Only R200 (R8500, FGL 8700, FGL 8800, R9100) supports Truform completely in hardware. RV250 and newer chips emulate it by vertex shader and CPU, and it tends to be problematic. I was a 8500 owner during those days, and then had 9700 and had crashes/BSODs with its truform "support".

You probably want a Radeon 8500 128MB for the best Truform possibilities.

Hmm okay thank you for that information.. what of those other cards in the series (8700 8800 9100), would any of them run it comparably?

Is there any further information on how buggy it was? With only a handful of TruForm games if a newer card ran that particular game well that may be good enough... I was assuming even an emulated version on X850 would be faster. 😜 Which games did you attempt/experience crashes in with your 9700?

The Radeon 8500 128MB that doesn't have "LE" in its name is the fastest R200 board. It should run 275 MHz on both RAM and GPU.

If you want more information on problems, I suggest you dig into the Beyond3D forum with a search. Maybe Rage3D as well. I don't remember the quirks anymore, just that using Truform caused crashes for me with 9700.

Thank you for that lead, I see there are multiple discussions on the topic at Beyond3D. 😀 Though it sounds like an 8500 will be added to the shopping list as the most direct solution to the problem.

I never even knew there was a 128MB version of 8500 radeon. Back at the time I had the 64mb version and was happy about it. And about trueform - I know I saw it in demos and in Wolfenstein. What else supported it?

Morrowind has unofficial support and it can be enabled with FPS Optimizer.

Serious Sam

Unreal Engine 2 supports it but I don't recall a game using it.

....maybe there's a list somewhere

Wikipedia lists some games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TruForm. On the wikipedia page there is also a link to ATI´s official list of supported games.

from wiki:

Counter-Strike (ati_subdiv "2.0", ati_npatch "1.0")
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six
Soldier of Fortune
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix
Quake (TruQuake Patch)
Quake 2 (TruQuake2 Patch)
Unreal Tournament (TruUT Patch)
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (unofficially, with the FPS Optimizer [2])
Madden NFL 2004
Bugdom
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Serious Sam
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 (must edit the game's ".ini" file and set "UseNPatches=True")
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Command & Conquer: Renegade
Neverwinter Nights (must edit the game's ".ini" file and set "Enable Truform=1")

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The list doesn't seem to be complete. For instance there was some patch or mod to allow Truform on Unreal Classic as well. (either working with the curvedsurfaces which were supported innately in earlier versions or enabling it in later versions)

And with half (most?) of those games, truform will make some objects look quite wrong because the developer didn't design the models with it in mind.

Keep in mind with later cards that Catalyst 5.8 is the final version to support TRUFORM at all. ATI themselves dropped it with 5.9 onward.

It's probably because it was ATI-exclusive that it never caught on. Shame, since we could've used tessellation back then more than we could use it now, what with today's models being quite high-poly already.

Actually, from what I understand, Truform is very similar to something called n-patches and NV supported that.

I think this sort of tessellation didn't last because it was not a very useful feature for some reason. Maybe it's not flexible enough. Modern tessellation hardware is far more powerful but developers are still largely ignoring it. We'll see what happens when all consoles have support too...

Yes, the Catalyst 5.8 is the last with the Truform support... So, the Radeon Xxxx series is also the Truform-ready.