First post, by batracio
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wrote:BTW can anyone name a game from the GF 256/GF2 times in which T&L actually mattered?
leileilol pointed out some T&L demanding games in this thread about Kyro II:
Was this card actually released?
One of the mentioned games is Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Graphics cards without HW T&L did have problems with this game, indeed. But it doesn't mean that the problem was related to T&L itself. I read somewhere that Giants developers did look for Dot3 bump mapping caps by checking HW T&L availability, instead of checking D3DTEXOPCAPS_DOTPRODUCT3 flag by calling IDirect3D::GetDeviceCaps() API. That was an incredibly clumsy workaround that prevented Kyro II from using Dot3 bump mapping. I think it was later fixed with a patch. But this was not the only problem Kyro II had with Giants. The internal Z-buffer gave some rendering errors that had to be fixed by forcing an external W-buffer. Imagine the performance drop Kyro II suffers when it eats up its limited bandwidth with W-buffer reads.
Well, I think i'm going a bit off-topic. What I want to say is that, even if you think that a particular game is T&L limited, it may actually be bandwidth limited. Hardware T&L is almost useless without proper support for hardware vertex buffers (that is, the ability to store vertex data in VRAM). But this means that GPU will get vertex data directly from VRAM, not from system RAM, therefore it will use some VRAM bandwidth for vertex data transfers. I guess that most 1st or 2nd generation T&L cards, without memory optimization technologies (LMA, HyperZ, etc), would hit their bandwidth limit way before suffering any slowdown in their T&L engine.
