Sad truth about hardware limitations
Sad truth about hardware limitations
I recently found that my poor GeForce4 MX 440 can't handle new programable shaders, so all the state-of-art graphic features - like real-time bump mapping - are off for me till I upgrade. That's both sad and funny, for when I saw specular mapping in "House of shadows" I mistook it for bump mapping. Not to mention I could not run demo of "Silent hill 3" I downloaded from Gamespot. C'est la vie...
the Geforce MX 440 is still an alright card considering it's age, also you can get it to do normal maps, however it can't do EMBM bumpmaps, EMBM is what we use for world geometry, but no need to worry as Wxb1 is working on Normal map support for worlds, so eventually you'll be able to have fully normalmapped games,
as for shaders it supports some older type shader but nothing to flashy like newer ones like heat waves seen in Doom3 / halflife 2 sort of stuff,
don't be to worried about the MMX 440 as it is still good for making games with as you never need to worry about being to graphical technical, there is a down side to having a "beefy" video card is that while you can have nine billion polys on a screen, it also means users must also have the same system requirements.......
I use to own one of these before i upgraded my system, and had no trouble with it for about seven years, it still would be ok, it's just i upgraded.
as for shaders it supports some older type shader but nothing to flashy like newer ones like heat waves seen in Doom3 / halflife 2 sort of stuff,
don't be to worried about the MMX 440 as it is still good for making games with as you never need to worry about being to graphical technical, there is a down side to having a "beefy" video card is that while you can have nine billion polys on a screen, it also means users must also have the same system requirements.......
I use to own one of these before i upgraded my system, and had no trouble with it for about seven years, it still would be ok, it's just i upgraded.
Yeah if I recall the GeForce4 MX 440 is actually a GeForce2 with added memory and newer programming. Even the GeForce3 series smokes it, but it does alright for a cheap card.
Or at least it did 3 years ago. Even then it wasn't up to par with the upper end cards. Nowadays I can imagine it's limitations would be even more noticable.
Or at least it did 3 years ago. Even then it wasn't up to par with the upper end cards. Nowadays I can imagine it's limitations would be even more noticable.
Fear not the textures for the almighty stylus is with thee - Book of Zen
Yup. What's makes this all even more sad is that I recently got my impatient hands on Irrlicht - only to find I'm unable to test most advanced features of the engine (like parallax mapping) due to aforementioned card problems. Irrlicht itself, however, works fine... Writing a simple app with FPS-like controls proved matter of merely 53 lines of code! The engine's only drawback is lack of integrated environment - which makes it necessary for the aspiring developer to code all the required tools by himself. True, the maps can be easily done with either GTKRadiant or Deled, but when we're talking about game, we're not talking about sightseeing tours in deserted, lifeless environments (unless it's "Myst" or one of its clones) - we're talking about the entities player can interact with, for instance, and they have to be placed on the map with use of editor - most favorably one written with the game we're developing in mind. The other only drawback of Irrlicht is that it's primarily a rendering engine - so if you want physics, sound, logic etc. you have to either rely on external libraries or write the stuff yourself. That's where RF wins over other open-source engines - it's fast.