Warp2Search.net » News » December 2004 » Half-Life 2 'designed' to be crippled on GeForceFX cards?

HardOCP have an interesting forum thread investigating how HL2 may potentially be detecting GeForce FX cards and crippling the game. A temporary workaround is detailed which will be most useful to owners to those struggling to play the game optimally.



First (before I explain how this is relevant to the "video card" thread), guess what graphics card this is rendered on? It's not my pic (I'm just hosting at the moment). Do pay attention to the FPS counter in the lower right.

Half-Life 2 'designed' to be crippled on GeForceFX cards?

digitalwanderer Junior Member Posts: 3 Joined: 2004-02-22

#58517 Posted on: 12/01/2004 04:56 PM Ok, we were screaming for over a year about how the FX series can't run dx9 very well and now that we find out it can't everyone is getting pissed about it? Oh please! :roll: I don't see how Valve "crippled" the game for FX cards by not taking the time to re-write all their shaders using _pp, we are talking about over 1,000 shaders for 2.5% of the userbase according to Steam! Sorry, FX users = lusers

hinkle Unregistered

#58518 Posted on: 12/01/2004 05:01 PM they can run DX9 just fine but not in FP32 precision for obvious reasons. And that's the problem with Valve and HL2. Valve is voluntary forcing all GF FX users to run all DX9 shaders at FP32 which is overkill. No fallback path for FP16 although valve stated last year that they spend 3 times the amount of time to optimize for those half-precision shaders... ok, but where are those now? Is BS from valve nothing less

dlolos Unregistered

#58520 Posted on: 12/01/2004 06:25 PM The irony of this is that Nvidia has been saying that full precision must be FP-32 otherwise it's partial precision. Microsoft says full precision is FP-24. Now valve creates HL2 with FP-24 which we know for years now that FX owners would loose out on. Now FX owners want special treatment because they can't run DX9 mode with full features? Screw them. I had to have idiot debates with FX owners how this day would come and now they want their own special DX9 with FP-16. I don't see the ATI Radeon X800 getting pixder shader 2.0b or Geforce 6800 with pixel shader 3.0. Not even ATI's 3Dc is being used in HL2.

TSThomas Junior Member Posts: 2 Joined: 2003-05-10

#58524 Posted on: 12/01/2004 10:04 PM Oh no! GeForce FX is handing shaders with "full" precision as badly as it was indicated they would a long time ago! What's the big surprise here?Why is it somehow Valves fault they didn't cover for the failings of others. I'm sure if the situation were reversed we'd have NVIDIA fans pointing this out as an indication ATi cards are crap.

antspants Junior Member Posts: 1 Joined: 2003-03-24

#58525 Posted on: 12/01/2004 10:06 PM when I sit at my computer and pull at my penis the monitor goes all blurry. HL2 is hardly viewable, so I called VALVE and asked them "why is it that when I play my illegal copy of hl2 and pull out my penis the game goes all blurry, what are you going to do about this?" Gabe replied, "Are you pulling at your penis right now and is your computer switched on?" I think gabe wanted to experience exactly what I was so he pulled out his penis (I heard the zipper) and exclaimed "Hey your right, my illegal copy of monopoly does the same thing!" The end result was that the problem is in the penis shaker. Although valve isn’t sure of when a fix will be available, they do assure that every single employee and hierarchy is on the job testing and testing my complaint. Thanks Valve, thanks Gabe Babe.

thomas997 Junior Member Posts: 12 Joined: 2003-04-21

#58530 Posted on: 12/02/2004 12:31 AM Someone stated elsewhere that supporting the FX would require extra coding, and they may not have had the time. And hell its a ATI sponsored game, so why bother heh

Hypo Unregistered

#58534 Posted on: 12/02/2004 07:53 AM ROFLMAO

MB Member Posts: 26 Joined: 2004-05-21

#58538 Posted on: 12/02/2004 06:11 PM True, why bother with a bug infested, boring, nice graphics-fooling, not-so-great-physics-show-off-only game, which was made by greedier people than Microsoft alltogether.

Warp2Search.net » News » December 2004 » Half-Life 2 'designed' to be crippled on GeForceFX cards?