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Stealth II S220 + Renditon Reference Drivers = D3D in N3/NL, but...

4 posts by 3 people · 01 Dec 1999 - 02 Dec 1999

Kirk Lane 01 Dec 1999#506635
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"
Dave Henrie 02 Dec 1999#506902
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
Quoted text (34 lines)> 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"
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---
Kirk Lane 02 Dec 1999#506904
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"

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