This news can be found on steam forums and on [H].
<b><i><font color=blue>some guys on Guru3d figured out what Valve did to cripple nVidia cards.
First off, you need 3dAnalyze. I'm assuming everyone knows that you can force HL2 to run in DX9 mode on FX cards, right? Only, you get artifacts in the water and other areas?
Well, that's pretty easy to fix. Just have the 3dAnalyze util report your card as an ATI Radeon instead of a GeForce FX.
*taddah* All the artifacts go away, and you get true DX9 reflections!
Okay, but there IS a performance hit doing that. How to get around that?
Well, the funny thing is that Valve coded Half-Life 2 to use FP24 shaders all the time every time. And it's really not needed. Nope. In fact, FP16 seems to do the trick all the time - as seen in that above pic. FP16 and FP24 are indistinguishable in Half-Life 2.
Again, using 3dAnalyze you can test this. It is capable of forcing a card to use only FP16 shaders no matter what is requested. You'll see no image quality difference doing that - just a HUGE performance boost. Why? Well, because while FP16 is all that Half-Life 2 *needs*, if they let the GeForce FX cards do THAT, they might have been competitive! So, instead, they forced FP24 (unneeded), which caused the GF-FX cards to render the DX9 mode in FP32 all the time. With the obvious associated performance hit.</b></i></font color=blue>
<A HREF="http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=838630&page=1&pp=20" target="_new">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=838630&page=1&pp=20</A>
:tongue: <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/priyajeet/fing.jpg" target="_new"><i><font color=red>Very funny, Scotty.</font color=red><font color=blue> Now beam down my clothes.</font color=blue></i></A> :tongue:
<b><i><font color=blue>some guys on Guru3d figured out what Valve did to cripple nVidia cards.
First off, you need 3dAnalyze. I'm assuming everyone knows that you can force HL2 to run in DX9 mode on FX cards, right? Only, you get artifacts in the water and other areas?
Well, that's pretty easy to fix. Just have the 3dAnalyze util report your card as an ATI Radeon instead of a GeForce FX.
*taddah* All the artifacts go away, and you get true DX9 reflections!
Okay, but there IS a performance hit doing that. How to get around that?
Well, the funny thing is that Valve coded Half-Life 2 to use FP24 shaders all the time every time. And it's really not needed. Nope. In fact, FP16 seems to do the trick all the time - as seen in that above pic. FP16 and FP24 are indistinguishable in Half-Life 2.
Again, using 3dAnalyze you can test this. It is capable of forcing a card to use only FP16 shaders no matter what is requested. You'll see no image quality difference doing that - just a HUGE performance boost. Why? Well, because while FP16 is all that Half-Life 2 *needs*, if they let the GeForce FX cards do THAT, they might have been competitive! So, instead, they forced FP24 (unneeded), which caused the GF-FX cards to render the DX9 mode in FP32 all the time. With the obvious associated performance hit.</b></i></font color=blue>
<A HREF="http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=838630&page=1&pp=20" target="_new">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=838630&page=1&pp=20</A>
:tongue: <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/priyajeet/fing.jpg" target="_new"><i><font color=red>Very funny, Scotty.</font color=red><font color=blue> Now beam down my clothes.</font color=blue></i></A> :tongue: