I revised my Opalis-demo!!! Now it runs with nVidia Detonator 5.22 and 5.33 drivers (I figured out some problems with these drivers myself, so it was rather easy to fix them.) The new version is available at: http://www.oe.uni-duisburg.de/Persons/Schneider/Opalis.zip
I hope, more people are now able to enjoy the show.
P.S.: Spread the demo to everybody you know…
…and…
… NO it’s NO virus/trojan/worm/bug/bird/dog
In fact I was even considering using it as a benchmark. IMO it is a good quality bench. What I mean by quality bench is that you con see on the screen wether the openGL is fully supported or not just by watching your demo.
Some exemples are :
-Using matrox G400 openGL the final sequence with blurbs is messy.
-On some cards, the light in the “light tunnel” will look wether as a ray wether as a sucession of balls of light.
-The infinite transparent cube will make an ati beg for grace.
But before I use it I think it seems only fair I ask your permission.
By the way if you could tell me what openGL functions you use in what parts that would be helpfull. (But I will understand if you prefer not to)
Oh I almost forgot : This really is a great demo and I really enjoyed watching it.
I had a lot of wireframing artifacts on the screen throughout the entire demo. Not everything was wireframed, just most of the active stuff. Notably, the meteor scene with the sun (or whatever it was), the transparency flare around the ball was completely wireframed as the texcolors went through it. Also, I had a bunch of shearing artifacts, especially on the text scenes.
Mind you, the 3DLabs is my primary video card because its the one I develop OpenGL on. Thats the one I had the problems with. I just ran it on the Voodoo3 and it runs fine, but a hell of a lot slower. Anyways, the 3DLabs card is a workstation-style card, so its OpenGL 1.2 standard, etc.
Siwko: I don’t know, where it comes from. I use only GL_QUADS in the text scenes and and GL_QUAD_STRIPs in a compiled display list in the meteor part. I see those wireframe artifacts if WinNT 4.0 switches to software rendering (window too big at 32bit), but I can’t control it.
kha: could you be more precise, what you want to benchmark (I don’t understand french, so your homepange says little to me). I don’t want to publish the whole source but I can tell you, which techniques I have used. For now: the only extension I used is GL_BGRA_EXT and GL_BGR_EXT for setting up textures. It would be nice, if you email me the benchmark results. I would like to know, on which cards my demo runs how well (a credit would also be nice).
siwko : Your card is OpenGL 1.2 but win2K is not AFAIK. Furthermore I heard (bash me if I am wrong) that the oxygen used DirectDraw for screen display, but I am not very sure about this one…
Your problem might also come form the Voodoo3. Marc said he was using big textures so maybe your OpenGL is set to fall back into software for everything regarding textures bigger than 256x256. Again pure speculation here.
When you say the Oxygen is primary is it bios setting or windows setting or both ? On the site of 3D Labs they report some problem concerning using another card with the oxygen. The bug seems to have been fixed with the drivers of march 2000. Is it the driver you are currently using ?
Marc : Of course you will have the entire credit for the demo. It was so obvious to me that I did not even mention it (guess I was a little stupid on that point…)
I would like to use your demo like a quality bench. As I said in my first post there are lots of graphics differences from a cart to another. Some are bugs (Matrox display of the blurb) other are just driver-ignore (ie the driver declare to have a functionnality but does not implement it, it just do nothing.)
One funny thing about driver-ignore is about the first release of your demo in the advanced coding zone : your demo would run much faster on an ati rage pro (which declares polygon smooth but does not implement) than on a GeForce with the latest drivers.
The problem is that today many group tends to make drivers that would run Quake 3 openGL as fast as possible. This is not a bad thing in theory but in practice they tend to remove thing that were working fine and replace them by driver-ignore. Ati and Nvidia seems to run in those a lot.
I like your demo because the differences are obvious. What is the point of gaining 10fps if the quality of the display falls.
Kha
[This message has been edited by kha (edited 08-01-2000).]