I seem to remember that in your videos, there were still some shadow issues with the Geforce 4, when compared to the Xbox version.

Here's how it should look like (on Xbox):

Taken from here, just after 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JriSe12tzd8

From what i remember, in your walkthroughs, the wooden plank section behind the pole didn't have the lighting on correctly. I could be wrong as i cannot check since you seem to have removed your videos but i seem to remember it looking odd at the time.

So it seems there's really no "perfect" way to play this. Even on xbox, the sound won't be as good without any hrtf or environmental effects i imagine?

The thing that made me come back to this topic is i saw someone talking about the original Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay on GOG.
They mentioned that the highest level of shadows only works on a particular generation of Nvidia card due to it being coded for the xbox.
So i wondered if it was a case like this, and what particular card it required. Unfortunately google turned up nothing when searching for the game + shadow buffers.

Guess it would be interesting to find out about. I didn't realise there were more games that sadly tied themselves to specific hardware like this.

I also heard that the remake of Escape From Butcher Bay in Dark Athena isn't as good but no specifics were given.

The Splinter Cell videos are here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5T8bm … ZHpq30_nk2HgZ9M

I've given up on the let's play videos. Almost nobody watched them 😒

The XBox is the main version of the game, so it should be the most accurate and correct version.

That image is pretty clear. How was it captured? I know that many let's play YouTube videos are done on the 360 in emulation mode. Who knows what impact that can have. I've been told it does affect the frame rate at least.

The PC version does have the light / shadows of the tree on the wooden planks like in that image. I'll see if I can find my old videos and take an image, but not sure if I've stored them.

Hmm yer i meant in your old let's play ones on your old channel.

I'm not sure how it was captured - i just took a screengrab from the video i linked to.
However for recording off of xbox, progressive component would be the best quality, or if not RGB scart. Well, VGA would be best but i am not sure if the xbox can be hacked to run vga.

I've only ever tried gta 3 / vice city on both xbox and 360 and on 360 they could run at 720p, however there was emulation slowdown throughout and vice city in particular had crazy graphical glitches in places. (The slowdown was due to emulation, it was still there running at 576i / 480p ).

So yer, i would say it's easier just to play things on the original xbox and don't rely on the 360 for backwards compatibility. It does look a lot nicer at 720p though - but i think you can imagine that - it's like in the old days of pc gaming, 640*480 and 800*600 were kind of annoyingly low res, but once you got to 1024*768 then games looked a lot better and didn't even seem that much of a downgrade from 1280*960 / 1024 .

Are you sure it had the shadows on the vertical plank? From what i remember of your let's play video it had them on the horizontal ones behind it, but on the vertical plank behind the pipe, all the lighting was not there.

notindeed wrote:

Are you sure it had the shadows on the vertical plank? From what i remember of your let's play video it had them on the horizontal ones behind it, but on the vertical plank behind the pipe, all the lighting was not there.

Ok I found the video, and you are correct!

This is at 104 x 768 resolution:

In the video you linked, in the description:

Framerate is slightly lower than normal due to it being played on a 360

I've also checked out this spot in the PS3 HD version, it also displays the shadows like on the XBox version.

I might revisit this and try this spot with a few cards and different driver versions.

Looking at the PS3 port is really odd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axQTkruEev0

It is missing the light rays from the blinds in the cutscene but adds in light on the wooden planks where you crawl under the netting on the assault course. This doesn't appear to be in the xbox version - at least from the video above but DOES appear in the pc one, at least from what i can tell from my broken shadow buffers running on a newish laptop. Incidently, they flicker in and out depending on distance and mouse movement on pc much like they are appearing to do in the video on ps3. I'm not actually sure if they're meant to be there or not and whether the xbox is "correct" as you are kind of down in a pit in that area and you woudlnt have thought the light beams would get down that low. Mind you, it's artistic direction, it's not like they're simulating the light coming in from the windows haha.

It just makes you wonder if all versions are half broken. Or maybe there really isn't meant to be lighting there and the xbox is correct.

Then, the ps3 one fixes the lighting behind the pole pictured above.

So, it's a strange port. I guess the code for the game is really messy or something!
It's like all versions are messed up in certain ways.

I've noticed on xbox the echo and reverb environmental effects are quite pronounced. They seem a bit more subtle on ps3. Then on PC they seem way, way toned down / different using EAX and DS3D with virtualisation set to high. But yer i was surprised consoles even had decent audio effects

You're right all version have some problems. The same is with SCPT. The best feeling is on Xbox.
The problem is with coding and who does the port. Programmers are 'generic' and do their job. They do not compare versions and do not see visual bugs. Testers even more. Time is also short to have minimum investments. Thats why all are different.

It's all bussines. Games stopped to be an form of art a lomg time ago.

I tested this scene with my 'new' GF 4400 Ti. It's the same., Tried a lot of versions : 2x.xx to 9x.xx and it shows the same. It seems that the developers missed this one.

notindeed wrote:

I seem to remember that in your videos, there were still some shadow issues with the Geforce 4, when compared to the Xbox versio […]
Show full quote

I seem to remember that in your videos, there were still some shadow issues with the Geforce 4, when compared to the Xbox version.

Here's how it should look like (on Xbox):

Taken from here, just after 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JriSe12tzd8

From what i remember, in your walkthroughs, the wooden plank section behind the pole didn't have the lighting on correctly. I could be wrong as i cannot check since you seem to have removed your videos but i seem to remember it looking odd at the time.

So it seems there's really no "perfect" way to play this. Even on xbox, the sound won't be as good without any hrtf or environmental effects i imagine?

The thing that made me come back to this topic is i saw someone talking about the original Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay on GOG.
They mentioned that the highest level of shadows only works on a particular generation of Nvidia card due to it being coded for the xbox.
So i wondered if it was a case like this, and what particular card it required. Unfortunately google turned up nothing when searching for the game + shadow buffers.

Guess it would be interesting to find out about. I didn't realise there were more games that sadly tied themselves to specific hardware like this.

I also heard that the remake of Escape From Butcher Bay in Dark Athena isn't as good but no specifics were given.

I tried moving the last few posts as they had nothing to do with building a PC for Splinter Cell, but something must have gone wrong, sorry. 😊

I fixed my old 6600 GT today (cooler had to be replaced) and decided to give the original Splinter Cell a whirl. For reference, I was using 77.77 WHQL drivers under WindowsXP SP3.

The game auto-detected shadow buffers and used them for rendering by default. I also forced them by editing SplinterCell.ini and setting ForceShadowMode=1 just to be sure. There were a few missing lights and shadows in certain places, such as when Lambert is walking towards his office during the intro. But on many occasions, the game does seem to use the high quality shadows, and consequently looks pretty good. I haven't done any extensive testing yet, just played through the tutorial mission, but I like what I've seen so far. Here are some screenshots:

The framerate isn't too bad on the 6600 GT. When I get a chance, I'll try checking some of the locations where Phil noticed the shadow bugs on cards other than the GeForce3/4 series. Lastly, here's an interesting article from Nvidia's website which claims that GeForce6 cards do support Shadow Buffers, at least in some capacity.

Nvidia wrote:

Shadow Buffer Support

NVIDIA GPUs support shadow buffering directly. The application first renders the scene from the light source into a separate z-buffer. Then during the lighting phase, it fetches the shadow buffer as a projective texture and performs z-compares of the shadow buffer data against a value corresponding to the distance from the light. If the distance passes the test, it's in light; if not, it's in shadow. NVIDIA GPUs have dedicated transistors to perform four z-compares per pixel (on four neighboring z-values) per clock, and to perform bilinear filtering of the pass/fail data. This more advanced variation of percentage-closer filtering saves many shader instructions compared to GPUs that don't have direct shadow buffer support.

I did some more testing to compare the Shadow Buffer rendering of a GeForceFX 5700LE and a GeForce 6600 GT. In some cases, the high quality shadows are rendered exactly the same between the two cards. However, in certain scenes there are definitively shadows and light sources missing on the 6600 GT. Here are a few comparison screenshots:

This screen shows very few differences between the two cards. But if you take a closer look, you'll notice that a light source is missing on the 6600 GT. It's in the lower left corner, next to the yellow "X" marker.

Here, the differences are much more prominent. The light illuminating the barbwire fence and the wooden beam is entirely absent on the 6600 GT, as are the shadows that it's supposed to cast.

Notice how the metal fence doesn't cast any shadows on the 6600 GT.

This screenshot looks largely the same on both cards.

Conslusion: while it is possible to play with Shadow Buffers enabled on a GeForce6 card, you'll be missing shadows and light sources in certain places and won't even be aware of it. When the high quality shadows do work, they look great, but it's not worth the trade off.