Hi, Ive recently changed pc, from a xp1800 with a Ge3, to a xp2800 with a Hercules 9800 pro. SW:Kotor looked very nice on the Ge3 (albeit it ran slow and I couldnt use AA etc!)
After upgrading I went back to playing it, and it looks nowhere near as good on the 9800 as it did on the old Ge3 card!, shiny surfaces etc look far duller and cruder, bloom/flare effects off reflective surfaces have all but gone.
Does anyone know what the possible cause is?, I assume it may be that the game was written for Nvidia specific opengl extensions(with the game being designed for Xbox), but im not sure, if so is there a work around or tweak that could replicate the effects on the ATI card? - I freely admit I havent got a clue when it comes to opengl etc.
Also a friend told me that ATI cards didnt natively support Opengl and cited this as the issue, this has confused me a bit - could someone clarify what this means by ‘native’, they clearly do support opengl otherwise the game wouldnt run!.
I have tried various configs and have reinstalled the game patched it etc.
I have to admit I never played this game.
When I compare the image quality of certain games between an Radeon and a NVidia card I mostlikley favor the ATI one (there are some exceptions to the rule).
However there may be some games that use Nvidia extensions but dont use the ATI extensions, of course the game will look better on Nvidia’s card’s then on the ATI ones.
The tide is turning however.
To say that ATI doesnt support “native” OpenGL is wrong. In fact current ATI drivers already support the opengl shading language (GLSLANG) which Nvidia doesnt support yet.
ATI’s OpenGL drivers used to be quiet buggy in the past but they put alot of effort to make them at least as good as the Nvidia drivers (and they surpassed them in most areas).
Thanks calrifying, Overall I too favour the radeons image quality, in fact this is the only instance so far when it has been vice versa - its a shame they didnt optimise Kotor for both cards rather than use only Nvidia extensions, as the difference is quite profound.