Trashbytes wrote on 2024-05-20, 05:58:
Pandora Tomorrow, PT is a notoriously difficult game to get running accurately on anything newer without something like DGVoodoo2.
I used to think that too, but Pandora Tomorrow actually works fine on GeForce 6 and 7 series cards. You do need to use a specific driver version though, I think it was 169.21. Drivers newer than that won't render the shadows and lights correctly. The same is true for some older drivers like 77.72. Phil has a video which shows Pandora Tomorrow rendering everything correctly on a 7800 GTX.
As for the original Splinter Cell, that one works fine up to the GeForce FX cards, with some very minor glitches like shiny textures on a few walls/floors, as Phil shows here. That said, with all in-game settings maxed out, performance is not great even on something like a GeForce FX 5900XT, especially if you're going for higher resolutions like 1280x1024. The frame rate varies a lot based on what's displayed on screen, jumping between 60 and 20 FPS in some cases. Not a great experience IMO.
Regarding Shadow Buffers vs. Shadow Projectors, while I have never played the game using the latter, a lot of people were using Radeon cards when this game first came out on PC (early 2003). Because Radeon cards can only use Shadow Projectors, it stands to reason that the developers would at least ensure basic functionality in that mode i.e. making it possible to finish the game. It won't look as good as Shadow Buffers, but I doubt it affects the gameplay in a significant manner.