Looks like OP is the winner here 🤣

clueless1 wrote:

I really wish you two would take this to PM. Scali, your technical knowledge would have so much more impact if you could just hold your tongue with the insults.

^Agrees.

Scali wrote:

When you have been explaining the same thing for over 20 years, and people still don't listen (and keep arguing against you), you don't have a lot of patience left.

Or maybe you were simply wrong and you missed something. Or maybe you were right 20 years ago and all things have changed now except for you. In a way, errors makes one human and if you can't even acknowledge your own, how can you ever learn from them? And how can one expect to learn from you if you can't learn from others?
That way in the end your knowledge will get lost and that would be a waste, right?

You aren't always right. Noone is!

Tetrium wrote:

Or maybe you were simply wrong and you missed something.

You have no idea who you're talking to, do you? Me, wrong about DirectX? 🤣.
This is exactly my point. The Dunning-Kruger in so many people these days. Their misplaced sense of entitlement. Stupid arrogant people who think their uninformed opinions are worth as much as actual facts from people with years of hands-on experience in the development of DirectX. Don't try to portray this as 'fair' and 'even'. It is not.

Everything is easy to verify if you only want to put in the effort. I even gave a link of an example of game requirements. I am not wrong, period. Don't even begin trying to argue that. Know when to shut up.

unreal gold, just make sure you get the unofficail patch 227i and use direct3D8 driver and you will have a smooth 53 frames

Scali wrote:

You have no idea who you're talking to, do you? This is exactly my point. The Dunning-Kruger in so many people these days. Their […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

Or maybe you were simply wrong and you missed something.

You have no idea who you're talking to, do you?
This is exactly my point. The Dunning-Kruger in so many people these days. Their misplaced sense of entitlement. Stupid arrogant people who think their uninformed opinions are worth as much as actual facts

I am not wrong, period. Don't even begin trying to argue that. Know when to shut up.

I do know that most people are in fact not so self-centered as you think. Not everyone who doesn't always agree with you is simply an arrogant fool or something. You may not be a fool, but what the other bit is concerned, you don't really seem to come across as someone who isn't arrogant himself and this is what I think is a waste as that way you scare people away and will be left with noone to share your knowledge with.

Btw I agree with you that stupid arrogant people (or people who pretend to be stupid, but in reality are not) who think their opinions are more valuable to the opinions of others are not very likable.

And the way you come across won't really make people not stop thinking arrogantly, it will only silence them out of fear or make them seek another target and what good would that do? That's a form of hate-projection and I've learned that that is a way forward I don't want to participate in.

You are not more valuable as a person than people who you as a person value as lesser.

I hope you see my point of view and if not, at least I'll know that I tried my best and did my part.

Relax. There's enough stupidity in the world as it is (I'm not naming anyone specific by this final statement).

deus x and half life are a lot of fun.

not exactly FPS, but i remember my GeForce 4 Ti 4200 was bundled with Aquanox2, probably best described as underwater wing commander.

I used ti4200 up until 2005 when I got 6600GT and had no problem running most games on med-high settings.

Am i the only one with Scali here? Well, not the way he brings it but i do understand his frustration.

When Geforce FX came out it sucked at a lot of the Directx9 ''new features'' (and ATi did it way better). To bypass that the Geforce Fx was better used by switching off some direct9 features or running a dx8 or even dx7 path completely.

Because of that, many people held on to their highend Geforce4 Ti cards because they could easily play the same dx9 games at the same settings (dx7 and dx8 features).
Very little games actually REQUIRE directx9 to be FULLY supported as in: the game will not run if your card does not do sm 3.0 (for example).

A game can only go back so far because it uses a certain engine. For that the MINIMUM support of a dx9c supporting game is indeed often a geforce2 or directx7 fully compatible card.

The list of ''supported cards'' in the system requirements is usually a list that should work without problems AND has been tested. You can not ask for tech support if you do not have the hardware from the list. It doesn't mean it won't work with older cards! Even the x800 is in that list and these cards do not fully support every feature of directx9c, they only do up to 9.0B feature wise.
And dx9c is in the requirements.......because they mean the software.

gf4 and gf5 are both GREAT dx7/8 cards. For dx9 you are better off with 6000 series or higher. The best dx9 nvidia card however is the 8800 series (a dx10 card).

Years later: take for example the game Dirt2. It features dx11 and has a radeon 5000 series (dx11) card in the recommended list. The game runs fine on dx10 capable hardware and even on fast dx9 features only capable hardware. You are just missing the water effects as that is the only dx11 feature of the game.

I think you can recommend games for a certain card as long as it is capable of running it smooth and with decent settings. And a gf4 is perfectly capable of playing a lot of ''dx9 featured'' games.

Recently finished Tron 2.0 on a Ti4200 / AXP 1700+, ran great maxed out with all effects. This is a really early DX9 game too.

meljor wrote:

I think you can recommend games for a certain card as long as it is capable of running it smooth and with decent settings. And a gf4 is perfectly capable of playing a lot of ''dx9 featured'' games.

Exactly. The card is from 2002, yet the advice given here was 'games up to 2002'.
On the contrary. When the GF4 was introduced in 2002, it was the fastest card on the market, by a margin.
It was only getting started in 2002, and many games in the years to come would target the GF4. Most of them would use DX9 to target the hardware.
Far Cry is an excellent example of that: it's from 2004, and works great on a GF4.
2002-2005 would be the 'heyday' of the GF4.
Sure, it got eclipsed by the Radeon 9500/9700 not long after introduction, but prior to that, the GF4Ti4200 was the card to have: it had excellent performance (the Ti4400 and Ti4600 were not that much faster), and incredible bang-for-the-buck. It totally destroyed the Radeon 8500, which was ATi's best offering at the time. It also totally destroyed the GeForce3 (which was about the same speed as the Radeon 8500).

So the GF4Ti4200 was quite a popular card, and also due to its similarities with the similarly popular GeForce3, it enjoyed quite a long life of support in games. It wasn't until... 2006 or so? that games actually started requiring SM2.0+, ending support for the GF4 and earlier models.

meljor wrote:

Am i the only one with Scali here? Well, not the way he brings it but i do understand his frustration. […]
Show full quote

Am i the only one with Scali here? Well, not the way he brings it but i do understand his frustration.

When Geforce FX came out it sucked at a lot of the Directx9 ''new features'' (and ATi did it way better). To bypass that the Geforce Fx was better used by switching off some direct9 features or running a dx8 or even dx7 path completely.

Because of that, many people held on to their highend Geforce4 Ti cards because they could easily play the same dx9 games at the same settings (dx7 and dx8 features).
Very little games actually REQUIRE directx9 to be FULLY supported as in: the game will not run if your card does not do sm 3.0 (for example).

A game can only go back so far because it uses a certain engine. For that the MINIMUM support of a dx9c supporting game is indeed often a geforce2 or directx7 fully compatible card.

Sure, it took a long time before games required the DirectX 9 feature level from graphics hardware. DX9 came out in 2002, and I distinctly remember people were still caught off-guard as late as 2007 when a graphically lighter strategy game like Europa Universalis III finally required DX9 hardware shaders.

In the case of the DX8.1 hardware GeForce4, some games with "DX9" on the box will run perfectly, others will be missing effects and yet others won't start at all. When it comes to the demanding genres of FPS, action and racing, I think it is fair to say they're at their best with DX8.1 era games like Splinter Cell, especially.

in terms of racing something not very popular that comes to mind is Rallisport Challenge, it was and Xbox game ported to PC, i think it requires ps1.1 and it looks kind of nice (the car models), now the game is not very good, I mean in terms of gameplay but it looks nice,

firage wrote:

In the case of the DX8.1 hardware GeForce4, some games with "DX9" on the box will run perfectly, others will be missing effects and yet others won't start at all. When it comes to the demanding genres of FPS, action and racing, I think it is fair to say they're at their best with DX8.1 era games like Splinter Cell, especially.

I would disagree on that, since DX8.1 has been around for only a few months. Most games targeted at DX8.x hardware actually use the DX9 API. In fact, many DX9 games even support DX7 hardware (GeForce2, Radeon DDR).

I played Need for Speed Carbon on a Ti 4400, it was playable, to give you an idea of what you can do.

Gothic 1 and 2 is good for 4Ti, I played with Ti4200 that games and in Gothic 2 with Athlon 1700+ I can sometimes play with 300% drawing distance at 1600x1200 resolution, especially in Jarkendar or Mine Valley, also Spellforce is good for that card, Doom 3 with some reduced settings can also be smooth. I haved GF4Ti4200 for some years and I played even NFS:MW at 1024x768 with high settings without problems, but at max/high settings NFS:U2 was slowed down a bit. You can also try Titan Quest on some reduced settings, I played also entire TQ on 4Ti and I don`t have problems with perfomance.

Scali wrote:

I would disagree on that, since DX8.1 has been around for only a few months. Most games targeted at DX8.x hardware actually use the DX9 API. In fact, many DX9 games even support DX7 hardware (GeForce2, Radeon DDR).

DX major releases were annual starting with 3.0 in 1996 until 8.0 in 2000, 8.0 had a full year on existing OS's and then 8.1 had another full year plus a month or two from 2001 to 2002. GF4 was kinda old tech from the moment the Radeon 9700 Pro arrived and enabled new standards in post-processing, even before DX9 came out. Matters of perspective and whatnot.

firage wrote:

DX major releases were annual starting with 3.0 in 1996 until 8.0 in 2000

Which is why you find only a handful of games for any of these given versions of D3D (in fact, D3D was not even updated with every release. There's 'IDirect3D' from DX2, IDirect3D2 from DX5, and IDirect3D3 from DX6. DX4 never existed. Only from DX7 on did you get a new D3D every version, and since DX8, D3D was basically the only thing still being updated in DX).
DX9 was the first version that actually stuck around long enough for a decent amount of games/engines to actually apply the technology in a meaningful sense.
This was helped further by the facts that DX10 was available on Vista only, and DX10 required DX10 hardware to work. This meant that DX9 renderers remained for a few years more, sometimes even side-by-side with DX10 in the same game.

Bottom line is: DX versions mean very little. DX9 is a completely different beast from anything else. The API was very similar to DX8.x, so with a bit of search-and-replace you could convert your DX8 codebase to DX9. There were no real downsides to using DX9 over DX8. The advantages were that DX9 included better support for DX7 and DX8 hardware (eg, more fixedfunction operations, support for HLSL for SM1.x), and you could also use the new SM2.0 hardware to boot.
This meant that as soon as DX9 was released (which was just a few months after the GF4), pretty much every game released would use the DX9 API.

DX10 was totally different.
DX11 was a case of search-and-replace again, like DX9, so DX11 superceded DX10 instantly.
And again DX12 is completely different from DX11, and its adoption is very slow so far.

I learned quite a bit from this thread. Thank you all for providing such detail and examples. I was not aware of this whole DX9-compatibale game/card issue and their sub-feature requirements or lack there of. Seems things are not so straight forward with respect to card and game compatibility.

Although such information may have been repeated throughout the years, this may be the first time many readers have been informed of this aspect of compatibility. I am constantly repeating myself on this forum as new users emerge and I do not really expect everyone to exhaustively uncover past posts and information.

Who was that news journalist who used to end each news cast with "remember, character counts!" ? Sound advice that is worth reflection upon, regardless of how frustrating things are. I realise this is often easier said than done. My 3 kids drive me insane, however I'm grateful that my wife is there to remind me that character counts.

feipoa wrote:

Although such information may have been repeated throughout the years, this may be the first time many readers have been informed of this aspect of compatibility. I am constantly repeating myself on this forum as new users emerge and I do not really expect everyone to exhaustively uncover past posts and information.

Well, this is not about new users. I find it strange that it seems that hardly any one here, even many long-time forum members, don't seem to grasp DX9 and hardware compatibility, and actually argue *against* facts and logic.
Which is strange, given that this forum is specifically dedicated to retro gaming/hardware. You would expect the more experienced members to be intimately familiar with just how complicated DX9 really is.

That's my two main gripes here:
1) The main protagonist here was someone who registered back in 2004 (ironically right in the heyday of DX9 when the GF4 was still a very common card).
2) It's not just not knowing, but actually arguing (strongly) against someone who tries to give a good explanation with facts and logic, repeatedly.