The 1999 driver holds up surprisingly well.
What's causing Unreal to not function on anything else?

Probably it's DLL for original Unreal. Latest unofficial patch will fix that.

I think unreal was crashing because there are too many GL extensions. After a crash it would always show this in the log file:

Ah yes, the good old extension string overflow.
NVIDIA appears to employ extension limits for certain old applications automatically in their modern drivers. Haven't been so lucky with Intel.

No big loss as Epic's own OpenGLDrv was a very feature incomplete and buggy mess anyway. No overbrights, no volumetric dog, no detail textures, etc. D3DDrv was preferred for nVidia then.

Nvidia's extension wanking in 2001 broke a lot of stuff including some professional applications.

I have nothing but respect for you, OP. First Rage128 now this. I can only hope you do this with a Matrox G400 as well.

appiah4 wrote:

I have nothing but respect for you, OP. First Rage128 now this. I can only hope you do this with a Matrox G400 as well.

Thanks, next one was going to be either Voodoo3 or G400.

cxm717 wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

I have nothing but respect for you, OP. First Rage128 now this. I can only hope you do this with a Matrox G400 as well.

Thanks, next one was going to be either Voodoo3 or G400.

Just wanted to say thanks for the huge work =)
And yea, G400 would be nice.
I expect a fairly huge performance development through the driver revisions.

With G400, I wonder about the visual differences between TurboGL and the full ICD. I'm curious if they obviously cut corners to run faster. Review sites didn't really look at image quality back then.

swaaye wrote:

With G400, I wonder about the visual differences between TurboGL and the full ICD. I'm curious if they obviously cut corners to run faster. Review sites didn't really look at image quality back then.

Yeah, the move from TurboGL to ICD really hit Quake 3 performance for examble, by around 15-20%, so I am wondering what changed visually as well as framerate-wise etc.

Well, I did pick up a capture card the other day. I could capture some video from different driver versions.

Here are the 1999 game results on the P3/800:

leileilol wrote:

No big loss as Epic's own OpenGLDrv was a very feature incomplete and buggy mess anyway. No overbrights, no volumetric dog, no detail textures, etc. D3DDrv was preferred for nVidia then.

Nvidia's extension wanking in 2001 broke a lot of stuff including some professional applications.

Did Unreal ever have overbrights? I noticed them upon disabling multitexturing in Deus Ex, but U/UT appear to have normalized lighting no matter the renderer I use.

Unreal did overbright until that big GlideDrv multitexture update around Sep 98 which pretty much made the game dark (but faster) for Voodoo2 owners since. SoftDrv also overbrighted. Don't think Epic's D3DDrv ever did (though it did do something similar to Quake2 with brightness processing textures instead, IIRC).

Thanks to this thread the process of downgrading my gf/gf2 pcs from 45.23 to 8.05 has started.

Memory fails me as to when nVidia's "Detonator" series of drivers started appearing.
But I remember that every revision of them made my Riva 128 PCI card (Diamond Viper V330) look better and better.
Eventually Quake2 was not only playable, and faster, but also looked better then on the VooDoo I also had.
It was a good day when the VooDoo could be removed and the blurry picture it caused went away.

Later I got the TNT and the card the Detonators were released with.
And the same thing repeated but with a VooDoo2 card.
The TNT image quality was just so much better, and when the performance got close enough to the V2, out it went.
Not to mention the ability, albeit not the performance, to chose higher resolutions and 32 bit colordepth!

I dont think we will ever see a driver evolution like the Detonators again.
If nVidia hadn't started that insane driver development I'm pretty sure they would not be where they are today.
It really put them on the map.
And if ATI had gotten the message and done the same ?
Well they always had really good hardware, but so many times they got let down by bad drivers.
The R200 was the first truly viable card from ATI, it could and really should have been king of the hill at that time.
But ATI took so long to get decent drivers released that the competition got their next generation of cards out !

A little thread ninja perhaps.
But nostalgia reared its head =)