Simplex on 13/2/2008 at 07:00

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Thanks for explaining, I did not mean to offend you in any way by writing "(s)he" so If I did then I am sorry. I just did not want to make the mistake of calling woman "he" by automatically assuming that all gamers are males ;)

klanjsek on 23/2/2008 at 14:04

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I wonder why no ati users are complaining.

I used to own 7800gt and SS2 looked and played great at 1280X1024 16AA&16AF (I do now know how, but I can also clearly remember that under video settings I had 1280x1024x32)???. Now I have 3870 and game looks like shit. DDfix works but game crashes as soon as try to open inventory.:mad:

Simplex on 23/2/2008 at 23:40

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8800GT + 169.21 + DDFix and thief works for me - I wonder if that means that nVidia finally fixed the driver? Up until now all dark engine games were crashing on any driver starting with 169.

Calibrator on 1/3/2008 at 07:29

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IMHO they won't.

And thanks to ddfix they don't even have a reason to do it as most people
seem to be content with it and its shortcomings (no fog).

I switched to an older ATI card and it works beautifully - granted I can't
play the more recent graphics intensive titles like Crysis to their full effect
but for the next year or so I won't switch to Vista anyway.
The only title I'm really interested in is Fallout 3 and I'm not very positive
that I will buy a complete new system for just one single game.

However, most people are different and not really "Thief-fanatics".
Sure, they would like to play the old games and the fan missions but their
love is limited as they won't install a different or weaker card instead of
their prided new GF88 or Radeon 38x0.
They won't even comprehend the fact that the newer, more powerful cards
are worthless if the drivers aren't working correctly with them.

And because being able to play the most modern games and running the
next 3DMark is more important than playing some retro games their curiosity
for the next 8-hour-graphics-wonder is mightier than hundreds of fan missions
with "sucky" graphics...

So, where do we stand now?

When such pressure is put on a community a schism can occur and it does
already happen in the Thief universe - in the truest religious sense of the word.

Here is what we experience now:
- Die-hard fanatics will keep/install old cards in their main system or build
specialized systems
- Moderate fans and curious people will install ddfix and either be content
with it for the above reasons or leave the scene after a short time
- "Lesser" fans and burned out mission authors will move on and leave
- The community will be "cleansed"
- New missions will be devoured with even more fervor
- Mission authors will be idolized to make them build new stuff
- Criticism will be shunned and/or struck down

What we won't see is Nvidia or ATI fixing their drivers as they are already
busily preparing the third(!) generation after the "last good Thief card" and
AMD/ATI already said that they won't even support XP with all features of
their newer drivers (some will later be incorporated into the XP drivers, some won't).

Calibrator

swaaye on 2/3/2008 at 07:24

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I do wonder why they dropped 16-bit dithering in the new chips. Both companies no less. But really it has been probably 9 years now since a game with only 16-bit depth came out and 3D rendering technology has evolved insanely since then. I'd definitely argue that 3D rendering has changed and advanced way more than 2D/3D consumer hardware had from say 1990 - 1999.

Dark engine was behind the times too. It's also not the only old game that has issues. I tried out X-Wing Alliance the other day and not only do you get crazy banding again, but text is unreadable due to pixel center being shifted. The text issue isn't new at all though. Drivers used to have a checkbox to hack this back into shape, but that is long gone.

The problem is that driver writers aren't just fighting to write "perfect" drivers. There is no gold standard. They have to tweak for each app because the game developers quite frequently did nasty little hacks themselves to get around deficiencies of hardware/software of the day. It really has to end sometime, unfortunately. Kind of a bummer. But they are having enough problems making modern games work correctly!

Maybe Ken Levine should step in and rework his game's code to work with modern cards? :)