Shadows

[Valdarham]

When playing X2 if I put the shadows on it lags like hell, WHY?
Here's what I got:
Pen 4 3.06GHz
GeForce FX 5800 Ultra
Creative SB Audigy (the latest one)
1024mb DDR
102 GB Hard Drive
XP
16 speed DVD Drive
16 speed DVD rewriter
All the latest drivers (is this the specs needed?)
So why can't I play with shadows on?

Please help I so want to play with shadows and as I got the lastest hardware on the market I would like the game to allow me SHADOWS!

[Avaktar]

Check the other threads around the forums, because there's a Beta version of an Nvidia driver that seems to be giving people better performance for the Nvidia cards, and less problems. Try running the game in a HIGHER resolution (1280x1024 for example) as some people believe the DX9 support may be optimized for higher resolutions within the GPU hardware.

Also check out the threads that talk about checking your DXDIAG and making sure everything is enabled properly. If it's not (like AGP support) you may have to update your motherboard drivers.

Poor loyal Nvidia customers - Nvidia didn't attend the DirectX 9 conferences until the very end, and ATI has a jump on the technology. Nvidia cheats the benchmark software with routines with hardware routines that see if 3DMark and various others are running, and replaces complex textures with lower quality maps so the card renders them faster, tricking the benchmarks. Go to www.tomshardware.com (and your own sources) and read up because I know this sounds unbelievable. I spent 3 days researching the cards before settling on the ATI Radeon 9800. NVidia right now is only beating ATI in DirectX7 and 8 methods, and not by much. There's some good graphics card discussion on http://www.mythicarealms.com/forums in the Off Topic forum as well, and actually some X2 discussion over there [/url]

[KakerMix]

The only reason (not really the only, but a big reason) why I chose an ATI card over Nvidia is because I don't like how Nvidia is portraying themselves. All these rumours about shady business practices (like cheating on 3d mark tests, WTF!) and the whole "The Way It's Ment to be Played"
really put me off.
So, I bought an ATI. At least ATI doesn't have their logo smashed all over every game on the planet.

I like rooting for the underdog.

[pjknibbs]

The only reason (not really the only, but a big reason) why I chose an ATI card over Nvidia is because I don't like how Nvidia is portraying themselves. All these rumours about shady business practices (like cheating on 3d mark tests, WTF!) and the whole "The Way It's Ment to be Played"
really put me off.

It actually wasn't so long ago that ATI were in trouble for cheating on 3DMark2001 by optimising their drivers specifically for that benchmark, you know--personally I think both companies are equally likely to cheat if they think they can gain a benchmark advantage (and provided they think they won't get caught, of course ).

[Avaktar]

It actually wasn't so long ago that ATI were in trouble for cheating on 3DMark2001 by optimising their drivers specifically for that benchmark, you know--personally I think both companies are equally likely to cheat if they think they can gain a benchmark advantage (and provided they think they won't get caught, of course ).

Argh! That bothers me. Good thing the one benchmark they haven't been able to cheat is when a demo is recorded by someone for the purpose of their own specific tests, because the cards can't detect this as a standard benchmark

I went with the ATI because of their participation in Microsoft's DirectX9 conferences from the beginning, and because NVidia is getting really arrogant. Nvidia assumed because they held the widest market share that everyone would start conforming to their standards, and they were wrong. In this case, I like the direction Microsoft is taking DirectX (from a user standpoint - I don't know how the game devs feel about coding for it), and working with hardware vendors to conform to some standard is excellent. It means the game industry has a common language for developing graphics and we as consumers are thus less susceptible to a hardware monopoly.

It won't be long before Nvidia catches up with ATI for DX9 performance, but since ATI's cards are kicking ass right now I figured I'd toss some cash their way. Seeing the "NVidia" logo starting to appear in a lot of game software lately is somewhat disturbing. I don't blame Egosoft however for taking the advertising money from Nvidia - if it helps lower the cost of my software.

(By the way, the $39.00 US price certainly was refreshing. I was expecting it to be the usual $49 or $59).

-Av

[Valdarham]

err...Hello done of this helps! I got the card made by the company in the intro (Nvidia)!! So I want to know why when I got their best card can I not use shadows with out it jumping!

[Mehrunes]

An awful lot of talking and not much problem solving.

err...Hello done of this helps! I got the card made by the company in the intro (Nvidia)!! So I want to know why when I got their best card can I not use shadows with out it jumping!

Go here - http://download.guru3d.com/detonator/ - and download the latest drivers (ForceWare (Detonator) version 53.03, it's halfway down the page). Uninstall your current drivers, reboot and then install these new ones. Shadows are extremely resource intensive, so it still might not run smoothly.

[gee]

I have no problems running with shadows on.

Intel Centrino 1.7 GHz
768MB RAM
Windows XP Pro
nVidia GeForce FX 5650 Go 128MB
v53.03 Forceware Drivers
Crappy sound chipset (laptop)
1024x768 res
Shadows on
Bump maps on
Particle effects on
AA off
Anisotropic Filtering on (8x)
All other nVidia driver options on 'best quality'