VOGONS


First post, by ZellSF

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I played through F.E.A.R two weeks ago with dgVoodoo, got sick since then so sort of forgot some information, but there were three issues I ran into.

One is known, that F.E.A.R complains in the settings that it doesn't have enough VRAM. Comparing textures it seems like it had no effect on texture quality though, so a non-issue.

Second thing I noticed that water reflections looked really wrong. Native and DXVK doesn't render any water reflections, but dgVoodoo does render some texture there that just looks wrong and isn't aligned to perspective. Wait, native doesn't have water reflections? Surely F.E.A.R has water reflections? Yeah I noticed I had accidentally set reflection quality to minimum, which is broken in dgVoodoo. Maximium works fine. Not an issue for this game, but maybe the cause of this needs to be looked into.

Third thing that actually did bother me a bit was that one asset and one asset only, seems to have a problem. It's a filing cabinet, looks entirely wrong and is fine natively and with DXVK.

I've attached my profile from the latest GOG build, the Save folder goes into %PUBLIC%\Documents\Monolith Productions\FEAR , the save file named "1" is in front of the filing cabinet that isn't looking right, "2" is near reflective water.

As said I got a bit distracted, so I'll only claim like 85% confidence that I tested all card types and disable forced resolution / MSAA / texture filtering to test both problems. I could not get WARP to work or test with another GPU.

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  • Filename
    Save.rar
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    2.38 MiB
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    37 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 1 of 1, by Dege

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Thanks for the savegames, water and the cabinet suffers from the same problem. In fact, I'm aware of all of these issues.
The rendering problems can be tracked back to the mismatching of 'bound texture' type and 'shader sampler' type. AFAIR "broken shaders" was the same issue in Halo, and I didn't change the behavior in dgVoodoo because the result should be undefined.
But ok, then I'll change it to the common practical way, if I do that, water and the cabinet gets rendered "as expected". I'm saying expected because I did a quick check and got the results natively you described with both NV and Intel but with AMD the water wasn't solid black but a dark waving texture without reflection.

The video memory issue: it'd be nice to know how the game detects the available videomemory... I couldn't see anything related in the d3d9 API calls last time I checked it out.