That game is a pain for modern machines.

I've spent a lot of time with it, in the end I built a machine for it. It's still in my lab, a Pentium 4 with GeForce 4 card 😀

Found the solution to the speed problem: setting Windows' power saving mode to "Always On". I initially expected that just taxing the CPU while starting the game would be enough, but apparently not. Also, the commandline option "-cpuspeed=<mhz>" didn't help; maybe it's just for older Unreal engine games.

And I'm not sure actually if ForceShadowMode=0 is more broken than it looks elsewhere. The intro office cutscene looks pretty similar in your video. Also the lack of shadow for your character when you start, and the overly plain look in the beginning of the training level.

Do you remember if, in your testing, you saw odd flickering/shimmering of the "bloom" lights (in the training map: wall lights, overhead lamps, windows)? Both on cards that properly supported the better shadowing, and on those that didn't.

philscomputerlab wrote:

in the end I built a machine for it. It's still in my lab, a Pentium 4 with GeForce 4 card 😀

I do have a computer that will be more compatible with it (GF4 included), but it's not ideal for various reasons. I'd rather have it work properly on the more modern one.

I wonder if I should postpone playing this game to a future time when, maybe, a full fix will become available. Shadowing and lighting (and less visual bugs) can add a lot to a game's atmosphere.

I can't remember any flickering to be honest.

You could postpone but it's the sort of thing that may have quite a long wait 😀 Unless someone is already working on it and I haven't heard anything.

philscomputerlab wrote:

I can't remember any flickering to be honest.

Looks like this: https://vid.me/ylbL

Nintendawg wrote:

Unless someone is already working on it and I haven't heard anything.

Komat's wrapper DLL for Splinter Cell 2 deals with similar issues, and is available also as source code.

Ok, had a look. This seems to be present on a period correct machine also 🤣

Why are the early Splinter Cell games so hard to run accurately on modern machines? Do they take advantage of hardware effects that don't exist on modern cards?

It's the late "bag of tricks" hell era when pixel shaders were new and get tacked onto UnrealEngine2 in strange ways. DX9 and DX10 strived to clean all that API mess up for a pipeline built around them.

Sure, shadowmaps and bloom are standard nowadays, but they were an ungodly hack of black magic then. and maintaining support for this ungodly hack of black magic is a burden for companies that want to go into The Future.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Why are the early Splinter Cell games so hard to run accurately on modern machines? Do they take advantage of hardware effects that don't exist on modern cards?

If I understand correctly, it was designed initially for the Xbox hardware. So it uses some Nvidia extensions, and they didn't implement an alternate rendering path with similar fidelity for ATI or others. And in the case of Nvidia, newer drivers changed behavior for some reason. Some details are in the page for the SC2:PT fix.

OK, so it's not like these games can be modded to take advantage of equivalent graphical effects on modern cards, at least not without tons of hacking.