Is TSE only supporting 1.4 shaders and above?

#1 Yep, same exact thing here. I have a Geforce4 Ti4200 and didn't want to upgrade for a while, but I have too now it seems.

I left TGE 1.3 for TSE(because a lot of the resources I added to my code didn't work in 1.3, so I thought, if I have to start from scratch might as well use TSE), but had to come back to TGE 1.2.

Anyone know of a decent 1.4 shader card?

#2 TSE supports 1.1 shaders and up. I've tested it on 2 cards.

#3 Never really thought about it as a 1.4 card can be gotten for under $40 now, but is there a plan to have fallbacks for non pixel shader cards? Like texture and lightmap only... no effects.

#4 Now that i think of it. The TSE car demo locks up on my laptop which is an ATI 9200. I need to look into that because i remember seeing some warning when it started up.

#5 TSE Supports 1.1+ shaders and above, but wether a shader will show up depends on the shaders themselves. Obviously some shaders can only work on 1.4+ or etc. TSE Also supports Fallbacks for older versions, so if you write a shader for 1.4 you can write fallbacks for 1.1, etc. TSE autodetects your shader generation so people with 1.1 get the "downgraded" fallback shader instead if they can't run a higher version.

However, these fallbacks need to be written manually of course, so in regards to the Car demo, there are no fallbacks because most of the effects shown off required 1.4 shaders or higher and couldn't be minimally duplicated in a 1.1 fallback so for those shaders all that would of been shown would of been a plain diffuse texture, so there was no point in putting them in. :-)

Hope that helps clear things up!

As for why the demo build you made gave you that error without having 1.4 shaders, Brian could probably explain that better than me. I'd just assume some code from the IGC demos slipped in by accident.

Keep in mind, by the time TSE is finished 1.4 shaders will probably be much more common.
God if you could see the secret stuff going on here, GDC is going to rule. :)

#6 Well i got my laptop working. It's an old Winbook J4 with the P4 2.6GHz cpu and a ATI Mobility 9000. The 9000 has 1.1 vertex shaders and 1.4 pixel shaders. My driver was *really* crusty... from back in 2003 and of course Winbook hasn't ever updated them and ATI does not provide drivers for laptops.

Well i found this nifty tool:

Patje's Mobility Modding

It modified the latest ATI Catalyst drivers so that it would allow themselves to be installed on my laptop. To my surprise it worked perfectly. I can now run both TSE demos on my laptop.

#7 This is my screw up. I modified gfxD3DDevice.cpp to complain if you have a card less than 1.4 pixel shaders for the coming Dojo demo. I accidentally checked it in :(. You can comment out that assert if you have a 1.1 pixel shader card and it should run fine for you.

#8 *sigh* I had a feeling, my poor G force 3 just doesn't have the shine it once did

#9 That's line 1155 in my version, thanks Brian. I can get to the demo now.

#10 I would recommend a Geforce 5200 card. Good shader 2.0 reference for under 150 bucks.
Shader 1.1 is obsolete.

#11 A Radeon 9500 or above actually would be much better than the Geforce FX series. (sorry nVIDIA - we love The 6000 series though!) They should be pretty cheap now.

#12 I'm running a Radeon 9200 on one of the machines here, and it runs the latest TSE car demo fine (ps 1.4)...

... but when i ran it on the machine with the GeForce 5200 (ps 2.0), the shader quality appeared to be much better... most noticeable with the bumpmapping shaders on the walls of the garage.

so, while those $40 ps 1.4 cards will work... the additional cost (not much more) of a ps 2.0 card would be well worth it.

--Mike

--Mike

#13 Yeah, the Radeon 9500+ cards are ps 2.0. I've been using a 9700 for a long time now and it's been great with everything.

#14 Based on the comments of people viewing the latest TSE dojo demo, the GeForce 5200 is not the card of choice for PS 2.0. Unfortunately Apple's new iMacs come standard with this card which will impact future games on the mac platform (imho).