Posted - 2007.08.18 11:08:00 - [3]

 

Originally by: Illwill Bill

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Comments: Video performance is good enough, but the drivers emulated vertex shaders take most of the juice out of the CPU, creating lags once or twice a second.

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Call it stutter. Lag doesn't affect framerate.

Posted - 2007.08.18 14:30:00 - [5]

 

Originally by: Illwill Bill

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Edited by: Illwill Bill on 18/08/2007 14:05:04

Originally by: T Than

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intel chips, except the very newest ones that i cant remember the name of right now, do not have hardware T&L capabilities. and as such if they work will give terrible performance.

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Well, GMA 900 and up (2004 and later) have HW pixel shaders, but not vertex shaders, so saying that they lack T&L is not quite true, but performance is a disaster with slower CPUs.

GMA X3000 is supposed to be a true DX10 chip, but the drivers suck really bad.

EDIT: Tech support advised me try downgrade drivers. This made the game perfectly playable with lower settings.

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the GMA900 and up did not have hardware vertex shaders. they had a software implementation. the only intel chipsets with hardware vertex shaders are G965, GM965, GL960 & G35.

some other chips (946GZ, Q963 & Q965) had half hearted hardware support built in, but it doesnt work right and no drivers enable it as such.

the X3000, which is the G965 chipset, is only DX9.0c. the X3500, or G35 chipset, is the DX10 part.

Posted - 2007.08.24 18:29:00 - [7]

 

Originally by: Illwill Bill

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You do realise that you repeated my post? :)

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i did not. ok, i'll explain...

a pixel shader is a shader program, executed on the GPU. you say they have hardware pixel shaders, no. they dont. there is no such thing. there are GPU's that have support for various versions of pixel shaders built in, but then without that it is impossible to render these effects. there is no such thing as a software pixel shader in the way you can have hardware or software support for vertex shaders.

the hardware needs to support pixel shaders, the version determined by the type of hardware, for them to be used on that card. there is no way to use pixel shades via a software implementation. the hardware must support them. with vertex shaders, you can still use them without dedicated hardware support.

now as for vertex shaders, those can be handled 2 ways as i said. via software, or via hardware. and when they are handled via software, the card is considered to lack hardware T&L. which when i said it was my way of saying that yes, saying they lacked hardware T&L was true.

and then you said the X3000 was a directx10 chip. it is not.

so while the first part seemed like me repeating, i hadnt explained what i was saying fully, it was me disagreeing. the part about the X3000 was me correcting you on a misconception you seemed to have.

Posted - 2007.08.25 10:15:00 - [9]

 

Originally by: Bomb Voyage

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Originally by: T Than

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the hardware needs to support pixel shaders, the version determined by the type of hardware, for them to be used on that card. there is no way to use pixel shades via a software implementation.

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Ahh, that's nonsense. Shaders are not voodoo magic, just small programs that alter pixels on the screen or textures stored in video memory. That can be done with complete control in software.

Everything the GPU does can be emulated - that's what the DirectX Reference Rasterizer does. Emulation isn't actually used for real simply because of the huge performance hit involved.

I don't know if Intel's IGPs can be reprogrammed to handle a higher PS version without resorting to pointless emulation. Their hardware is based around general purpose execution units so, in theory, there's a chance it can be done. Performance would be terrible, but that's never bothered Intel before...

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there is software that will bypass the checks on a card to see if it is compliant, that is a game requires pixel shader 2.0 and doesnt have it, the emulation software will fool the game into thinking it does, and will then run, but the consequence is graphical errors, which range from not noticeable to massive corruption depending on the amount of shaders used.

technically, it is possible to pass pixel shader operations to a software solution, but a scene that runs at around 50fps with hardware pixel shaders drops to under 1fps when you try to do this via software. so yes, while it is technically possible, you would need a card on the 8800 level running software pixel shaders to get the same performance you would have got from a geforce 2 or similar.

so for all intensive purposes, its not possible to run pixel shaders without hardware support, at least not in any way that is anywhere near being useful. vertex shaders can be emulated pretty well. the performance gains from switching from software to hardware are no where near as much.

and in a direct3D pipeline the pixel shader comes into play after the triangle setup rasterisation and multisampling. in fact the pixel shading is pretty much the last thing to be done before display.

so i apologise, i should have said, there is no feasible way to use pixel shaders via a softweare solution without it turning anything at all into a slide show. while vertex shaders can be handles in software much easier.

lets face it, hardware vertex support, while not helping, never was the sole issue with intel graphics chips lol they were just pretty poor chips, even if they did have hardware vertex support, they would still be pretty poor chips! for a myriad of reasons.

Posted - 2007.09.11 22:02:00 - [11]

 

Nvidia GeForce 6150SE
Game starts: Yes
Performance: Half decent
Comments: Game plays well, but framerates drop radically when 10+ ships or gas clouds appear on screen.

Posted - 2007.09.12 14:37:00 - [13]

 

Any nVidia card started from Geforce4 series is ok' for EVE.
At 1024x720/768 perfomance is good or at least enough to play (20-30 FPS in solo mining/hunting to 10 FPS in 30+ engagements). Checked in windowed mode, in fullscreen it should be a bit better, but nothing significant.