New 3dfx Beta drivers have HSR for OpenGL!

[Guest]

From over on the 3dfxgamers forum, it appears that 3dfx has included hidden surface removal (HSR) in their most recent beta drivers. It requires a registry tweak or a bat file to turn this stuff on for now, but some guys are reporting great results. There are 4 different levels of HSR with 1 being conservative and 4 being the most aggresive.

here are some numbers from Sharkfood:

Just off the top. Q3, 1024x768x32, all settings maxed. demo001
HSR=0, 76.7 fps
HSR=1, 91.2 fps
HSR=2, 104.6 fps
HSR=3, 108.7 fps
HSR=4, 109.1 fps


Please note that there were some artifacts with the HSR=4 setting.

Now the big questions become: 1) When will HSR be incorporated into the D3D drivers? 2) Does this HSR implementation use SSE and/or 3DNow!? 3) How does this scale across different CPUs, 4) When will 3dfx finalize these puppies and make them the official drivers?

 

[Guest]

It's quite interesting to see this function added into V5 driver, but I just read Riva Station's short review.(Saw it on Anandtech)It indicated that HSR setting above 1 was kind of unplayable in higher resolution. In the 3dfxgamers support pages, people seem to take a bit of effort to get this undocumented feature to work properly. I really hope 3dfx can improve this nice feature further in future driver, make it a real boost but not a (if so) compromise.

 

[Guest]

Agreed. They've definitely got some kinks to work out with the driver, but it looks promising.

As it is now, people have to do registry tweaks to get the HSR part of the beta driver to work. It's pretty obvious that this is an early beta feature that 3dfx really didn't intend for general use yet. It will get better. If it doesn't, these will never be certified drivers and I doubt 3dfx would be pursuing this path if it wasn't doable.