An update...

[R0M]

Hey Guys,
I guess you wanted to know what's been happening, well we've been very busy working on many things. First we got 2 games up on the Surround Gaming page and we added 4 more on the upcoming list. There was also a new patch released for Operation Flashpoint: Resistance which improves Surround Gaming support for it, so check it out. You can also buy the Operation Flashpoint GOTY which comes with all the expansion packs and they all support Surround Gaming with the same patch so you will have all 3 in 1 box We're also deep in the next drivers and so far i have been busy crushing every bug that you guys reported, so if you got any new ones in 1.02 now's the time to talk about it. Other things regarding a new apptimizer which adds and improve support for many games, stay tuned for that.

Ok now here's the surprise, so you got a Parhelia and you got one feature which everyone is talking about, yes you guessed it, Displacement Mapping. Well i'm happy to say that <a href="http://www.earthandbeyond.ea.com/">Earth & Beyond</a> is the first title to support Displacement Mapping on Parhelia. No you don't need DX9 to run it. An easy way to check for it, look at the geometry on planet surfaces, it doesn't pop up, why cos Displacement Mapping is turned on when you run it on Parhelia

Regards,

[3dfx]

Thanks for the update ROM m8 I just cant wait to get my hands on the next drivers. Oh and it is nice to see that Displacement mapping is getting some attention

[TdB]

Im a bit confused here.

how can they support a directx9 feature, without directx9?
the only answers i can imagine is that they have hardcoded a special parhelia-only path, that won´t work on other gpus that support displacement mapping, OR that they are "emulating" DM in the vertexshader, or both.

My own impression from ROM´s comment is that they have been using DM all the time (this can be emulated in dx8 vertex shaders), and that the game-content for landscapes has been made as displacement maps from the beginng of the game development. And that they are using parhelia-specific "depth adaptive tesselation"(to avoid polygon-"popping") through some non-standard parhelia-only API calls.

will this work on a potential non-parhelia "DAT" and "DM" capable card?

why cos Displacement Mapping is turned on when you run it on Parhelia

I thought you couldn´t just "turn on" DM, because it is a data-type, the content creators have to deal with, and not an operation/method. It sounds to me, that you are talking about "turning on" depth adaptive tesselation, for already made DM.

[Joel]

I hate Earth & Beyond because it has no single player option and from what I can tell you also have to use their servers. :-((

Joel

[TdB]

well, what would you expect from an mmorpg.

[Tony Ostinato]

I still play allegiance, in my opinion its the ONLY online space combat game.

[DGhost]

TDB - the Parhelia drivers support Displacement Mapping in DX8 through a Matrox made extension to it. That means that as of right now DM is gonna be a Parhelia only technology. that being said, when DX9 comes out i'm sure Westwood will release an update that supports DX9 DM.

as far as using it in game.. dunno.. but i know that the Quake3 engine allows something similar to displacement maps to be used in it, without hardware acceleration. its not hard to enable for terrain in engine. they might have just hardware accelerated it. or they could have done something else. who knows.