Recent content by Zoner

There are 2 problems 1) Quicksaves/Saves are excruciatingly slow when AA is enabled. Fixable but somewhat silly of them to miss this (since the docs to the function 'GetFrontBufferData' flat out say 'this function is extremely slow by design). They should have re-rendered the game to a...

After following all the links I've seen a few different artifacts (and each piece of hardware is quite different in this department), but I've seen several different things all lumped together as 'shimmering'. In the end its all the same thing: Something is aliasing. 1) The City of Heroes...

Valve has all the models from the Dreamcast (used in Blue Shift/Hi-Def pack) and PS2 versions of the game, but didnt put them into HL1:Source. WTF?!?

1600x1200 with 4x AA requires 95 MB of RAM, so don't discount that possibility. Models and Textures (and shaders but they are tiny) all take up space. If the game uses any other screen sized images for blur effects, that also quickly chews up space, as the effects usualy require several of...

I suspect the loss of SoundStorm has everything to do with the memory controller being moved into the CPU core. The audio processor would naturally want to be integrated into the memory controller to pre-empt everything else on the system.

The lightmap in that screenshot looks 16 bit or DXT compressed to me. Going from memory on the older ATI drivers, I could have sworn there was a dialog in the display properties->advanced on the ATI tabs, that contained an option to force textures to be 16 bit (or maybe it was worded to make...

The reference software rendering device that the DirectX SDK provides developers will never exactly match any hardware. Its primarily used to enable interactive shader debugging, and can also be used as a simple test to make sure you don't have a graphics driver bug (i.e. does your hardware...

why do they make a 5200 fx 256meg pci? For people that need to run 4, 6, or even 8 monitors. And with PCI you want extra security that everything you render with fits on the card since its so slow to upload in realtime.

The image quality complaints about FarCry and the 6800 are compltely the fault of FAR CRY. Even with the 1.1 patch, the game is running with the Geforce FX fp16 shaders instead of the general 2.0 shaders they wrote. I'm sure the code was very simple in this (if NVIDIA use fp16 2.0 shaders)...

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1476&p=4

I'd get a Radeon 9700 or 9800 unless you can afford the $$$ and time waiting for an NV40 (for shader 3.0 features it brings). For D3D, shader 3.0 development requires the "DirectX 9.0c SDK Summer Update 2004" (currently in beta, but very easy to acquire from MS), otherwise any 3.0 hardware is...

In response to: Q: Don't games like prince-of-persia and halo-2 have blur/glow effects in them already? A: Yes they do. For the curious, they achieve this by rendering to a texture (in video memory of course), manipulating that texture with gpu operations, and then drawing a single...

Maybe its a reason similar to the apple cinema display resoloution (1920x1280), allows you do do widescreen 1080i fullscreen video editing, while leaving some room at the top or bottom for some buttons. I never cared, always getting 1600x1200 displays or better :P

Haven't found any yet aside from the overpriced niche FireGL from ATI (~$800). NVIDIA Just annoucned some variant of GeforceFX Quaddro for PCI use (for those crazy people that need 4-8 monitors). Hopefully this next generation will have some versions with dual DVI at more humane pricing.

You guys act like the only bottleneck could possibly be fillrate (the very very end of the graphics pipeline). Most games are CPU bound (the very beginning of the pipeline). Modern CPU's are only 3x faster than what's in the XBOX, and I'm sure you guys can do the math on that one. Not to...