notindeed wrote:

A long shot, but have you tried driver 40.27 while forcing it as another card?
Unlikely to work but worth a try.

I tried this one:

YT Video: Building a retro gaming PC for Splinter Cell!

Crashed the machine. These are also older than the driver Ubisoft recommend in the readme. I know that thread, studied it carefully. One mentions it looks perfect on the GeForceMX whereas the MX is specifically not capable of shadow buffers.

I also couldn't confirm this "gamebreaking" drivers. Splinter Cell on a GF4 works fine. even on the latest 90 something ForceWare.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I tried this one: […]
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notindeed wrote:

A long shot, but have you tried driver 40.27 while forcing it as another card?
Unlikely to work but worth a try.

I tried this one:

YT Video: Building a retro gaming PC for Splinter Cell!

Crashed the machine. These are also older than the driver Ubisoft recommend in the readme. I know that thread, studied it carefully. One mentions it looks perfect on the GeForceMX whereas the MX is specifically not capable of shadow buffers.

I also couldn't confirm this "gamebreaking" drivers. Splinter Cell on a GF4 works fine. even on the latest 90 something ForecWare.

GeForce MX is supposed to run the game properly? I've got one or two of those sitting around if it's not been tested yet... 🤣

obobskivich wrote:

GeForce MX is supposed to run the game properly? I've got one or two of those sitting around if it's not been tested yet... 🤣

No it's not.

AFAIK it's based on a NV1x core, but the game needs NV2x core for shadow buffers.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

No it's not.

AFAIK it's based on a NV1x core, but the game needs NV2x core for shadow buffers.

That's what I thought...just figured I'd ask in the event that it was supposed to work, since I've got an old MX 4000 sitting around doing a lot of nothing these days, and figured it'd be pretty simple to swap that with the FX 5800 for one more test. 😀

Yea I believe any more testing is just time down the drain 😵

GeForce4 Ti with shadows at medium and effects at high is as good as it gets. Runs fine at 1600 x 1200 as well 😀

The Ti 4200 is a big sluggish, ideally you want a 4600 / 4800 non SE.

Btw, parts 1 and 2 only display up to 360p on Youtube in case you didn't realise.
Not sure why that is, maybe you changed the rendering method after that or maybe they didn't upload properly.

Thanks 😀

notindeed wrote:

Btw, parts 1 and 2 only display up to 360p on Youtube in case you didn't realise.
Not sure why that is, maybe you changed the rendering method after that or maybe they didn't upload properly.

Thanks 😀

Hi! That's odd, I just tried and can select 720p and 1080p. Very odd.

But one thing I notices is that with Chrome I can't get proper Full HD. If you right click and look at the video stats it doesn't use Full HD. IE works fine though.

Hmm i can get 480p on them now. Still no 1080 or 720.

I am guessing it is to do with multiple video servers and it taking time to transfer. I guess they haven't transferred the better quality ones to the server that is closer to me yet.
From what i heard once, when you upload a video to youtube, it uploads it to the nearest server to you, then, as the video is played around the world, it gets transferred and uploaded to the other servers.
Could be something to do with the server it uses for me not having the higher quality ones.

Edit-
1080p will load on a different computer... Very strange!!

Thanks

BUMP! I managed to get Shadow Buffers work on a GeForce 6800 LE! I've got a Northwood 3GHz, an Intel D875PBZ board and an unlocked 6800LE (with some overclock in there as well) and I've been fooling around with them all-day. I thought I'd see how well it runs Splinter Cell at 1600x1200, so I installed my original copy of the game, as well as the latest patch released. Shadow Buffers seem to be working, although I haven't tried to see whether or not they produce a similar shadow problem as the FX cards.

I'm using Forceware 77.77 by the way.

That card doesn't have the required hardware.

The game sort of works in some parts, but it's very glitchy and not correct. I'm now worried you give others new hope and they waste precious hours in trying to get something going that simply doesn't work 🤣

There are PCI-E versions of the FX line, PCX 5300, PCX 5750, PCX 5900 and PCX 5950.

People who wants to play this on modern systems could perhaps also use Quadro PCI-E cards from the Geforce FX generation?
They would have the same bugs as the FX 5xx0 I guess but with luck they should work better than newer cards.
The Quadro cards are often found in dumpsters these days.

philscomputerlab wrote:

That card doesn't have the required hardware.

The game sort of works in some parts, but it's very glitchy and not correct. I'm now worried you give others new hope and they waste precious hours in trying to get something going that simply doesn't work 🤣

Dude, it does use the Shadow Buffers. I put it side by side with your own video and in the training mission intro you can definitely see different parts of Sam's and Lambert's faces illuminated, following the pattern of the window blinds. Your video seems to have a yellowish tint or maybe that's how the game's supposed to look.
Also on the training mission, I could definitely see the leaves' shadows on the walls.

Again, this card probably produces the same glitches that the FX cards produce when using Shadow Buffers, but we have to investigate in the off-chance that it works like it should.

I'm sorry but you're wrong.

I know you can force class 2 rendering pipe on all cards and it does appear to work in some areas. But interact with the shadows and compare it to a GF3 and GF4 and you will see how it glitches out.

anyone know if this game would run acceptably on a duel tualatin Pentium III 1.4 with 4gb of ram and a geforce ti 4600? I don't own the game yet but I could use a good excuse to use that machine for something.

soviet conscript wrote:

anyone know if this game would run acceptably on a duel tualatin Pentium III 1.4 with 4gb of ram and a geforce ti 4600? I don't own the game yet but I could use a good excuse to use that machine for something.

Easy! That system is way beyond what't needed to run it well 😀 And that graphics card is the fastest possible option as well.

Enjoy the game 😀

Phil, can you provide me with save files to some important areas of the game that these glitches would show up?

F2bnp wrote:

Phil, can you provide me with save files to some important areas of the game that these glitches would show up?

Training mission when you climb up the first tower and there is a zip line. Walk around, jump on the top of the platform and look at the shadows. Then zip down to the platform and do the same thing.

Then do the exact same thing on a XP machine with a GeForce 3 or 4.

If you have Fraps you can capture it and put it online for analysis.

Ok, I'll use fraps and capture a video of that 😀.

Here we go, 1600x1200 capture straight off the PC. Excuse the shitty framerate, the game typically runs at 60 fps at these settings, but FRAPS utterly kills performance. Also, the audio went completely out of sync during conversion of the uncompressed file from FRAPS to something "a little" smaller in size (was 2.06GB, now is 40MB 😜) and I didn't really bother to fix it as my main PC is out of order.

I can't really tell a difference between this and your own video. I would gladly try other levels (especially the ones with "shiny" textures or the oil refinery), but I'm not really in the mood of playing this game right now, I'm saving it for a better time 😀. Give me some save files (or profile folder by the look of it) and I'd be glad to try it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_tc7aBvPuA&feature=youtu.be

Your're just standing there 🤣

Look in the direction of the sun light and observe how Sams shadow interacts with the environment. It should be "off" with non GeForce 3 and 4 cards.

I don't have save games any more. But you can play the first few levels and compare it with the scenes I used in the video. Note that I investigated the difference between the two shadow modes, I didn't investigate forcing / hacking shadow buffers on unsupported / incompatible hardware like you're doing. Plenty of people have already done this you see. The game defaults to the other compatible shadow mode for a reason.