So I made some Morrowind comparison screenshots for people who might be curious about the difference. I used a GeForce2 MX400 and a GeForce4 Ti4200 for this purpose. Both cards were using driver version 45.23 with DirectX 8.1 installed. This was done with the retail CD release of Morrowind (version 1.0) with no patches, expansions or mods applied, i.e. exactly how the game shipped back in 2002.

This looks even better in motion, since the waves on the water surface are much nicer with pixel shaders. Yeah, this is pretty much what made me upgrade back in the day. 😁

To be fair, Morrowind had very minimalistic approach to shaders and water shader of such low quality can be replicated by EMBM, with better look.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-11-13, 13:28:

To be fair, Morrowind had very minimalistic approach to shaders and water shader of such low quality can be replicated by EMBM.

Well, the pixel shaded water might not look so great now, but it sure blew me away back then.

As for EMBM, I don't think Nvidia cards had that until the GeForce 3, right? But yeah, Matrox had water which looked just as good in their G400 demo back in '99.

But yeah, Matrox had water which looked just as good in their G400 demo back in '99.

Actually better. I just don't remember anything substantial from Morrowind graphics, outside of "cool" looking water. Vanilla game is more or less just DX7 with haphazardly added water shader. So no good use here.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-11-13, 13:45:

But yeah, Matrox had water which looked just as good in their G400 demo back in '99.

Actually better. I just don't remember anything substantial from Morrowind graphics, outside of "cool" looking water. Vanilla game is more or less just DX7 with haphazardly added water shader. So no good use here.

Spells/particles effects looked nice.
Lights were impressive too (you could place lamps of various colors anywhere)
Magic armor and weapons added some dynamic texture effects too. (Like a glow effect)
Night vision ? (I can't remember how it looked like in MW. I have better memories of Oblivion and Skyrim)

I'm not an expert on the topic and I don't know what DX features were used to achieve that.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-11-13, 13:45:

Actually better. I just don't remember anything substantial from Morrowind graphics, outside of "cool" looking water. Vanilla game is more or less just DX7 with haphazardly added water shader. So no good use here.

I agree but it was one of the first games that utilized pixel shaders. Among my friends in the days of GF3 "water in Mororowind" was synonymous with "pixel shader" 😉 (although for me it was more important to run the "Nature" test in 3DM2001 😉).

In retrospect, I think that programmable shaders were an overkill in case of GF3 and R8500 - EMBM or even fixed-function effects like on GameCube GPU by ArtX would have been enough back then. On the other hand, it probably accelerated the adaptation of technology.

While browsing game patches I noticed one for the game 4x4 evolution, it says it's an upgrade only for the Geforce 3 and requires "Directx8a or later installed for this special version to work." It's an autoupdate program and I don't have the game. I can't check what's actually in it, it there are newer shaders in the upgrade.

I got the patch in the magazine Joystick issue 128 from july august 2001
https://archive.org/download/Joystick_Magazin … rce3Upgrade.exe
Patch notes https://ia802606.us.archive.org/view_archive. … rce3Upgrade.txt

any thoughts on rallisport challenge? I remember the cars looking fairly impressive with detail and reflections, it was an xbox game ported to PC and required DX8 GPU to run.

GT legends looked fairly good on my FX 5900 in DX8 mode

Interesting toppic 😀
- Yes matrox had stunning reflecting water WITHOUT pixelshader-tech on G400 which means DX6!
- Morrowind's water does not look that good, but requires DX8.x? capable hardware (R7000 does not work, because not flexible for dx-requirements, but R7500 demo looks STUNNING on R7000 with mirrors reflecting water etc. a shame that it did not work in games, only in that techdemo!)
- Severance also has nice reflecting water, but only the reflection and some linear waves, not like water in real life, but it's also not pixelshaded stuff.)
- FarCry and HL2 offer Pixelshader-Water that look OK on DX8 cards like my FX700. HL2 only activates DX8 renderpath for FX series cards, but effects are ok in my eyes.

Doc

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/geforce-fx … x-8-only.12981/

EMBM requires a very tesselated surface for it to work well without bending and it's only one environment map. DX8+ shader techniques can handle cubemapping which is more stable without the need of a very split-up surface, as well as rendering a reflected / refracted scene in a texture on the screen and applying the surface normalmap to that. You can do the same with ARB shaders and GLSL. There's no EMBM for OpenGL.

Morrowind water has dynamic waves. It only looks "bad" because the texture is unusually dense (a good water reflection effect wasn't quite set in stone in 2002)

Severance is a massive buffer trick that's not normal aware. Urban Chaos did similar. It is hell on the bus. SLI would die on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger 😁

3. system requirements ---------------------- […]
Show full quote

3. system requirements
----------------------

.kkrieger requires a relatively high-end machine to run properly. To be
precise:

- A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
- 512MB of RAM (or more)
- A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card
supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
- Some kind of sound hardware
- DirectX 9.0b

We've done some testing to ensure it runs on all hardware meeting those
requirements we could get, and we checked it runs on all major supported
configurations with current drivers, but with some graphics card/driver
combinations it might screw up. In case you have problems, please try
getting the most recent driver release from your vendor, and only if the
problem persists contact us (refer to the contact section).

swaaye wrote on 2022-11-25, 05:11:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger 😁

3. system requirements ---------------------- […]
Show full quote

3. system requirements
----------------------

.kkrieger requires a relatively high-end machine to run properly. To be
precise:

- A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
- 512MB of RAM (or more)
- A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card
supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
- Some kind of sound hardware
- DirectX 9.0b

We've done some testing to ensure it runs on all hardware meeting those
requirements we could get, and we checked it runs on all major supported
configurations with current drivers, but with some graphics card/driver
combinations it might screw up. In case you have problems, please try
getting the most recent driver release from your vendor, and only if the
problem persists contact us (refer to the contact section).

Odd the system requirements don't mention HDD space, people really should be warned about it 😀

I had completely forgotten this existed!