TheCycoONE, on 08 June 2011 - 08:30 AM, said:
Of course Plagman being an NVIDIA employee would have nothing to do with the engine running much better on NVIDIA hardware? I don't mean to say there's been any intentional malice on his side, just that he would be far more familiar with NVIDIA hardware and which calls to use and which to avoid. If an ATI employee had done most of the engine work we might have ended up in the opposite situation.
There are many other engines that have problems with ATI's OpenGL support. For example GZDoom had and may even now have problems with ATI cards. Another example is D2X-XL, though D2X-XL's developer mange after lots of hard work to fix many of them.
So, no it's not Plagman's fault that ATI has bad OpenGL support. It would special knowledge and experience with ATI cards for someone to make EDuke32's Polymer engine work in a satisfactory level. Or all the ATI users should ask from AMD/ATI's programmers to rework the OpenGL support in their drivers.
But even if you have an NVIDIA card, Polymer is still buggy and especially if you use the Polymer HRP. I have a Quad Core cpu @3.2GHz with a GeForce 9800 and Duke Nukem Eternity still crashes after a period of time. Even the latest dpcons cannot fix this crash. The same thing happens with a pure DukePlus 2.30 installation with Polymer HRP, it crashes after some period of time.
The visuals with the Polymer renderer enabled are awesome and Duke Nukem Eternity with the addition of DukePlus and Polymer HRP demonstrates the current awesome capabilities of EDuke32.
By the way, DeeperThought thanks for both WGR2 Siege Braker and War of Attrition. They are really awesome mods. I'm playing them in no-HRP mode and without polymer. In Attrition I noticed that when enabling polymer some areas in various levels are lagging a lot (if there are many source lights), even though I don't use HRP. It seems polymer is heavy even for the old 8-bit graphics