VOGONS


First post, by antrad

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I have been playing with the ATI Radeon tech demos. Most of them work fine and there was no need for dgVodoo, but I have problem with two of them(actually 3, but third one is DirectX 10.1) and even dgVoodoo doesn't help. I am using Windows 7 and have a R9 270X graphics card.

I know dege also tested many of these demos, but these two are not listed:
http://dege.freeweb.hu/Gallery/DXDemosGallery.html

The first one is the ATI 8500 Dolphin Demo, it doesn't start and gives an error about N-Patches (something Dege mentioned 3 years ago when Expack3 was testing these demos):
dgVoodoo 2 for DirectX 11

The second demo is ATI X850 The Project by Crytek. This is DirectX 9 demo, that uses CryEngine. It is an official machinima or in-game trailer that shows what happened few minutes before Far Cry begins.

Without dgVoodoo the game gets stuck on loading and log is full of messages:
WARNING: HLSL compiler (fxc.exe) wasn't able to compile vertex shader 'CGVProgLightTempl_VS30'

With dgvoodoo the game loads (sometimes it crashes), but the colors are all messed up (see attachement). Interesting, if I make any configuration file it gets stuck too, but if I use Ati 8500, then it loads, but this time I only get TV noise over the screen.

I tried WineD3D, but there it gets stuck on loading like before.

These and many other ATI demos can be downloaded here:
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Grafikkarten-G … s-cards-683297/

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https://antonior-software.blogspot.com

Reply 1 of 13, by WSH303

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NPatches (TruForm) was a form of tessellation introduced by ATI in Radeon 8500. Stuff was rad, but no one knew about it. Only few games supported it, but the ones which did... oh boy, TES3 Morrowind was smoother than Skyrim. Some screen shots can be seen here (deeper in the comments):

http://www.hardwaretidende.dk/hard/artikel/02/05/06/0003496

edit.

Later, in dx10 era they reintroduced the technique with HD2000 series, using geometry shader, and tech demos for it works even on Nvidia GPUs.

Reply 2 of 13, by antrad

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Thanks. It turns out I can run the Dolphin demo by simply disabling npatches in the config file, but it beats the whole purpose. I have an old ATI R9550 card and with old enough drivers it might support npatches in software/CPU mode. I will try to run it using that one day.

https://antonior-software.blogspot.com

Reply 4 of 13, by Dege

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This demo works. You just have to wait that 25-30 minutes that the demo needs to compile the shaders and build the binaries in its shader cache.
(The progress bar will be completely stuck all the way to the left for the first ~10 minutes). I'm not joking.
I don't know why this process is so incredibly slow but once the cache is ready, subsequent launching of the demo takes only a few seconds.

Everything works fine, except the water which isn't rendered correctly. Both through dgVoodoo and natively. I don't know why, maybe some of the shaders don't get compiled.

BTW, I didn't try it with ATI Radeon 8500 as it's not a DX9 card.

Reply 7 of 13, by lowenz

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For me "The Project" is running with the lastest Catalyst (19.11.3) and a Radeon RX 570, but there are black/missing textures.
No luck with dgVoodoo2 (it's running but what a mess and 3DC normal maps compression is not supported).

It's a SM 3.0 DX9 class application by default (you can force lower SM by editing the config files and delete shader cache folder too - it take minutes to compile them! ).

Reply 8 of 13, by Dege

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I made a video capture how it works for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeXwOuvbl8Q&feature=youtu.be

Not perfect. But, I cannot place it, it seems to be broken in different ways for different people.

Reply 10 of 13, by lowenz

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With NV hardware (my 1050 Ti) I got the same results using dgVoodoo2! Water is not missing, the shader has some problems with the camera angle going from -45° to -90° (normal mapping issues?)
So another case of dgVoodoo2 not well working with AMD hardware/software 😒

Reply 11 of 13, by Dege

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DoF has a wrong screen space offset along the x-axis. It's clearly appears that in most cases there is an ellipsoid-form (or alike) unblurred area which should be placed over the person in focus but that unblurred area is offseted to left/right instead.

This demo is weird because it takes ages (30-40 minutes) while building the shader cache, and, I remember I saw some errors (failed shader compile or such) on the console during the process. (why? Maybe a new version of fxc or the d3d compiler dll backend takes in effect instead of the expected, on my machine?)

As for the AMD texturing bug: I submitted the report to them, giving a download link to the prepared pack (Aqua3) with some internal shader information and my strong guess about the cause. Let's hope they'll fix it.

Reply 13 of 13, by WSH303

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WSH303 wrote on 2019-08-30, 17:43:
NPatches (TruForm) was a form of tessellation introduced by ATI in Radeon 8500. Stuff was rad, but no one knew about it. Only fe […]
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NPatches (TruForm) was a form of tessellation introduced by ATI in Radeon 8500. Stuff was rad, but no one knew about it. Only few games supported it, but the ones which did... oh boy, TES3 Morrowind was smoother than Skyrim. Some screen shots can be seen here (deeper in the comments):

http://www.hardwaretidende.dk/hard/artikel/02/05/06/0003496

edit.

Later, in dx10 era they reintroduced the technique with HD2000 series, using geometry shader, and tech demos for it works even on Nvidia GPUs.

Shameless, Morrowind-loving bump. Any chance dgVoodoo could support TruForm?