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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2 103

Posted by simoniker from the gordon-forgot-to-put-contact-lenses-in dept.
Sevn writes "Apparently, there's a hardware anti-aliasing bug in many new graphics cards that's surfaced in relation to Half-Life2. The details are on a forum post at HalfLife2.net. It seems that many ATI cards will be able to work around the problem, but nVidia users may not be able to. Here is a link to the original X-bit Labs story." The X-Bit Labs article explains further, citing issues with "...Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing, a popular feature that dramatically improves image quality in games... This is a problem for any application that packs small textures into larger textures. The small textures will bleed into each other if you have multi-sample FSAA enabled [in DirectX 9.0]."
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NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2 More

NVidia Doesn't Play Nice With Half-Life 2

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  • The next time you pooh-pooh consoles... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @11:57AM (#6511994) Homepage
    Just remember: people buy consoles - and console games - because they know they'll work. In a few years, even, if they take good care of the hardware and not abuse the media. How many of your 10 year old games refuse to run on your current hardware? Your future hardware?

  • Easy fix (Score:5, Funny)

    by neosake ( 655724 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @11:58AM (#6512008) Homepage
    ...just rename the half-life2 executable to something else [slashdot.org]

  • Is this at all related... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HaloZero ( 610207 ) <protodeka@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @11:59AM (#6512018) Homepage
    ...or even a result of the aforementioned [slashdot.org] driver [slashdot.org] optimization [slashdot.org] hacking [slashdot.org]?

  • Wasn't Half Life 2 the game that was rumored to be an nVidia-only game? I thought nVidia wanted to do that to strike back at ATI but of course it didn't fall through.
    • Actually, it did fall through... hence the article. =P
    • "Wasn't Half Life 2 the game that was rumored to be an nVidia-only game?"

      Sure! Only NVidia chipsets will have this feature^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbug. And only Valve can exploit this functionality in its new HL2 game (until the usual copycats catch up).

      ATI users will just have to do without this specific rendering functionality or ditch their card and buy NVidia.

  • Round here, we call that a foot-shooting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Snowspinner ( 627098 ) <{ude.lfu} {ta} {dnaslihp}> on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:04PM (#6512068) Homepage
    It would be wise of Valve, I think, to put all necessary resources into getting a fix for this. Since it's probably a bad idea to release a game that doesn't play well with the most popular graphics card.
    • I think you meant "nvidia got caught with their pants down" rather than "valve got caught with their pants down"
    • It would be wise of Valve, I think, to put all necessary resources into getting a fix for this. Since it's probably a bad idea to release a game that doesn't play well with the most popular graphics card.

      I would think if nVidia wants me to buy their video card, then they should support the only game I have cared about buying in years. I will be buying a new system on the release of that game, and more and more it seems like I will be going with ATI. nVidia already was behind with the way they altered
      • Personally, I won't be buying a new system or even graphics card for any game in the near future, so until I see a fix, no HL2.

        Valve has a history of this crap with HL. They had a bug where player skins didn't show up correctly (in fact, not at all, the player would be completely white) on nVidia cards, which only showed up after one specific HL patch. Valve blamed it on nVidia for about a year, and then magically fixed it.

        Another, more recent, patch caused the game to crash if you tried to render it on a
        • Whether or not you are getting a new system, doesn't really matter. I don't think this is a major problem that prevents people from enjoying the game. Just people who need every drop of graphical love they can get will care. Sure, it makes things look a little btter...but most people tweak for performance, not looks (or at least find the happy medium). This is just one less variable you will have to worry about.
          • Yeah, after taking the time to read a few more things, it looks like something that wouldn't have an effect on me at all.

            That being said, it's just Half-Life, and while that statement may seem counter to what most gamers think of this title, it means that whether or not I buy the title probably has a lot more to do with how bored I am when I walk into a game store than anything else. I don't even use FSAA on any of the games I own, I'd rather just turn the resolution up if my card/CPU can handle it. I tend
        • Not saying you're wrong, but from what I understand each of those problems was a specific idiosyncracy in either the driver or the hardware. Since they were (respectively) for a company's whole line of cards, I think it was an issue with the way they programmed their drivers. Probably nVidia could have fixed the first problem (skins not showing up) with a driver update if Valve did it in an industry-standard sort of way. The problem comes with the fact that stuff comes out "optimized" for a particular vendo
          • Not saying you're wrong, but from what I understand each of those problems was a specific idiosyncracy in either the driver or the hardware. Since they were (respectively) for a company's whole line of cards, I think it was an issue with the way they programmed their drivers. Probably nVidia could have fixed the first problem (skins not showing up) with a driver update if Valve did it in an industry-standard sort of way.

            I agree to some degree, in that it *could* have been some issue with the video card d
      • Trust me, you're in the minority on this. I suspect my situation is much more common.

        I spent $3000 on a new computer in March. This will be the computer I use for the next 5-6 years, while I put myself through grad school.

        It has an nVidia graphics card.

        So, basically, I'm buying games that will support that equipment. Because I'm not going to blow a shitload of money on a new card.

        Valve decided to release a PC game. Knowing that many PCs use nVidia graphics cards. It is therefore their job to make their

    • Re:Round here, we call that a foot-shooting (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SD-VI ( 688382 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @01:49PM (#6513074)
      Actually, the most popular graphics card for high-end gaming right now is the ATi Radeon 9700 series. But I do agree with your point, and I think they will too; companies don't like losing profits.
    • The game plays just fine on the hardware with the exception of a setting that very few even hardcore gamers use. This is important to a few enthusiasts, most others will never know the problem existed.

  • Overblown (Score:4, Insightful)

    by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:11PM (#6512126) Homepage Journal
    So am I the only one who thought the original headline/article sounded like "NVidia won't work with HL2"? No, it just can't use FSAA. Whoopty do. Certainly a downer for us NVidia users, but I'm thinking the game will be worth it anyway.
    • Exactly, and it refers to a problem with DirectX9 based cards, so it may just be the FX line that has the (unfixable?) problem. There hasn't been enough information gathered to realize the extent of the issue.

      They say it has to do with HalfLife2 packing smaller textures into larger ones, and when multisample AA is turned on the textures bleed into each other.

      • Re:Overblown (Score:4, Informative)

        by addaon ( 41825 ) <(addaon+slashdot) (at) (gmail.com)> on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:49PM (#6512479)
        Right. Let's say you have four 256x256 textures... you can pack them into a single 512x512 texture, which is often convenient, especially when the textures tend to occur together. Now, when a graphics card does texture mapping, it sort of assumes that the portion of the texture it's painting on one triangle spills over onto the other faces of the polyhedron... that is, that it's wrapping the texture, in some way, around the polyhedron. One of the consequences of this assumption is what we're seeing here. In multisampling FSAA, you look at a set of points, not just the pixel center, to figure out what color to display in the pixel. In the center of a face, this works fine; the points are all in the desired pixel, all on the same face, and you get the correct effect. Towards the edge of a face, though, some of the points chosen may be past the edge of the texture boundry. If the texture wraps (that is, continues), it will be more or less the same color; we may see a tad of color from something that, strictly speaking, should be on the next face, but this is a non-issue. However, what if we're at the end of the texture? Normally this is detected and special-cased; either they wrap around to the far end of the texture or, more likely, they just throw out the given point. However, here, we're at the end of what the programmer thinks of as a texture, but not what the hardware thinks of as a texture... so it averages in a little bit of totally wrong coloring in the pixels at the edge of a polygon, under certain conditions. Solutions? Hardware side: Have the card only pick pixels within the polygon, which should therefore also be within the texture; the above describes only if you have some mismatch, like getting points from the far side of pixels that are part of the polygon on screen, but only partially inside the polygon in fact. Developer side: Don't pack textures.
        • Thanks for the explanation, I couldn't work out what the original article was on about.

          I'm still a bit confused though. When you're working out the colour towards the edge of the face surely you should start pulling in the colour from the next face (and it's texture) rather than parts of the texture for the current face that are outside the u,v's for that face - this is FullScreen AA after all. I guess I just don't understand multisampling FSAA.

          • Re:Overblown (Score:3, Informative)

            by addaon ( 41825 )
            You should. For reasons I don't fully comprehend, you don't. I suspect (having written and optimized a polygon-based renderer) that they're cheating a little here, which is far from rare (or inherently bad). Let's say an edge falls through the middle of the pixel. On the right hand side of that edge (say), the textures are well defined. On the left hand side, they're not. Now, how to we pick points for antialiasing? In the naive 4x model, we treat each pixel as four pixels, and things work fine. For each of
        • Ok, i unserstand what you are saying. And lets assume the packing is there for good (memory usage ) reason.

          Wouldnt be a simple workarround for the developer be to add a 1 pixel border arround the 256x256 texture that has the same color as the edge pixels? Ok i under stand that a 258x258 texture is not a nice number, but does the renderer really have a problem with this? are you bound to this magic numbers?

          (I am not a render engine programmer)

          • Must be magic numbers. We do multiplication through shifting, to find texture values at a given point... that is, on a 512x512 texture, pixel (17,41) is found as 17+(419), rather than 17+(41*512). The cards don't even have a multiplier in this location in the pipeline. Scaling the texture down to 254x254, and then adding a border, may work, and I can't imagine that there would be much of a quality difference. The actual value of the border pixels is an excersize for the reader. ;-) Note that the solution be

      • So this is a design flaw in DirectX 9? I suppose it must be since the article said it should be fixed in 9.1. It shouldn't be too surprising considering who writes the DirectX "standard."

        • It shouldn't be too surprising considering who writes the DirectX "standard."

          That's really funny. That was my attitude before I actually started using D3D to develop commercial AAA games. And then I realized that if I waited around for standardization of all of the extensions in Open/GL that I would never release a product. Did you know that multitexturing in Open/GL isn't officially part of the standard? That's a technique that virtually *every* 3-D game released today (and even release 2-3 years ago) u

  • Slightly OT but I can't get HL1 working with DirectX or OpenGL on my GeForce 4 with DirectX 8 installed.

    With DirectX set up, when hitting ESC to return to the menu I get a black screen. The options are there - but I can't see them or hope to click on them.

    With OpenGL I see no text, it comes out as a block of colour.

    I did a Google Groups search and the DirectX is a known problem (with no fix so it seems). But I'd like to go something better than Software rendering and I'm stuck with OpenGL - can I fix

    • With HL, your only real hope is the following set of steps, unless there's a known problem that's been addressed in another way (though this is usually the way to fix problems known and unknown):

      -Install the latest version of DirectX (yeah, 9 iirc, even though HL doesn't use it, there may be minor fixes to DX7 somewhere along the way)

      -Install the latest drivers for your video card (preferably not 'leaked' drivers, although in some cases leaked drivers fix some problems)

      -Make sure you're not overclocking
    • New nVidia drivers
      Upgrade to DX9
      BTW OpenGL runs 50% faster on all my systems and is less buggy.
    • Oh, and one other note:

      OpenGL rendering in HL is better than Direct3D rendering, so being 'stuck' with OpenGL is pretty much a non-issue. It's been so long since I dealt with the rendering options in that game that I didn't think about it until I hit submit on the last reply.

  • Amazing... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by sevensharpnine ( 231974 )
    A few days ago we had a story here about an interview on Gamespy with one of the Half-Life PR folks. In it, he stated:

    [...] For folks who want the ultimate experience, they'll want the latest ATI card, and the fastest processor available from AMD or Intel.

    Now the linked post states (w/r/t the anti-aliasing bug/feature):

    As for NVIDIA GeForce and GeForce FX-series, there are practically no chances to find a workaround, according to Valve."

    That's one hell of a coincidence. It seems like ATI

  • Pick one before posting please: (Score:4, Funny)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis@@@ubasics...com> on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:41PM (#6512418) Homepage Journal
    You can choose to talk about any of the following topics. Please stay on topic.

    • Nvidia is dead!
    • Serve's 'em right for tweaking their drivers!
    • Who uses FSAA anyway! My card doesn't even have it!
    • Valve should fix it
    • ATI RULZ FOOLZ
    • Will it still run on my Matrox Millenium?
    • My friend went back to the future and all he got me was a lousy GeForce HX 9600 Iridium, and it still has this FSAA bug!
    • How many software ''engineers'' does it take to build a buggy windows driver?
    • But... But... Nvidia is diety! Why does my world have to fall apart now, when duke nukem forever is so close!


    Thank you for your attention to these matters.

    -Adam

    "My captian... My Kin -rewind- THWAP! THWAP!" Die, boromir, DIE!

  • I doubt conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by quantax ( 12175 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @12:56PM (#6512553) Homepage
    For those who are saying that this is a move by Valve after saying how ATI was 'recommended' chip for HL2, do you seriously think Valve would want to alienate roughly 50% of their target population? Basically, Nvidia users experiencing a lack of a feature (albeit, realistically this is not going to impact anything at all gameplay wise and really can be gotten around by just running a higher res...) is not a 'power move' designed to pressure anyone. Think of the facts:

    1. All cards can play HL2 without issue (that we know of)
    2. FSAA works fine on ATI but fails due to issues on Nvidia.
    3. Why would Valve punish Nvidia in such a petty, and ultimately wasted way since Nvidia users can still play the game, just without FSAA...
    4. FSAA in no way alters the gameplay. In fact about 99% of the time I play w/ FSAA enabled on my R9700, I forget its even on, and vice-versa when its off.

    My conclusion is that the chances of this being deliberate are pretty damn small, since Nvidia users can still play the game just without a relatively minor graphical enhancement. I hope they come up with a fix, and lets give Valve a little bit of credit here... though I still want my damn TF2!

    • Except that HL2 doesn't work fine on ATI. Read the article. All it says is that ATI probably can develop a workaround in their drivers, whereas NVIDIA almost certainly can't. It remains to be seen how much of an authority whoever is claiming this is. I'll wait for official word from ATI and NVIDIA before worrying.
    • FSAA works fine on ATI but fails due to issues on Nvidia.

      Should be:
      FSAA does not work but could be fixed on ATI by a driver update. It can not be fixed on NV.

  • Improper use of textures (Score:5, Informative)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @01:29PM (#6512859) Homepage
    This isn't a new problem, this is a generally known limitation. If you place multiple textures onto one texture, you need to place a border area on them so that the mipmapping, interpolation, and anti-aliasing features work. This is because they use neighboring pixels for the smoothing. I bet it happens even with FSAA off, it just probably isn't as noticeable.

  • Uhh... (Score:2, Funny)

    by SD-VI ( 688382 )
    Why exactly would you enable full-screen antialiasing in Half-Life 2? "See, and if I set it to 8x, it's like PowerPoint with guns!"
  • FSAA will be disabled on the Xbox version then? I only played the original once or twice(because they cancelled the Mac version) and was looking forward to some Half Life finally.

  • Stock Drop but New Buys Coming (Score:4, Interesting)

    by felonious ( 636719 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2003 @02:55PM (#6513680) Journal
    This should affect Nvidia's stock price a bit. NVDA [yahoo.com] It looks like it's on it's way down again.

    It's pretty amazing how a game can change a companies p/l margins and stock values these days but gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry so it's no joke. If anything Nvidia will come out with a new and better card which I'm sure will be geared towards Valve's HL 2 engine and a surge in sales will follow. Nvidia seems to be on the same course as 3dFX was. 3DFX used to own the video card market but became complacent and had no forward vision. Nvidia came from no where and stole the market and bought 3DFX out. I wonder if ATI will do the same to Nvidia? WHat comes around goes around..

    HL 2 is a game that will probably be the biggest ever. I'm talking bigger than Q1/Q2/Q3, Bf1942, and even the original HL. I was never into HL but after the E3 movies I am. The big deal to me is a totally interactive environment. The old thinking or way of doing maps was to have a building made of a box covered with a flat texture. The texture consisted of windows, brick wood, etc.

    Now take HL 2 and you have a building with more intricate and detailed textures, with bump mapping (so I've heard), and you can shoot out windows, go into the building and knock over furnishings, hide behind them, throw them at other people, get a coke from a vending machine then blow it up and watch all the sodas fly out from the inside of the machine. I am only scratching the suface in my desciption.

    Another big deal is large scale maps with no visual loss of fps ala any quake engine game as well as others. Full facial animation, etc. I'm not sure if they have the body zone damage like SOF but I would think so. You can even duck under a running fan to lure an enemy into that if he doesn't duck it will chop off whatever bodie part isn't low enough.

    I wan't to buy this game more for just exploring and the interaction than the gameplay. Take Vice City...even though it was interactive most places were the equivalent of a flat sprite form the doom days. Imagine that game with full interactivity. being able to go into any building, area and having that environment be the equivalent to the real world, materials, physics, etc. and you have a game that is going to take the FPS genre to another level.

    Now all they have to do is take the gameplay to the next level...
    • Now take HL 2 and you have a building with more intricate and detailed textures, with bump mapping (so I've heard), and you can shoot out windows, go into the building and knock over furnishings, hide behind them, throw them at other people, get a coke from a vending machine then blow it up and watch all the sodas fly out from the inside of the machine. I am only scratching the suface in my desciption.

      None of that is revolutionary. Larger textures are pretty, but they're just textures. Bump mapping looks

  • I'm using a current Radeon card, along with two other friends too, and I frequently experience the blue screen of death or system freezes while playing almost ALL games to the point where they're barely playable. Even tuning down the settings to the lowest quality doesn't help, and frankly why should I have to do that as I bought a powerful card like this so I CAN max it out. It's not just me, my friends with ATI card's do too, and I suspect poor drivers as we've tried everything. While our friends with

    • I frequently experience the blue screen of death

      What makes you so sure that the 3D driver is the reason? In my personal (limited) experience, the motherboard and its darn AGP driver is far more likely to be the cause. At least if it's a VIA board ;-)

      • Yep, looked into the motherboard chipset drivers too...we all have different motherboard's and different archetecture's. I've even tried two different machines with different motherboards, still have problems. I'm currently running an Asus A7M266 with the actual AMD 761 chipset, I've grabbed all the latest drivers etc...tinkered with all the bios setting config's that might help. Nothing's solved these issues yet, ATI support tries to help but unfortunately haven't come up with a fix its sad partially be
    • Have you tried turning up the voltage of your AGP slot? My computer only became stable in games when I increased it from 1.5v to 1.7v
    • Interesting. I had a problem initially, but that was AGP 8x being unstable. Since I disabled 8x, I haven't had a single crash during a video game. None. I have been crash free for about 8 months on Windows XP. I would say that the ATI drivers are rock solid. For what its worth, I have a Radeon 9700 Pro, AMD 2600+ and ASUS A7N8X Deluxe.
  • Four possible solutions:

    1) Valve fixes HL2 so that it runs on NV.
    2) NV releases a major patch so that HL2 runs on their chips.
    3) Valve and NV cooperate and both work together to find a solution.
    4) Neither company bends, and NV users have to buy ATI (bleh) or sit and spin.

    Correct response: 3. Or am I wrong?

  • Gabe Newell's response (Score:2, Informative)

    by gedanken ( 24390 )
    http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=& threadid=3071 [halflife2.net]

    The gist: This isn't a big deal.
  • Seriously.

    They're confusing anti-aliasing textures (ie: making them smooth out instead of pixelate when up close) with FSAA (smoothing out the whole screen/scene, trying to reduce jaggedness, etc).

    These are totally different.

    Just read the response from Gabe that gedanken linked to:

    Gabe Newell's response [halflife2.net]

    ~Rayme
  • Gabe Newell has silenced the rumours about problems with the nVidia (non FX cards) on Halflife2.net this morning. Here's what he had to say about it:

    "Since people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue, I thought I'd update everyone.

    1) How bad is the problem?

    With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light maps from other polygons.

    This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Q
  • Sorry, but in response to all of you complaining about being "unable to play without FSAA" - am I the only one who is looking forward to HL2 for the gameplay? i thought the original HL was awesome because the gameplay rocked - the weapons were great, the enemies were cool, and the environment was excellent. I've been looking forward to someone creating similar work. (and, no, I haven't played Halo, Deus Ex, or whatever the other one is that people typically cite for these qualities, so I can't say that i

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