philscomputerlab wrote:

Firstly, thanks for helping out with identifying some early Windows XP games in my other thread. The video is now online, it's a […]
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Firstly, thanks for helping out with identifying some early Windows XP games in my other thread. The video is now online, it's about how to make older games look better: https://youtu.be/P2vnKDeVO8g

I'm planning my next project and for this I am after games that are mostly DX9, but either directly support a few DX10 eye candy features, or received a patch.

So far I can think of Crysis, Company of Heroes, Bioshock, Call of Juarez and I think Lost Planet too. These games usually offered extra features such as tessellation, nicer water or shadows when run in DX10.

Oh, and if you happen to know what eye candy is provided, that would be awesome. For example in Crysis I know that you get nice sun rays with DX10, and in Bioshock the water ripples and shadows are nicer.

Apart from the sunrays, I remember DX10 Crysis gave you also object based motion blur (looks better) and parallax mapping

Ah, good to know, thank you!

It's not just simply DX10 features in DX9. The games had to be worked with the api as a whole, not actually using DX9 when DX10 is used. DX10 is not OpenGL.

Crysis does a LOT of things differently in DX10.
It uses new texture formats, so it gets better quality shadows, HDR lighting and that kind of thing. Also, I'm not sure if the SSAO is DX10-only.

Funny that they weren't providing HDR lighting earlier. It was introducted with DX9 and the Radeon 9700 cards.

gdjacobs wrote:

Funny that they weren't providing HDR lighting earlier. It was introducted with DX9 and the Radeon 9700 cards.

They were, in fact, even Far Cry has HDR.
I meant they have *better* HDR.

Phil, thanks for all the wonderful YouTube videos you do. I'm always looking forward to your next project showing up in my subscription feed.

I recently discovered this DX10 driver for classic Unreal. It isn't "official" but it works very well. 😉
http://www.kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/

It also works with UT, Deus Ex and Rune.

Thank you 😀

Scali wrote:

Crysis does a LOT of things differently in DX10.
It uses new texture formats, so it gets better quality shadows, HDR lighting and that kind of thing. Also, I'm not sure if the SSAO is DX10-only.

Mmm, any reason why there was no anisotropic filtering when POM was used under DX10 Crysis(without mods)? I remember textures looking blurry like hell on my 9800GTX back in 2008/2009

Scali wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Funny that they weren't providing HDR lighting earlier. It was introducted with DX9 and the Radeon 9700 cards.

They were, in fact, even Far Cry has HDR.
I meant they have *better* HDR.

I think Far Cry required DX9c for HDR (geforce 6), same as HL2:LostCoast and CS Source, the effect would not work with Radeon 9000s (not even X800 as far as I can remember?), I don't remember playing anything with just DX9 (SM2.0) advertising HDR?

Call of Juarez I remember being one of the first showcases for DX10, the game originally was DX9 only, and had quality reductions compared to the Xbox 360 version,
the DX10 patch made it look great but it was not just about DX10, they did things like increasing textures resolution in DX10 mode... also, I might be wrong but you couldn't even play the entire game in DX10 mode, it was just for benchmark/demo purposes?

I remember games being released a lot later with DX9-DX10-DX11 support like Metro 2033, they reduced the quality significantly when playing in DX9 mode (to a point it also had effects from the Xbox 360 version missing)

SPBHM wrote:

I think Far Cry required DX9c for HDR (geforce 6), same as HL2:LostCoast and CS Source, the effect would not work with Radeon 9000s (not even X800 as far as I can remember?), I don't remember playing anything with just DX9 (SM2.0) advertising HDR?

There are different ways to implement HDR.
I'm quite sure Half-Life 2 uses an SM2.0-compatible method, because I'm quite sure I used it on my Radeon 9600Pro at the time.

Even on DX7-level hardware you can do fake HDR bloom.
It was used in the.popular.demo for example, which can run on a GeForce2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAv57jBiJOU

Scali wrote:

There are different ways to implement HDR. I'm quite sure Half-Life 2 uses an SM2.0-compatible method, because I'm quite sure I […]
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SPBHM wrote:

I think Far Cry required DX9c for HDR (geforce 6), same as HL2:LostCoast and CS Source, the effect would not work with Radeon 9000s (not even X800 as far as I can remember?), I don't remember playing anything with just DX9 (SM2.0) advertising HDR?

There are different ways to implement HDR.
I'm quite sure Half-Life 2 uses an SM2.0-compatible method, because I'm quite sure I used it on my Radeon 9600Pro at the time.

Even on DX7-level hardware you can do fake HDR bloom.
It was used in the.popular.demo for example, which can run on a GeForce2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAv57jBiJOU

yes but I remember the term HDR being heavily used only for DX9c (Geforce 6) and newer

HL2 originally didn't have it, Hl2 Lost Coast was released to show HDR and other source engine updates, Hl2 EP1 and so on had it, but it would be disabled if you run the game in DX9 (sm2.0), the original HL2 was later updated to the newer version of the engine with the HDR option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJyCYA8JFoo

There's GPU scaling for Intel?

SPBHM wrote:

yes but I remember the term HDR being heavily used only for DX9c (Geforce 6) and newer

HL2 originally didn't have it, Hl2 Lost Coast was released to show HDR and other source engine updates, Hl2 EP1 and so on had it, but it would be disabled if you run the game in DX9 (sm2.0), the original HL2 was later updated to the newer version of the engine with the HDR option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJyCYA8JFoo

HDR was being touted as a feature with the introduction of FP shader pipelines.

Edit: Upon double checking my memory, it seems DX9 and DX9b used higher precision integer representation for the lighting model. FP representation was introduced with SM3 in 9c. So, it went like (High, Higher, Highest) Dynamic Range lighting.

awgamer wrote:

There's GPU scaling for Intel?

Yup. It has options for aspect ratio and centred scaling in the driver 😀

gdjacobs wrote:

HDR was being touted as a feature with the introduction of FP shader pipelines.

Edit: Upon double checking my memory, it seems DX9 and DX9b used higher precision integer representation for the lighting model. FP representation was introduced with SM3 in 9c. So, it went like (High, Higher, Highest) Dynamic Range lighting.

SM2.0 also has FP shaders and rendertargets. The main difference with SM3.0 is that you could do floating point texture-filtering and alphablending, so you had a 'full' floating point pipeline.
With SM2.0 you had the precision in your shaders, but you either had to use integer-based textures and rendertargets, or you had to use some workaround, such as manual texture filtering in the shader, and using a render-to-texture solution for alphablending instead of fixedfunction.

Ahhh! Scali is trying to pull me into the vortex!

Arcania can use DX10 functions and can run even on DX9 hardware and on XP.

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

Mmm, any reason why there was no anisotropic filtering when POM was used under DX10 Crysis(without mods)? I remember textures looking blurry like hell on my 9800GTX back in 2008/2009

POM is a variation of bumpmapping, and the problem there is that you displace your normal vectors, which creates discontinuities in the lighting, and in more advanced techniques also with texturing/self-shadowing, because they are sampled with the displaced vectors, rather than with linear texturecoordinates, which can be predicted with piecewise-linear filter.
The only way to solve this is by using supersampling.