rec.autos.simulators

When using the latest Diamond drivers for the Stealth II S220, I could not
run N3/NL in D3D mode, and had to revert to software...

But when going to the latest reference drivers from Rendition, I can now get
into the (much prettier) D3D mode in N3/NL.  It runs almost as fast, and
I'll take a 2 FPS hit in most situations over ***graphics.  However...

The car textures, in both games, are reduced to VERY low resolution!!
Reminds me of NASCAR 1 (yes the FIRST ONE!) on my P90 with 8 MB RAM and a
2MB Diamond Stealth video card!!  Also, whenever there is more than two or
three cars in front that are actually having the texture drawn on them, the
framerate plummets from 27-30 to 15-20.  It must be the textures, since when
switching them off, no matter how many cars are shown, it goes back to 30.
However, not even with N1 on that P90 did I ever need/want to switch them
off!!  Is there a fix for this, tweaking in the video card control panel, or
what??

Also, why the heck doesn't Sierra offer a DLL (like Matrox did for the G200)
to put native Rendition support in?  I mean, they had it back in N99...

--
Kirk Lane


ICQ: 28171652
BRT #187

"Yeah you won't find me
I'm going MIA
Tonight I'm leaving
Going MIA
Getting lost in you again
Is better than being known"
                     -Foo Fighters, "MIA"

    Because Kirk, the poor Rendition chipset is dead.  Any company that
puts
resources into coding for a Rendition card is wasting their money.
While the
installed base of N2/N99/GPL users have a high number of Rendition
cards, the
total ammount of Redline products is miniscule compared to Nvidia and
3dfx.
  You have only 4 megs on your card, Herc Thriller3d users with 8 megs
have reported
troubles running N3.  It was designed for 16+megs of video ram.  You may
get
it to run, but only at very poor resolutions.
  For a while longer the Rendition will power GPL, but I think that will
be the last
sim EVER coded for native Rendition support.(even N99 was a partial
implementation)
While it is unfortunate that a card that started with such good
beginnings has become
passe`.  It's time to stop asking for support for the card and start
making choices about
which product you will purchase in the future, because soon there will
be racers out
there that will totally ***on 4 or 8 megs.  I loved the AA clean
crisp graphics in
ICR2, but I sure don't miss the weekly rebooting and resetting of screen
resoultions.
  Rendition may have been first, but the moment Id started using Opengl
for Quake, the
time for Redline began to run-out.
dave henrie

The Stealth II was a good card, but the most recent games run poorly, so it's
well on it's way to become obsolete.

But you still can play GPL with it on a low spec computer...

A buddy of mine is using this card with a Celery 550 (366 OC), and he gets 36
fps with 640x480 on the grid with 20 cars, and all graphics turned on.

The reason for GPL running well on it is that it was written for RRedline (as
well as Glide), and the fact that GPL isn't fill rate sensitive.

I am afraid you have to buy yourself a new card soon. The TNT stuff renders D3D
nicely, and very fast. And they're becoming cheap these days...

D3D is rather too heavy for those first/second generation cards.

---Asgeir---

Jeez...a Celery 550...and I thought my PII466 with a Rendition was rare!! :)

Gotta love cheap RAM that acts like PC133...

It's not a pressing issue - the PC was originally built for GPL only, the
main one has a G200/Voodoo2 combo...and a Celeron 450a :)

--
Kirk Lane


ICQ: 28171652
BRT #187

"Yeah you won't find me
I'm going MIA
Tonight I'm leaving
Going MIA
Getting lost in you again
Is better than being known"
                     -Foo Fighters, "MIA"