Can BTS explain Voodoo incompatibility?

[pops]

I have a Banshee card which basically works but lacks some of the features people with other cards enjoy in this game...this is strange because this is the first game that has been incompatible with my card (and I play a LOT of 3D games...sports to sims etc)

......can you explain why this is a problem that is unfixable (yes I have the latest drivers and DX7)....

[Schrullenhaft]

I obviously can't speak for Charles on this issue, but I will tell you what I think I know about it.

It may be surprising to people just how "incomplete" many drivers are when it comes to fully supporting all of the features available in a particular API. I don't know if there are hardware reasons for some of this (sometimes there are), often the problem is driver support and the time available for their developement. Some manufacturers put the basics in and address performance concerns, but quite often don't go to all the lengths possible to make sure their drivers support all possibilities in a particular API (DirectX in this case).

This is something that some ATI chipset owners are seeing with CM and fog effects. The latest (and past) drivers have never been written to support fog-tables. Instead they support vertex fog (which isn't backwards compatible with a lot of older video cards). With this feature supported ATI dropped the requirement (I'm making an assumption here) for any other fog effects in DirectX. So they support one type of fog effect, but not all fog effects.

With the Voodoo Banshee, I don't know why it has a problem with CM's transparent, high-quality smoke. It may be the way that the smoke is animated that is throwing the Banshee drivers. This would suggest a problem with the Banshee drivers, which 3dfx probably isn't going to patch since CM's sales haven't hit over 200,000+ (and constitute a significant market share of "ill will" for those who did own a Banshee). I'm making a lot of negative assumptions for these graphics card developers, but it does come down to money for them. Waste too much time with a discontinued product and you won't get the profit margins your shareholders are expecting. It's a highly competitive industry that is seeing shorter than normal developement and life cycles of products and this is causing excessive weeding out of many manufacturers in this industry.

In order to "fix" this problem Charles would have to code up completely new routines for high quality smoke and fog. And even then there will probably still be video cards that are going to have a problem with supporting all of these effects.