IIRC they did eventually work out a fix for the shadows in Splinter Cell 1 but I cannot find the page for it anymore, I do know that Splinter Cell is a special case as it was programmed to use the Xbox hardware which had special functions for the shadows it used. These functions never made it past the GeForce 3 series of GPUs as nVidia removed them, no driver tweaking will ever get them back but the fix above emulated the functions using CUDA in a manner that made them work correctly.

Since I cant find the page anymore you may have to do some searching on your own, IIRC it was fixed by a Russian guy who had in depth knowledge on the issue, or you could grab yourself a cheap GeForce 3 GPU and run the first two Splinter Cell games using that card .

As for DgVoodoo I'm not sure if there is a XP version but the author is around here and they can best answer this question.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-16, 08:29:

IIRC they did eventually work out a fix for the shadows in Splinter Cell 1 but I cannot find the page for it anymore, I do know that Splinter Cell is a special case as it was programmed to use the Xbox hardware which had special functions for the shadows it used. These functions never made it past the GeForce 3 series of GPUs as nVidia removed them, no driver tweaking will ever get them back but the fix above emulated the functions using CUDA in a manner that made them work correctly.

Since I cant find the page anymore you may have to do some searching on your own, IIRC it was fixed by a Russian guy who had in depth knowledge on the issue, or you could grab yourself a cheap GeForce 3 GPU and run the first two Splinter Cell games using that card .

As for DgVoodoo I'm not sure if there is a XP version but the author is around here and they can best answer this question.

Unfortunately I can't grab an older gpu as its a laptop, the gpu on it is upgradeable but only to other Nvidia 7 series cards or quadro fx from the era. Can you recall if this Russian guy fixed the issue for pre dx10 cards? All the research I do leads me to fixes for modern OS's and video cards and nothing for XP. I'd greatly appreciate if someone could link me to any of his articles that may have been archived or something, or if the guys who created the widescreen fixes and dgvoodoo2 could give me some insight on this! Pandora tomorrow works a treat it's just that the 1st game is a real PITA

Ahh didn't realise it was a Laptop . .that does make it difficult, from what i do remember from the page when it was still up he had it running perfectly under Windows 10, no idea if he had a version of it for WinXp.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-16, 08:29:

IIRC they did eventually work out a fix for the shadows in Splinter Cell 1 but I cannot find the page for it anymore, I do know that Splinter Cell is a special case as it was programmed to use the Xbox hardware which had special functions for the shadows it used. These functions never made it past the GeForce 3 series of GPUs as nVidia removed them, no driver tweaking will ever get them back but the fix above emulated the functions using CUDA in a manner that made them work correctly.

Shadow Buffers work fine on GeForce 4 Ti and GeForce FX cards too. Phil did an in-depth analysis in one of his videos.

They also partially work on GeForce 6 cards, but it's very inconsistent. Some effects will display correctly while others will be missing entirely. IMO, it's better to not use Shadow Buffers on any Nvidia GPU after the FX series.

To clarify, I'm only talking about real hardware, as I have no personal experience with third-party tools which may be able to address this.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-07-16, 12:01:

Shadow Buffers work fine on GeForce 4 Ti and GeForce FX cards too. Phil did an in-depth analysis in one of his videos. […]
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TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-16, 08:29:

IIRC they did eventually work out a fix for the shadows in Splinter Cell 1 but I cannot find the page for it anymore, I do know that Splinter Cell is a special case as it was programmed to use the Xbox hardware which had special functions for the shadows it used. These functions never made it past the GeForce 3 series of GPUs as nVidia removed them, no driver tweaking will ever get them back but the fix above emulated the functions using CUDA in a manner that made them work correctly.

Shadow Buffers work fine on GeForce 4 Ti and GeForce FX cards too. Phil did an in-depth analysis in one of his videos.

They also partially work on GeForce 6 cards, but it's very inconsistent. Some effects will display correctly while others will be missing entirely. IMO, it's better to not use Shadow Buffers on any Nvidia GPU after the FX series.

To clarify, I'm only talking about real hardware, as I have no personal experience with third-party tools which may be able to address this.

Its a weird problem and from what I have read even on later hardware the effect isn't as perfect as running the game on a Xbox or GeForce 3, I know Chaos Theory also had issues with newer cards due to the shadows and lighting.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-16, 12:16:

Its a weird problem and from what I have read even on later hardware the effect isn't as perfect as running the game on a Xbox or GeForce 3, I know Chaos Theory also had issues with newer cards due to the shadows and lighting.

I can't find any factual evidence (as in screenshot comparisons) that there are differences in Splinter Cell's Shadow Buffer rendering between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4 Ti (not MX440 and such), assuming that the same driver version is used on both cards.

Phil did find one minor issue with the FX series which doesn't occur on GeForce 3&4. He calls it the "shiny texture glitch". But other than that, everything seems to be largely the same between the three card generations. Major issues only start occurring on GeForce 6 cards and up.