Splinter Cell & Cat 5.3...

cswiger

Hi, guys--

While I was waiting for SC3: Chaos Theory to show up, I decided to go back and replay SC2: PT. Before I say anything about bugs, I have to say that the video quality of these games plus 5.3 is generally awesome.

With SC2, the only real problem I noticed is that if you enable antialiasing, Sam becomes radioactive and glows in the dark:





[ Well, actually Sam glows in the light, too, for that matter. In the level being shown, Ingreid whatshername says "hey, it's my guardian angel!" ...only I don't think they meant it to be quite this way. :-) ]

Full size .BMPs and a DxDiag are at:
http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/SplinterCell/

x800 Pro + Cat 5.3 w/CCC, AMD 2400+ on a Soyo KT600, 1GB RAM, WinXP

--
-Chuck

thegave

i had that problem with my 9500pro/9700 a while back but to tell the truth i honestly don't remember how i fixed it. i probably just played with AA off because it didn't visually make a huge difference.

cswiger

I took those a coupla days ago, and since then, I've gotten SC3 in. I've also applied the monster 75MB v1.1 patch.

There is a weird distortion that seems to happen to things seen at an angle. It's somewhat subtle, it doesn't seem to happen when looking straight at things, but the effect is somewhere of a cross between the "ripple" or "bow wave" seen when mipmap levels switch and anisotropic filtering is not turned on, and a blocky square distortion which looks like MPEG-2 decoding artifacts. Only, I'm running with 8x aniso enabled both in the driver and in the game settings.



The .jpg image compression seems to smooth out the problem, so the BMP image is more useful:

http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/SplinterCell/splintercell3%202005-04-06%2022-22-59-76.bmp

Finally, if you've made it this far, there are another half-dozen or so images in that directory which contain a much more obvious problem, where stuff becomes transparent and/or disappears altogether. I don't want to put too many images into this thread, so let me use links instead. A good before/after pair showing what happens when I move Sam slightly would be:

http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/SplinterCell/splintercell3%202005-04-07%2002-25-17-78.jpg
http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/SplinterCell/splintercell3%202005-04-07%2002-25-07-14.jpg

[ This is the start of the forth level, Displace. ]

Spyre

SC2: PT doesnt support AA so it shouldnt be enabled its a game issue, Nvidia cards also cant use AA in that game

Zardon

Well now I feel rather silly, ive been running this game for a week on a PCIe BBA X850XTPE with 4x AA selected in game (not with the CP), and I could have sworn it was working (and I didnt see the glowing either)........ I guess ive been enjoying it too much to study it, and its hard in some games to notice AA at 1600x1200.

MythicaL

Yeah, Splinter Cell doesn't officially support AA, and I don't even think it works (if it does, not properly).

Spyre

This thread is a bit mixed up with combined SC2 and SC3 problems

AA doesnt work in SC2 and is disabled by cat ai if its detected so you can have AA on but it doesnt take effect unless you rename the EXE file but you get all sorts of problems like a glowing sam and the lights when viewed through the sniper scope leave trails (not sure about SC3 if it has an ingame option I would suspect the game devs have fixed the problem)

The blocky floors in SC3 would most likely be due to low pixel shader precision, not a lot you can do about that other than petition the game developers to add PS2.0 support or buy a card that supports PS3

The missing stuff when moving slightly is probly a driver bug as a similar thing happens on Prince of Persia warrior within (also a ubisoft game) also a similar thing happened on the 8500 with spinter cell 2 (which was fixed a while ago)

Zardon

Im almost sure AA does work in Chaos Theory (they do have ingame AA options), im in work atm, but ill test tonight at a lower resolution so its easier spotted.

cswiger

Perhaps you're right, and my first message should have been in another thread.

I'm not too worried about SC2, I simply turned off AA. As you and others have confirmed it's an issue with the game itself not supporting AA, rather than a driver issue, maybe it doesn't matter, but if Zardon or one of the other mods wants to split the thread, that's OK by me.

Thanks for your feedback, this seems to be something to bring up with Ubisoft, so I'll file a bug report or two with them as well. SC:CT supposedly supports HDR/"High definition rendering", which I believe means using floating point-based shaders or textures, rather than the traditional int values. I thought the Radeon x800 cards supported that as well as Pixel Shader 2.0b, only the HDR option is also greyed out.

[ And yeah, I know that HDR+AA doesn't work-- apparently the current gen of hardware doesn't support the combination-- but I'm not using AA with SC3. ]

As for getting a card with PS3, I'm only going to buy one $400+ video card per year. :-)

I just saw that Cat 5.4 is out, so I'll grab that tonight and retry.
Thanks again, and to others who have provided feedback...

nauticus

For ther record:

SC1 and 2 don't support AA at all
SC3 does in Shader Model 1.1, but it doesn't work when HDR lighting is enabled (which I'm pretty sure turns on when SM 3 is selected)

Dreakon

Chaos Theory does not support Shader 2.0. The color banding is caused by the low shader precision of 1.1 and changing to Shader 3.0 fixes it. If you dont have a card that supports 3.0, your out of luck unless Ubi makes a patch officially supporting 2.0.

nuG

i seriously doubt that. Ubis main hobby is bendin over for nvidia and taken it in the ass from them. They re just going to be dicks about it. i mean, even people with last gen cards from nvidia cant enjoy PS3.0 why the hell would they do such a thing?im pissed as hell.

pr0digal jenius

AA semi works in SC3...certain options cause it to not be available in game/not work...such as HDR and such(I've onyl tinkered with ti on my 680)GT, so I can't vouch for radeons...that'll be zardon's cup o tea)

But from the looks of that glowing it looks like it's messing up the gamma/lighting and possibly shadows?

Whata re your in game settings?

Spyre

@pr0digal jenius

The glowing is from SC2 NOT 3 and as we have mentioned numerous times that doesnt support AA so forget about the glowing

@cswiger

ATI dont have enough precision in their HDR method to meet the same way Nvidia have their HDR so games which support HDR Nvidia style (farcry and splinter cell3 and erm Painkiller) dont allow that option for ATI cards

Not sure if the upcoming HL2 HDR patch is low precision HDR (LDR? ) or Nvidia style HDR

If I remember correctly ATI's is 10bit and Nvidias is 16bit (or something like that)

The farcry demo that was done for ATI did have HDR so its possible to do and look nice but everyone seems to be wanting to go the Nvidia way ($$$ offered or future proofing take your pick on the likely explanation )

cswiger

Good deal-- Cat 5.4 fixed the missing textures I was seeing in Displace. Thumbs up to ATI for a timely driver release to solve that issue.

With regard to HDR, I think Spyre's right: ATI's site claims an X800 has "Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs". You can fit three 10-bit values into a 32-bit value, so that lets you handle these newfangled FP texture formats in the same space used for a traditional 8880 (RGB) or 8888 (RGBA) format.

Of course, you can't fit an alpha channel into this format, which kinda limits what you can do with it without using another pass to handle litemaps and volumetric fog and the like which use alpha blending, but it's an improvement for simple texures and for the output frame buffer. Apparently, the higher-end nVidia 6800/6600 series supports a 64-bit FP format using 16-16-16-16 for RGBA, but the other 6x00 models can't....