SFFT alpha drivers - V3/4/5 - Join to Testing

[patience]

Of course, my Voodoo 5 (and others) succeeds without problem DxDiag under DirX9 and simply because DirX9 is (still) backwards compatible.
But my Card is even not a DirX8 card.
But if a game needs absolutely some features of DirX9, you have "some chances" that the game will not start without forgotting that "some" games like ATI and NVidia cards and only them.
Why do you say that your driver refuses to try the DX9 Api ?

[SuperFurryFurryThing]

Graphic cards do not support specific versions of DirectX. The software drivers report to directX what facilities the card can support, and map requests from DirectX down to the card hardware. The Amigerlin and 3dfx drivers, only support commands in the format supplied by DirectX 7. When DX8 and DX9 run on a card that has a driver designed for DX7, they have to present the data in the old DX7 format. DX8 supports presenting commands in a more efficient manner, and drivers that understand these new formats are Directx 8 drivers. This support is supplied by extensions to the commands supported. The DX8 driver has to tell the DX runtime, that it can understand these extra commands. I presume that DX9 has added yet more extra commands. My driver supports the DX7 commands and the DX8 extra commands but not any DX9 ones. Hence its behaviour. If you support the extra DX8 commands you can getter higher performance from an existing card.

SFFT

[Kyon_CoraeL]

Originally posted by SuperFurryFurryThing

As I understand your post, you are running Vice City in default fastest performance mode on a V5. One thing that I noticed in GTA3, is that it goes an awfull lot faster in single chip mode. Could you try setting single chip mode using some 3dfx tools Amigerlins would be ok. and try it again, and confirm that the problem is still there and see whether the performance is better.

SFFT

The performance is realatively the same but there still is the same problem. when I used amigamerlin I had no problems, but after a few minutes it crashed. Hope that helps

[SuperFurryFurryThing]

I believe that I have fixed the main problem with Vice City, in the Alpha6. One of the DX8 primitives wasn't handling a parameter correctly. I would try the Alpha6 when it is made available. Thanks for the feedback.

SFFT

[Kyon_CoraeL]

Thank you for your effort.

[r21vo]

thank you SFFT - i'll test your drivers and try to report results (I have VooDoo3 3000 and VooDoo4 4500, so I can test both versions of drivers.)

Why doesn't the driver development go opensource or smth like that? Ok, i know, source belongs to nvidia, but anyways, it would be much better to share tha ideas and fixes with everyone.

[Ragnarok72]

Well, it is certainly great to hear that someone is taking matters into their own hands and working on DX8 support.  But....

WARNING: POSSIBLE STUPID QUESTION(s) ALERT!

Can these drivers in their current state function properly on Win9x?  Now, by "function properly", I mean "install without windows screaming bloody murder because the driver was written with Win2k/XP in mind".

If not, then is Win9x support planned?

[vykupitel]

They cannot run on Win9x. Different kernel here.

[r21vo]

but maybe it's possible to apply all the fixes which were made to w2k/xp  core to w9x core. I guess it wouldn't take much work.

[Glide]

SFFT alpha6 Driver


Just driverman SFFT send me his latest packages .
Win2k/XP release has a fix for GTA 3 Vice City

These are:


- SFFT alpha6 Driver - Voodoo4/5 - Win2k/XP

- SFFT alpha6 Driver - Voodoo3 - Win2k/XP



Good download.

[SuperFurryFurryThing]

There are a couple of general fixes in the Alpha6 which can occur on all of the cards. One of the problems certainly occurs on some platforms with Vice City, and another one is shown by Pacman World 2. Both of these problems could have occured with other games though.

SFFT

[FBS]

Image Insert:

104.01 KB

The new drivers give me this result with th Alpha6. Another thing to note is that when I try to make adjustments to the diplay settings within the game and revert them back again my PC crashes and reboots.

[SuperFurryFurryThing]

The Flight Sim game is presumably now loading reliably. I am still seeing graphic corruption problems in other games, so there is obviously still work to be done.

SFFT

[patience]

Originally posted by r21vo

but maybe it's possible to apply all the fixes which were made to w2k/xp  core to w9x core. I guess it wouldn't take much work.

This is probably easier to start and run a game under Win9x than under Win2k and under XP.
But indeed, if a game has problems under Win9x and Win2k/XP and if the problem can be fixed under Win2k/XP, so would be interesting to try to fix it under Win9x, using the same way but without forgotting that the kernel, the driver, the gfx card are or can be different.

[Ragnarok72]

Originally posted by patience


This is probably easier to start and run a game under Win9x than under Win2k and under XP.
But indeed, if a game has problems under Win9x and Win2k/XP and if the problem can be fixed under Win2k/XP, so would be interesting to try to fix it under Win9x, using the same way but without forgotting that the kernel, the driver, the gfx card are or can be different.

True....and it bugs me that everything nowadays is for XP, XP, XP.  

While I am glad that SFFT and Amigamerlin have been able to kick-start the WinXP driver development to get to the state it is at now, we should still not totally forget that they could still raise compatibility up even further on the Win9x side -- largely because you don't need to use 3DAnalyze to emulate TnL.  I figure that if someone like SFFT would take a crack at updating the Geometry Assist code for the Win9x core so that it would be stable under DX8 games, we'd probably get a boatload of games from 2002-2003 to run/run better.