swaaye wrote:

I busted out the 6600GT that I got for free the other day and did some comparisons between it and my 5900 Ultra. 😉

I only tried out Doom3 and KOTOR but the two cards really felt rather comparable on my Athlon 64 2.2 GHz. The 6600GT has a major bandwidth deficit though (less than half in this card's case) and this should show up with MSAA.

Obviously if you play anything that uses PS 2.0 to any extent then the 6600GT will just dust the 5900. I giggle at the memories of the 5900 Ultra trying to run Oblivion at 640x480 and only managing 10-15 fps.

Holy crap that's sad. I saw a video on Youtube a while ago that showed Oblivion running on integrated 6150 graphics and showing a playable framerate. You need Oldblivion.

Oldblivion footage on FX5200

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUnyJYPFXxs&feature=related

http://www.oldblivion.com/

The owner of the site is running Oblivion with a GeForce 3!!! 😮

GeForce3 Ti500 playing Oblivion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0G-zAARDiU

I tried Oldblivion with a Radeon 8500 once and it ran ok. The problem with Oldblivion is the water shader is gone and as a result water looks very flat. Otherwise it's not too bad.

Oldblivion saved my ass back then. I had an FX5600XT and wow was it slow even on the lowest possible settings. I managed to play the game with Oldblivion, great program. It has kinda lost its usefulness though since Bethesda introduced the Very Low settings for older cards and Oblivion was perfectly playable on them.

swaaye wrote:

I tried Oldblivion with a Radeon 8500 once and it ran ok. The problem with Oldblivion is the water shader is gone and as a result water looks very flat. Otherwise it's not too bad.

After seeing a partial list of the supported cards, I've come to the conclusion that Oldblivion lower the graphical requirements to DX8 standards. No card supporting DX versions older than that seem to work with it.

What would be fun is if you could use Oblivion with a 3dfx card. 😮

Yup they rewrote a number of the shaders. The impact is clearly visible and they never figured out the water but it lets people with zero budget play the game.

There's a similar project for Bioshock to let the game run on Radeon cards with only SM2 support. That would be Radeon 9500 - X850. That SM2 limitation has really made those cards pretty useless. You can still get use out of NV40/G70 in modern games but R300/R400 either won't run games or will be ugly due to lack of support for effects.

Which reminds me: GeForce FX has more flexible pixel/vertex shaders than the stupidly faster Radeon R400 series. 😉 Not that it's usable though.

swaaye wrote:

Yup they rewrote a number of the shaders. The impact is clearly visible and they never figured out the water but it lets people with zero budget play the game.

There's a similar project for Bioshock to let the game run on Radeon cards with only SM2 support. That would be Radeon 9500 - X850. That SM2 limitation has really made those cards pretty useless. You can still get use out of NV40/G70 in modern games but R300/R400 either won't run games or will be ugly due to lack of support for effects.

Which reminds me: GeForce FX has more flexible pixel/vertex shaders than the stupidly faster Radeon R400 series. 😉 Not that it's usable though.

I don't see how FX could have better shader support when it's older than R400 and both support DX9.0b.

There are actually two extensions to pixel shader 2.0.

PS2.0a is for GeForce FX
PS2.0b is for Radeon X700, X800 and X850 along with 690G.

They are specific to the hardware and are not really incremental upgrades to the spec. What happened was that both NV30 and R420 had some features beyond PS2.0 and the companies wanted to expose them. Oblivion uses some PS2.0b features to allow some extra effects on a X800 vs. a 9800, for example. I noticed this because some menu options become available on a X800 that aren't with a 9700.

I believe PS2.0a was really created to allow the HLSL compiler to compile somewhat faster code for GeForce FX. Obviously you aren't going to get fancier effects from those cards and have it playable 🤣

See here for an overview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Level_Shade … ader_comparison

Umm... I dunno bout this Oldblivion/ OBlivion on very low settings thing. Oblivion doesn't have much in the way of gameplay/ storyline - the graphics though were mind blowing (and with the various patches- still!). So, without the immersion the point of playing it looking like mud is lost on me. It was the one game back in the day that made me spend tons of $$$ to max out.

Something like Left for Dead though might be more worthwhile to port over to DX8.

i'd like to see TF2 on DX7 😜
Half-Life 2 also had a little DX6 fallback mode too, it barely ran on the Kyro2 surprisingly

sgt76 wrote:

Umm... I dunno bout this Oldblivion/ OBlivion on very low settings thing. Oblivion doesn't have much in the way of gameplay/ storyline - the graphics though were mind blowing (and with the various patches- still!). So, without the immersion the point of playing it looking like mud is lost on me. It was the one game back in the day that made me spend tons of $$$ to max out..

Well you know it's an eye of the beholder thing. There are a lot of people who love the game and not just for the graphics.

leileilol wrote:

Half-Life 2 also had a little DX6 fallback mode too, it barely ran on the Kyro2 surprisingly

Oh I bet that looks great 🤣

The D3D8 fallback for GeForce FX and the real D3D8 cards is ugly enough.

I still want to play Oblivion in Glide. 😠

If they can mod Doom3 to work with Voodoo cards, why not Oblivion?

sliderider wrote:

I still want to play Oblivion in Glide. 😠

If they can mod Doom3 to work with Voodoo cards, why not Oblivion?

If it was never made for Glide, it most likely never will be.

Tetrium wrote:

sliderider wrote:

I still want to play Oblivion in Glide. 😠

If they can mod Doom3 to work with Voodoo cards, why not Oblivion?

If it was never made for Glide, it most likely never will be.

Doom3 was never made for Glide. It's an unofficial mod.

sliderider wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

sliderider wrote:

I still want to play Oblivion in Glide. 😠

If they can mod Doom3 to work with Voodoo cards, why not Oblivion?

If it was never made for Glide, it most likely never will be.

Doom3 was never made for Glide. It's an unofficial mod.

The fact that they made Doom3 work on a Voodoo doesn't mean the Voodoo is running it in Glide 😜

Yeah I'm sure it's running OpenGL.

You'd have to edit the engine's renderer lib to support glide (WHICH YOU HOPEFULLY SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO IN THE COMING MONTHS HEHEHE). It isn't glide if it ain't directly into glide.

Yeah it was openGL with a lot of reduced texture detail and software emulation of TnL. At least that's how I remember it.

leileilol wrote:

You'd have to edit the engine's renderer lib to support glide (WHICH YOU HOPEFULLY SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO IN THE COMING MONTHS HEHEHE). It isn't glide if it ain't directly into glide.

Uh oh, I sense a lot of Glide ports of games that were never intended to be Glide but should have been.

sliderider wrote:

Uh oh, I sense a lot of Glide ports of games that were never intended to be Glide but should have been.

I doubt it. The only time that has ever happened on an id software source release was Doom Legacy and early versions of Doomsday (jHexen era)
No one's done a glide quake, glide quake2, glide quake3, glide rtcw, etc... ever.

Anyone here played WoW on a Voodoo 5? How does that wok? Apparently that's doable- though I don't know about newer patches.