I recently decided to boot this up from my GOG library and to my surprise, found that there are no shadows in the game. Confused me since I remember them being in the Xbox version when I played it back in 2005 but after some digging, I found another game like Splinter Cell that relies on special hardware for a graphical effect.

According to this old forum thread from the Geforce forums:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/3534 … s/advent-rising

Apparently the shadows only work on an ATI 9800 Pro card and not any NVIDIA ones, even at the time. I am not sure if they are broken on modern AMD cards, but if anyone has the game and a system with an AMD GPU, I would love to know if they are broken on there too. I've tried messing with 3D Analyze to no success, and dgvoodoo2 is not in the state to emulate that ATI card or any later pixel shader cards as far as I am aware.

As far as I can see, there is no solution and I wanted to bring this issue up here since it seems to be the perfect place for the mention.