Poor Water/Underwater Graphics
 

Hi

Just reinstalled DW after a long absence.

Never had a problem before'but had my new rig for about a year and don't think i've tried DW on it previously.

I'm finding the water looks extremely poor and seems discoloured with blobs depending on the angle.
You can also see the blobbing on the underwater terrain.
Also you can see a pale blue/violet colour in the troughs of the waves in picture 1.
Also Notice picture 4 the blob above the submarine can just be made out.

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b205/osakajoe/555.jpg
http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b2...joe/Image4.jpg
http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b2...joe/Image5.jpg
http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b2...joe/Image3.jpg


My GC is a Nvidia 7900GT 512mb.
Tried a few of the latest gRaphics drivers with no improvement.

Any ideas ?

Thanx

P.S Can't reply to any posts or info till tomorrow night UK time. :cry:

I have this problem, it occurs only at night and seemed to start around the same time nvidia broke anti-aliasing for DW.

It's most noticeable if you're at periscope depth and look up from under the sub, it appears as if there are 100s of feet of water above you, instead of 67, very disconcerting.

I know no fix, other than to down date drivers a long way back.

This is normal look GFX cards which does not support dithering. DW only supports 16 bits screen mode (which sucks), but some cards can use dithering, which helps a lot. Older nVidia supported it (recent do not), and at least some ATI cards. Search the forum, there was some discussion about this several times.

DW has never supported Antialiasing nor Anisotropic filtering. The graphics engine is very very very old (16 bit graphics :down: ) and no new graphics card (DX10+ generation) either from ATI or Nvidia will render nicely the game.
As far as DX9 cards are concerned, ATI still had the hardware to enable dithering, so the quality you get is acceptable.
Nvidia for all intents and purposes starting with 79xx cards disabled completely dithering so rendering looks very poor indeed.
Unfortunately the user can't do anything about it, you just have to live with it.

Regardless of official support, it did USED to work very well, until nvidia broke it :(

Since it was never an official supported feature, Nvidia is not to blame.
Blame SCS that decided to reuse an already obsolete graphics engine in 2005 !!! when everybody else had been using 32 bit graphics for several years.

This happens to me all the time.

I never really thought much about it until the original poster mentioned it.

I just regarded it as "normal."

nVidia have no problems breaking old games in order to squeeze a few more frames out of newer games, I have a slew of games here that once used to work at launch, but are now graphically corrupted due to nvidias incompatible fiddling. I blame nvidia for this lousy compatibility and with good reason.

Loving DW, I just got it a couple of days ago. I used to play SC a very long time ago, its a shame about the nvidia problem. I did find if you turn off shadows and caustic effects it seems to help a little on the eyes.

I wouldn't call it nVidia problem. They simply dropped feature which is not needed for years. It's completely Sonalyst's fault. In fact I have not seen any other D3D game which does not allow 32 bit screen modes.

i have the same problem here with my nvdia 9500 gt. It makes the grafics look ever worse then they did on my old pc. Normally its the other way around. I guess the engine is so old that its just slowly dieing the newer pc,s get. Guess that shooting yourself in the foot huh? Oh well i guess scs dont seem to mind to much seen the support or addons they released for this title.

sorry double post

Well there is more to DW than just graphics. This is more true as the RA is finally approaching release date.
It would just be the icing on the cake if somehow the game textures could be converted on the fly to 32 bit textures.
Even if there is a performance penalty, I think all modern graphic cards should just get along with no problem we could get a game that at least renders nicely.

Is there a precedent for that, or are you just wishing for something that hasn't yet been done.

It has been done for Thief 2.

Here read the discussione : Thief2 & 8800_GTS/GTX, bad rendering/dithering

Goldorak,
Thats a great link, which really points the blame at Nvidia. When I played SC I had a older Nvidia card and never had this problem. Now I have a 9800M GTS and both sims show dithering. Its still a blast to play and I can still see the waterfall display:yeah:

Ok, I know that this is a strange way to fix this issue, but sometimes you have to think outside the box.

I fixed it by doing the following:

1) Installed Virtual PC

2) Installed Windows XP inside that VM. I used a XP cd that used a OEM key which I happened to have right on the case.

3) installed game to the virtual OS

Better graphics than the host machine (Vista 32 bit) with a 9xxx series Nvidia card. This is becuase the virtual machine virtual graphics card supports all the old formats. You can not play bleeding edge games, but it is generally more than adequate for older games.

BTW: I know have a older machine with a Nvidia 7XXX series card to play older games. This is not the only game that has issues with the newer Nvidia cards

Where do i get Virtual PC Bubblehead?

Thanx

You can download it from microsoft.com. Its completely free.

I'm curious how you managed to pull this off as Virtual PC has no support for D3D apps, unlike say, VMware.