything small like that without also dropping a bunch of other, more noticeable things besides.

[AV8R]

Yes, the newest drivers make the particulate effect vanish. In fact, I built my current ATI-based system almost 2 years ago. And before that I had another ATI-based system but it was much older (late-90's hardware). Since I've been using the latest drivers since I built this system in 2012, I can ascertain:

1) Drivers for ATI-based systems since 2012 could break certain visual features
2) My previous hardware was so old it did not support those features and thus I never saw them

Seems now that I have the hardware that supports these graphics features and use a driver version that was tuned to give these features maximum effect, I can now see what I was missing using newer drivers that "broke" that feature. Seems somewhere between 2010 and 2012, ATI released a driver base that could break that particulate effect and kept building on that base driver ever since.

Maybe I can pinpoint which revision it was, given a few hours and a bottle of rum.   

[Swifty]

If you could see this effect on a pre-2000 video card, that means you were using the fixed function pipeline meaning no shaders were involved. The feature set graphics cards had before the heyday of shaders amounted to nothing more than drawing textures and vertex lighting on triangles which means that whatever effect you were seeing was nothing more than a bunch of screen aligned billboarded triangles. I'm pretty sure AMD's OpenGL drivers can still draw those because otherwise we have a bigger problem on our hands (you'd basically be seeing a blank screen).

If anything, this is probably a programmer error brought on by the transition to the shader pipeline and it would help if you can make comparison videos of the discrepancy.