Good point Boomy. Such reflections can be seen if the car lies still in the middle of a lake. Otherwise the reflection is distorted by the tarmac surface. Personal oppinion: the original reflections look better.by maniak - Grand Prix 4
To JC (it isn't Denton, is it? With great sorrow I have to tell you that I don't understand why you laugh so hard I worked for nvidia (actually I am one of its founders - of course I didn't tell my real age in the FBI thread) and when I got them up the hill (did I mention I was CEO, CTO, CFO and in the later stages President of the Board?) I just switched to Ati. I worked for thby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Earth to seemsnice and Morbid! Maybe you should both take it easy. Even if I hate to play the moderator role, as I am the adept of a very relaxed "laissez faire", please try to stick to the theme of this thread. Some of your arguments are valid and I intend to keep them in my final conclusion to this saga. But most of it is just bitter talking. Morbid must have been pissed off when heby maniak - Grand Prix 4
I would say that each man payed 9,6(6) $, but who am I to argue anywayby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Alan, your post is partly true. While there is some truth in the relation Amount of Memory/Resolution, actually memory matters only as far as the frame buffer is concerned. Logically, the higher resolution, the more memory is needed to store the ALREADY rendered frames. All 3D accelerators store pre-rendered frames in the frame buffer, which are used to smooth the animation. Usually the gfx cardby maniak - Grand Prix 4
No smilies, as you can noticeby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Cai, Your Excelency, your presence in this thread is gives it a whole new meaning, and makes us all happy that we, the mortals, have the great opportunity to share our thoughts with a personality of the highest rank. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Let me assure you of our highest consideration and non-dissimulated respect. Yours trully and sincerelly,by maniak - Grand Prix 4
Morbid has a point. This thread has exceeded its scope. Even if I personally enjoy the philosophycal approach of Morbid and I agree with the "suspended disbelief", still, this is out of what we originally intended. I didn't start this thread to justify one's preferences. The reason was to identify, in a rational manner, the pluses and minuses of the physical engines of f12k2by maniak - Grand Prix 4
The "static" environmental mapping GP4 has is actually just Environmental Mapping. This means that only one texture is "reflected" at a given moment. GP4 has two sequential environmental textures, which are quite different, giving that violent change of reflection when passing from one to the other. To jeh: don't worry, the "dynamic" setting is quite hungry andby maniak - Grand Prix 4
As far as I know, HSR is more of a software workaround rather than hardware feature, but you could say they are similar, to some extent. I remember the days in which everybody was so pissed off because nvidia would not release a driver with HSR support, as 3dfx was.by maniak - Grand Prix 4
Good thinking, but tell me again, why don't F1 cars screech when loosing grip?by maniak - Grand Prix 4
Well, if you want a more detailed description you can check www. tomshardware.com , but basically this is how it goes: All the 3d accelerators from the past (by past I mean anything before PowerVR Kyro, nvidia GF3 and ATi Radeon) inherited a rather unefficient rendering technology. The steps, in general terms, were these: 1) wireframe generation (vertices, triangle setup etc.) - build the 3D woby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Anandtech just put up a review about gfx chipsets benchmarked in UT2003. I don't know how much RAM Cai's board has, but a Radeon LE 128MB scored about 120 FPS, while GF4MX 460 scored a little over 100. There is some difference, but what's the price for each board? Of course I'm not talking about Cai's bargainby maniak - Grand Prix 4
qwerty, are you a proud radeon8500 owner?by maniak - Grand Prix 4
In theory the answer will be Yes. But in practice..., well you know the saying "We're good at theory, but the practice kills us!"by maniak - Grand Prix 4
Good point Alan. Radeon has early Z comparison, so it would seem logical.by maniak - Grand Prix 4
In my oppinion it shouldn't happen like that. I guess is has to do with the optimisation of the graphics engine. Normally, and it happened like this since GP2, Monaco should be one of the hungriest tracks of all because of the complicated graphics. Regarding the crowds, you could be right, but still, the crowd animation is rather simplistic, therefore I can't see why it would consume mby maniak - Grand Prix 4
You're right. The terms under/over modelling could be misleading. That's why I prefered "alter". Driving aids could solve your problem, but only if they are numerous enough. EA did a good job by including a larger number of aids, but still the car dances all around the track. On the other hand, the aids GP4 has for the players are only the essential ones. The only one that maby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Recommending settings could be a risky job, I might lose my hat Basic guidelines: Try to keep the framerate above 25 FPS. Otherwise the racing experience will suffer. I would recommend to keep the texture filtering to Bilinear (either edit the .cfg file from GP, but I can't help you here) or adjust it in the gfx card drivers, if possible. Texture quality might need to be downgraded becauby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Environmental mapping is a feature that adds other textures to the objects in order to obtain the glossy look. It is a rather old technique, but gives nice results. In the literature there in no such thing as "static" envmapping. However, as a convention, it works. The "dynamic" environmetal mapping is actually called Cube Mapping, and it involves a great deal of calculationsby maniak - Grand Prix 4
To answer Ronnie: I guess we were talking about slightly different notions. I understand your arguments and I pretty much agree with them. However, I think that the sims are built having realistic models at the basis, but slightly modified in order to compensate the lack of information the gamer/driver experiences. I will give you an example: If the car slides to the side, in real life you willby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Texture sharpness is a little more complicated than geometry. It involves many aspects that need to be covered. 1) texture itself - it is a picture of various resolutions that is applied on an object to give it "life". The quality of the texture is given by a number of factors: game producers, gfx card texture capability etc. 2) texture filtering - it is a method of eliminating the piby maniak - Grand Prix 4
The number of poligons you see should depend on the distance the object is from the camera. This is called Geometry LOD (Level of Detail). However, the algorythm for GeLOD is not always well implemented. It usually creates a bad effect by jumping from one LOD to another, instead of smooth transition. About the number of objects on the track I think there is another setting called "Tracksideby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Why don't you try it? In general, the geometry detail refers to the number of poligons used to represent a certain shape. The more poligons used, the closer to the real shape you'll get. However, this has impact over the performance of the game because more calculations are needed for Transforming and Lighting that particular shape.by maniak - Grand Prix 4
Vader, you're the Unforgivenby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Good post Tony! You're right in spot. There are fans on each side and they will be hard to convince that the other one is better. However, this should not prevent us to try and find rational arguments (you know, better than "that game sucks because it sucks" I think that people who wrote in this thread (even myself, every now and then came with solid arguments. One way or the oby maniak - Grand Prix 4
I would like to comment a little about "what you see on TV". Morbid had a good argument by saying that if you judge a simulation model by what you see on TV you are doing a reversed analysis, from effect to cause, which can lead you to erroneous conclusions. In theory I fully agree with Morbid. However, from a practical view point, I think that the previous statement is not good enoughby maniak - Grand Prix 4
Let's force a preliminary conclusion here: 1) The more parameters a physics engine has, the better. It's only logical, because you can build more mathematical functions and therefore the chances of getting closer to the reality are higher. 2) Even if there are more parameters and more functions, this does not necessarily mean that the model is accurate. If the functions are wrong (morby maniak - Grand Prix 4