NPatches (TruForm) was a form of tessellation introduced by ATI in Radeon 8500. Stuff was rad, but no one knew about it. Only few games supported it, but the ones which did... oh boy, TES3 Morrowind was smoother than Skyrim. Some screen shots can be seen here (deeper in the comments):

http://www.hardwaretidende.dk/hard/artikel/02/05/06/0003496

edit.

Later, in dx10 era they reintroduced the technique with HD2000 series, using geometry shader, and tech demos for it works even on Nvidia GPUs.

Thanks. It turns out I can run the Dolphin demo by simply disabling npatches in the config file, but it beats the whole purpose. I have an old ATI R9550 card and with old enough drivers it might support npatches in software/CPU mode. I will try to run it using that one day.

It sounds interesting. I'll check it out.

BTW, Morrowind supports TruForm? It looks amazing.

This demo works. You just have to wait that 25-30 minutes that the demo needs to compile the shaders and build the binaries in its shader cache.
(The progress bar will be completely stuck all the way to the left for the first ~10 minutes). I'm not joking.
I don't know why this process is so incredibly slow but once the cache is ready, subsequent launching of the demo takes only a few seconds.

Everything works fine, except the water which isn't rendered correctly. Both through dgVoodoo and natively. I don't know why, maybe some of the shaders don't get compiled.

BTW, I didn't try it with ATI Radeon 8500 as it's not a DX9 card.

As I remember, the project was a tech demo made for X800 series, which was DX9 and supported Shader Model 2.0b, maybe the water is this "2.0b" part. The stuff wasn't really popular.

AFAIK, 2.0b only adds the capability of using geometry instancing + some enchanced dynamic control flow features (both are available with 3.0), so it shouldn't be a problem.

For me "The Project" is running with the lastest Catalyst (19.11.3) and a Radeon RX 570, but there are black/missing textures.
No luck with dgVoodoo2 (it's running but what a mess and 3DC normal maps compression is not supported).

It's a SM 3.0 DX9 class application by default (you can force lower SM by editing the config files and delete shader cache folder too - it take minutes to compile them! ).

I made a video capture how it works for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeXwOuvbl8Q&feature=youtu.be

Not perfect. But, I cannot place it, it seems to be broken in different ways for different people.

Well, it's nearly perfect in the video (DoF is right, it only looks wrong)

With NV hardware (my 1050 Ti) I got the same results using dgVoodoo2! Water is not missing, the shader has some problems with the camera angle going from -45° to -90° (normal mapping issues?)
So another case of dgVoodoo2 not well working with AMD hardware/software 😒

DoF has a wrong screen space offset along the x-axis. It's clearly appears that in most cases there is an ellipsoid-form (or alike) unblurred area which should be placed over the person in focus but that unblurred area is offseted to left/right instead.

This demo is weird because it takes ages (30-40 minutes) while building the shader cache, and, I remember I saw some errors (failed shader compile or such) on the console during the process. (why? Maybe a new version of fxc or the d3d compiler dll backend takes in effect instead of the expected, on my machine?)

As for the AMD texturing bug: I submitted the report to them, giving a download link to the prepared pack (Aqua3) with some internal shader information and my strong guess about the cause. Let's hope they'll fix it.

Me too I thought about using a new fxc taken from lastest Win10SDK.

No luck, it takes ages as well.

WSH303 wrote on 2019-08-30, 17:43:

NPatches (TruForm) was a form of tessellation introduced by ATI in Radeon 8500. Stuff was rad, but no one knew about it. Only fe […]
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NPatches (TruForm) was a form of tessellation introduced by ATI in Radeon 8500. Stuff was rad, but no one knew about it. Only few games supported it, but the ones which did... oh boy, TES3 Morrowind was smoother than Skyrim. Some screen shots can be seen here (deeper in the comments):

http://www.hardwaretidende.dk/hard/artikel/02/05/06/0003496

edit.

Later, in dx10 era they reintroduced the technique with HD2000 series, using geometry shader, and tech demos for it works even on Nvidia GPUs.

Shameless, Morrowind-loving bump. Any chance dgVoodoo could support TruForm?