lowend machines and warzone

[-Kosh-]

I read on the mailing list that some of the devs want to continue to improve the graphics of warzone and some want to stick with what we have now.

I for one would like to see improvements to the rendering engine and trunk is a very nice start.

What the devs should do is produce a snapshot of the current code in trunk and have a link to this widely available and listed on the front and download pages so everyone can get it a try and see if it works on their machines or not.
This will end the speculation on the perceived argument that most people will not be able to run the game anymore.
From what I can tell, pretty much all nvidia and ati cards produced in the last 6 years should have no problems with the trunk version.

I also guess it is possible that there will be a fork for the improved graphics version of warzone and that would split the current dev team up. Which would mean that the version everyone has now will most likely die off if more devs are not found to continue to support it.

[Zarel]

What the devs should do is produce a snapshot of the current code in trunk and have a link to this widely available and listed on the front and download pages so everyone can get it a try and see if it works on their machines or not.
This will end the speculation on the perceived argument that most people will not be able to run the game anymore.
From what I can tell, pretty much all nvidia and ati cards produced in the last 6 years should have no problems with the trunk version.

Change that "6" to a "3" for Nvidia, and "2" for ATI (and Intel), and you'd be more accurate.

I also guess it is possible that there will be a fork for the improved graphics version of warzone and that would split the current dev team up. Which would mean that the version everyone has now will most likely die off if more devs are not found to continue to support it.

Nope, we'd outright drop support for the older version. We don't have enough manpower to split up the dev team like that. (You'd have found this if you had continued reading the ML thread. )

[Per]

From what I can tell, pretty much all nvidia and ati cards produced in the last 6 years should have no problems with the trunk version.

Change that "6" to a "3" for Nvidia, and "2" for ATI (and Intel), and you'd be more accurate.

Really? From what I can tell from wikipedia (for what that is worth), ATI has had support for OpenGL 2.0 from the R300 onward, which was first released in 2002[1]. NVidia had full OpenGL 2.0 support from the GeForce 6 series onward, first released in 2004. However, it is quite possible that the GeForce 5 series will do fine as well, where support is partial[2]. Intel is supposed to have OpenGL 2.1 support on the X3100 and later on Linux already or soon[3], while on Windows X3000 and later are supposed to support OpenGL 2.0 with recent drivers[4]. As for MacOSX, I don't know, but since OpenGL is the API of choice and the drivers are supposed to be rather good, I can't imagine it would be worse than on Linux. Of course, this is all assuming that drivers work as advertised.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R300 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R300
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... sing_units
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA# ... d_chipsets
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA# ... on_Windows

[Zarel]

Man, Wikipedia is giving a lot of conflicting information. I could've sworn I read on it that a lot of video cards had trouble with OpenGL 2. Oh, well, from what I can tell, all you've said is correct, in terms of hardware support. Driver support is harder to tell.

I think I heard once that Windows has dropped OpenGL support from their built-in drivers, so you really need to download manufacturer drivers to get OpenGL drivers.

The Intel GMA 950 is probably the most popular video card (~2005) that doesn't support OpenGL 2, as far as I can tell. As I mentioned on the ML, as long as Warzone runs fine on anything newer than that, I'm fine with upgrading.

[Ilr]

Actually yes that is true. ...A lot of older cards were never fully compatible with 2.0 or later. It's not that they didn't work, they just failed to render *fairly* important features or would occasionally have stack overflows on unique content that exceeded hardware limitations. Matrox and older ATI's most notably...

As for "low end"... according to games made atleast 2-3 years ago, I have a "Low End" computer {{ Asus dual-threading (266 fsb) Dual-CPU (2400mhz) 1gb 266 SDRAM & 512 Nvidia 7600GT overclocked}} yet it runs TRUNK just fine when Trunk itself isn't busy crashing from Campaign Transport mission Errors.


...As for 2.0 compatibility, the only thing on my Wishlist would be Specular Lighting b/c I'm toying with the idea of a "steampunk" Full-Conversion to help me become more proficient in modeling and all those metallic surfaces just wouldn't look right without Specular.

[-Kosh-]

What the devs should do is produce a snapshot of the current code in trunk and have a link to this widely available and listed on the front and download pages so everyone can get it a try and see if it works on their machines or not.
This will end the speculation on the perceived argument that most people will not be able to run the game anymore.
From what I can tell, pretty much all nvidia and ati cards produced in the last 6 years should have no problems with the trunk version.

Change that "6" to a "3" for Nvidia, and "2" for ATI (and Intel), and you'd be more accurate.

Nope.
Nvidia GF5 and Ati radeon 9x00 were both released around 2003.

OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9500 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.
Direct from intel http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/cs-028169.htm
* OpenGL* 1.4 + extensions is supported by the Intel® G31, G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets. * OpenGL* 2.0 is supported by the Intel® G35 chipset. (and higher)

The reason they do not have 2.0 support in the older chipsets is they do not offer multisample with is required for 2.0 and I do not think that will be used?

Then the whole list that intel supports is here http://software.intel.com/en-us/article ... nd-beyond/

Link for huge database of chipsets / cards http://www.ozone3d.net/gpu/db/

[lav_coyote25]

phys x ?? just noted an article on this from nvidia - seems they have a hateon for the ati (and everyone else)... phys x wont work on anyone elses card... or am i getting this wrong... xD


http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/disp ... stems.html



http://hardware.slashdot.org/firehose.p ... /30/202201

[-Kosh-]

phys x ?? just noted an article on this from nvidia - seems they have a hateon for the ati (and everyone else)... phys x wont work on anyone elses card... or am i getting this wrong... xD


http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/disp ... stems.html



http://hardware.slashdot.org/firehose.p ... /30/202201

You read right. If you happen to have a ATI & Nvidia card in the system then it will disable the physX on the nvidia card. Pissant thing to do. They do not want their card to be 'only' used for physX.

What would be very cool would be if everyone has one of the new Radeon 5850/5870 cards and have 3 monitors. It would bring warzone to a new level! Just think of everything you can do. This is amazing! I found this review that shows what the low end card can do. http://www.viddler.com/player/8f18b1a8/

[cybersphinx]

What the devs should do is produce a snapshot of the current code in trunk

Current trunk runs on a Radeon 9600XT (r300), though it is a bit slow (with Mesa, which is slower than ATI's binary drivers), and good on a X800 GTO (though there are some problems with texture size > 512 and mountain levels - desert works ok...). The question is, what features we are not yet using are supported by a sufficiently large amount of drivers so we can use them.

[marsbound2024]

phys x ?? just noted an article on this from nvidia - seems they have a hateon for the ati (and everyone else)... phys x wont work on anyone elses card... or am i getting this wrong... xD


http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/disp ... stems.html



http://hardware.slashdot.org/firehose.p ... /30/202201

You read right. If you happen to have a ATI & Nvidia card in the system then it will disable the physX on the nvidia card. Pissant thing to do. They do not want their card to be 'only' used for physX.

What would be very cool would be if everyone has one of the new Radeon 5850/5870 cards and have 3 monitors. It would bring warzone to a new level! Just think of everything you can do. This is amazing! I found this review that shows what the low end card can do. http://www.viddler.com/player/8f18b1a8/

First we have to code Warzone to actually be able to make use of the cards and the architecture they implement. I highly doubt that will happen in the near future. However, it appears this project is making some good progress when it comes to refining the Warzone game engine. Not sure if anyone has worked on shaders, though. Most of the artistic work done appears to be texture-based and static. Nonetheless, I am happy to see an active community.

- Derek (marsbound2024/jcastro)