ATI's TRUFORM technology?

[Mr. T]

How many of the current games support this feature anyway?
Don't get me wrong here, i think Truform is fantastic, and hopefully gets full support for all new games to come? :confused:

[Kruno]

Who knows and who cares. I still play DOS games with my R300.

[Mr. T]

Originally posted by K.I.L.E.R
Who knows and who cares. I still play DOS games with my R300.

What informative reply that was?:p

[Hanners]

Originally posted by Mr. T
How many of the current games support this feature anyway?
Don't get me wrong here, i think Truform is fantastic, and hopefully gets full support for all new games to come? :confused:

There are a hanful, but not that many - Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament 2003 are the most notable.

I don't think we'll be seeing any great adoption of Truform now, for a few reasons:

[list=a]
R3x0 chips don't fully support Truform in hardware, so quite a bit of the work is offloaded to the CPU, slowing things down more
Some modern game engines (in other words - Doom III) can't use Truform as it is incompatible with their lightning/shadowing techniques.
Better ways of doing this kind of work will start appearing soon in future generations of hardware.
[/list=a]

[T-Spoon]

These games support TruForm according to ATi:

Command & Conquer: Renegade
Deadly Toonz
Earth and Beyond
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (using FPS Optimizer)
Half Life
Half Life: Counter Strike
Madden 2003
Myth 3
Neverwinter Nights
New World Order
Rainbow Six: Raven Shield (on by default)
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Serious Sam
Serious Sam: 2nd Encounter
Soul Reaver 2
Star Wars Galaxies Online
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Stokerider
Team Fortress Classic
Unreal Tournament 2003

I only play Command & Conquer: Renegade, New World Order, Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. It looks cool in all those games. :cool:

[saturnotaku]

Ah yes, and I remember when many an ATI folk were saying how Truform was going to be the greatest thing ever and how just about every new game was going to support it. The times, how they've a changed.

[GlowStick]

Yeah, Truform works pritty good, accept for shadows, then it goes down the poooper, and shadows are all the rage now a days.

Even EverQuest 2 is gonna have VERY realistic shadows. And oviously doom III

[John Reynolds]

Originally posted by saturnotaku
Ah yes, and I remember when many an ATI folk were saying how Truform was going to be the greatest thing ever and how just about every new game was going to support it. The times, how they've a changed.

Fanboys always do that when their preferred company has technology its competition lacks. I remember the halcyon T&L claims of late '99 with amusement.

[The Baron]

Meh. Good idea in theory, didn't work out in practice.

Now, if there was a Truform setting that was similar to AA and could be used in every game (well, almost every game--no Doom 3 or stuff like that, but all old games) and really worked... Hello, Huge Success!

[GlowStick]

Originally posted by The Baron
Meh. Good idea in theory, didn't work out in practice.

Now, if there was a Truform setting that was similar to AA and could be used in every game (well, almost every game--no Doom 3 or stuff like that, but all old games) and really worked... Hello, Huge Success!

Truform wasent that hard (to programmers) to implment. The programmers at CroTeam (made serious sam series) said they did it in like less than a day or something.

[The Baron]

Originally posted by GlowStick
Truform wasent that hard (to programmers) to implment. The programmers at CroTeam (made serious sam series) said they did it in like less than a day or something.
You still had to implement it. It's for something that most of the market doesn't support. If AA support had to manually be added to games, you wouldn't see it in most things.

[GlowStick]

Originally posted by The Baron
You still had to implement it. It's for something that most of the market doesn't support. If AA support had to manually be added to games, you wouldn't see it in most things.

Hm good point, i guess most games that wernt in development at the time would not get it implemnted then.

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by The Baron
You still had to implement it. It's for something that most of the market doesn't support. If AA support had to manually be added to games, you wouldn't see it in most things.

Exactly. And there is a difference between implementing something and doing it well. For Serious Sam Truform seemed more of an afterthought and I think support was even added via a patch (though I could be wrong there). And in a lot of cases it didn't work too well to begin with - models that looked like balloons and so forth.

[walkndude]

Anyone know how to enable truform in jk2 ?

I've checked it out with castle wolfenstein(not much of a difference) and morrowind(noticeable difference but horrible performance hit on a 9800pro)...

Just dont want to re-install wolfenstein to see which opengl extension is added in the config when tru-form is selected in the menu(assuming its the same jk2).

[John Reynolds]

One notable thing is that TRUFORM is no longer supported in R3xx hardware. Throws the workload at your CPU.

[digitalwanderer]

I believe the reason that ATi abandoned truform is because they were able to make such a quantum leap in AA speed with the R3xx series. Truform was made to help eliminate jaggies, but AA does it better and the R3xx series rocks at it with speed & image quality.

I know it ain't exactly right of them to abandon it, but I do believe that's their reasoning.

[T-Spoon]

Originally posted by digitalwanderer
Truform was made to help eliminate jaggies, but AA does it better and the R3xx series rocks at it with speed & image quality.

TruForm and eliminating jaggies? :confused: I thought TruForm was a way of making blocky figures smoother? It's a Higher Order Surfaces (which 'eliminating jaggies' isn't) by way of N-Patches.

I think I read somewhere that TruForm was just a cross-over until the GPU's were strong enough to pump out high numbers of polygons, instead of 'artificially' inserting them like TruForm does. Those extra triangles you need for those smooth and round figures/faces/characters need a lot of bandwidth and Radeon8500 just didn't have that much bandwidth to begin with. So they came up with TruForm, which converts low poly 3D models into smoother high poly versions. Something like polybump does in the Cry Engine of Far Cry.

So when R300 came around, there was actually no need for hardware TruForm anymore, since it had enough raw power and bandwidth to produce those extra polygons by itself. Hence they removed the hardware TruForm part to reduce transistorcount.

Or am I now completely wrong? :confused:

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by digitalwanderer
I believe the reason that ATi abandoned truform is because they were able to make such a quantum leap in AA speed with the R3xx series. Truform was made to help eliminate jaggies, but AA does it better and the R3xx series rocks at it with speed & image quality.

I know it ain't exactly right of them to abandon it, but I do believe that's their reasoning.

Truform has absolutely nothing to do with removing jaggies. Truform creates a less blocky, more rounded model. There is no less need for Truform today...other than the fact that games are using more polygons on their own. Of course, we can still see that models in Doom3 could use more polygons. You can always use more polygons though :p

[GlowStick]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
Truform has absolutely nothing to do with removing jaggies. Truform creates a less blocky, more rounded model. There is no less need for Truform today...other than the fact that games are using more polygons on their own. Of course, we can still see that models in Doom3 could use more polygons. You can always use more polygons though :p

vavle claims their half life 2 models are only possible though shaders, they said even if they had more poloys they can only go so far, witch i thought they were kinda bsing but who knows!

[Miksu]

Now you can use Truform when playing good old QW. http://www.fuhquake.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1378

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by GlowStick
vavle claims their half life 2 models are only possible though shaders, they said even if they had more poloys they can only go so far, witch i thought they were kinda bsing but who knows!

How can a TNT2 run HL2 if the models are only possible through shaders?

[GlowStick]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
How can a TNT2 run HL2 if the models are only possible through shaders?

Because of their amazing 'scaleability'

The models that they showed on the 9800pro used shaders, and their claim was they need more shader power to make better models, they dont want more polys.

But amazenly their models can drop back probly what HL looks like!

[Hanners]

Originally posted by saturnotaku
Ah yes, and I remember when many an ATI folk were saying how Truform was going to be the greatest thing ever and how just about every new game was going to support it. The times, how they've a changed.

Well, it was a great idea at the time. But, without any support from other IHVs (nVidia even removed their support for N-Patches from their drivers because of 'compatibility issues' with Truform games), along with the fact that other parts of the hardware and technology have moved on so fast, it became redundant very quickly.

[Clockwork]

Originally posted by Hanners
Well, it was a great idea at the time. But, without any support from other IHVs (nVidia even removed their support for N-Patches from their drivers because of 'compatibility issues' with Truform games), along with the fact that other parts of the hardware and technology have moved on so fast, it became redundant very quickly.

Actually it was support for rt-patches in their drivers. It conflicted with N-patches/truform. But yeah, that's pretty much what happened.

[muzz]

Originally posted by Hanners
Well, it was a great idea at the time. But, without any support from other IHVs (nVidia even removed their support for N-Patches from their drivers because of 'compatibility issues' with Truform games), along with the fact that other parts of the hardware and technology have moved on so fast, it became redundant very quickly.
Remember the rather LARGE hit NV took with that implementation..........