I'm back ... with a question re: T&L

From Tetris L's FAQ

As for playing U2 on non T&L cards Legend's Chris Hargrove explained in this thread on Infogrames' U2 forum:

If you don't have a card that supports T&L, we will not make any promises at this point that the game will be playable. Everything we're doing tech-wise assumes that T&L is present. This isn't just an assumption of our own technology, it's also an assumption of the Unreal Warfare engine itself. If your card doesn't have T&L, you might be able to run the game, but probably not as well as you might like.

Regarding cards using "software T&L", he added:

In terms of the argument about how fast CPUs are these days, yes they're fast... but we expect T&L because the CPU is still going to be very busy doing *other things*. If the CPU gets bogged down doing transformation and lighting calculations that otherwise can be offloaded to the video card (and that's a lot of calculations, given our high poly count), it can be a *big* drain on performance.

To anybody interested in playing U2 on non-T&L-cards I strongly recommend reading this thread on Infogrames' U2 forum. Excellent info from the U2 dev team. I interpret that as: U2 will have a software T&L option, but Legend do not make any promises regarding performance if this is used.

Click to expand...

In summary, with software T&L you should be able to play, but there are no guarantees about your framerate.

Tribes 2 attempted almost the same thing. They didn't include decent support for Voodoo cards out of the box and it caused an uproar in the community. Legend can't assume that everyone has a Geforce card by now. I can only guess that a fairly large percentage of U2's target audience has a T&L supported card, but there will be many who are still trying to squeeze a little more life out of there 3dfx cards.

In the end, I think Legend will put some support for non-T&L cards in the game, but it won't be pretty.

Let's not mince words

Non T&L won't be pretty. It'll be frickin' horrible.

Re: Let's not mince words

Law,
I don't think you can compare U2 and Tribes in this respect. There is 1.5 years between them. When did 3dfx stop selling cards? Those PC with voodoo cards are typically around 2 years old. They have really reached the end of their lifetime.

Originally posted by Ulukai
Non T&L won't be pretty. It'll be frickin' horrible.

Click to expand...

As far as I understand you can fully emulate hardware T&L via software. This is what the Kyro2 does. So ... software T&L will be just as pretty as hardware T&L. But it'll be a helluvalot slower, unless you've got a killer-CPU.

Slow = frickin' horrible

I honestly hope people won't be trying to use Voodoo 3s in U2. My point is that Legend will get a lot of grief from people with slower systems if they don't include, at the very least, an option like software T&L support.

It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to make the game run. I'm confident that U2 won't be a performance disaster like T2, but I can already envision this forum filled with posts like "Why won't U2 run with my l33t 3dfx card?".

Originally posted by Law
My point is that Legend will get a lot of grief from people with slower systems if they don't include, at the very least, an option like software T&L support.

Click to expand...

I'm afraight Legend will get a lot of grief from people with slower systems either way. If they don't include software T&L they'll be flamed because a lot of people can't play the game. And if they do include it, then they'll get flamed for low framerate. Even if they put in 36pt font on the box "Warning: We do not guarantee good performance in software T&L mode!" people will still expect it and bítch as usual if they don't get it.

Unfortunately, I think you're exactly right. The reason we haven't gotten a straight answer from Legend is that they realize that this is a no-win sitaution.

I am running an ATI 3D Rage Pro (i have no money) and this only just runs UT at a almost playable frame rate (15fps )

Originally posted by Master_Blaster[MASTER
I am running an ATI 3D Rage Pro (i have no money) and this only just runs UT at a almost playable frame rate (15fps )

Click to expand...

If you look through a few online retailers you should be able to find a Geforce 2 MX extremely cheap. Depending on the rest of your system, that could help quite a bit.

Remember that the Kyro2 ran the U2 engine benchmark suprisingly well, so if you have a decent CPU you will be able to get away without T&L.

Originally posted by Law


If you look through a few online retailers you should be able to find a Geforce 2 MX extremely cheap. Depending on the rest of your system, that could help quite a bit.

Click to expand...

Yeah, i am saving and hoping to get a GF4 Ti 4200, or I might see what ATI have on offer at the time. Maybe they will come out with a card that they can make decent drivers for

Until it ships, we probably won't know how it will run on systems with "older" hardware. It's going to probably be heavily dependent on CPU speed and memory bandwidth do to the number of triangles/polygons it has to process, as well as all the Unreal Script code. UScript is a interpreted language, very much like Java. Practically everything you see and hear will be done thru UScript.

Remember that U2 is an single player adventure game at heart. It doesn't need to run 60FPS. Rather, a fairly constant 20 or 30 FPS would be more desirable. Time should have a contestant flow, not speed up and down fluently.

I'm hoping Legend will include a "target frame rate" option, kind of like the "minimum desired frame rate" option in UT. But instead of just keeping the frame rate above that limit, U2 would attempt to keep the frame rate within +/- 4 or 5 FPS of the target frame rate, keeping the frame rate from getting to high and to low.

Now why would you want this? Well, ask yourself. Why is it that when you watch TV or a movie, you don't notice the frame rate. Typically film is displayed at 24 frames per second, and the eye can detect frame rates more than twice as fast. But you don't notice. Why? Because it's not your eye that's making the rapidly displayed images into continues motion. It's the brain. And because the frame rate is always the same, the brain adapts so the motion appears smooth and consistent.

A single player adventure game plays very differently than an multiplayer game. Multiplayer games are much more fast pace, with very little exploration. Single player games tend to be more inversive. After I finished the original Unreal for the first time, I came away feeling that I hadn't just played a game, but played an experience. After finishing UT's Tournament mode for the first time, I came away feeling like I'd just completed an frantic action game that kept me on my toes.

UScript is a interpreted language, very much like Java. Practically everything you see and hear will be done thru UScript.

Click to expand...

It's possible to write very fast interpreters. Perl is interpreted and can execute code faster than a lot of C++ programmers can write. It all has to do with how it handles its data structures. Even if all the game behavior in Unreal games were compile-coded, it probably wouldn't make much difference.

Most Java is compiled now. The interpreted code is compiled by each machines' Java extension/plugin/library. Only Javascript must still be interpreted.

Just the musings of a CS major. You got to be an expert at something, right?

Originally posted by MeStinkBAD
Until it ships, we probably won't know how it will run on systems with "older" hardware. It's going to probably be heavily dependent on CPU speed and memory bandwidth do to the number of triangles/polygons it has to process

Click to expand...

Some of that burden, hopefully a good deal, will be offloaded by the game's requirement for a T&L card all of which also offer at least 32MB VRAM, so a much heavier amount of eyecandy ought to be obtainable at lesser cost to the CPU.

I find that it seems smooth (almost) for me at FPS of 15+, but i haven't really experienced anything much bigger than 30 b4...