3DAnalyzer runs Reef Demo on non Matrox hardware now!

[Paddy]

Its runs fine and smoothly on mine.

How much nicer than this is it supposed to be?

[Paddy]

With HW TnL caps emulated it did look nicer. The artifacts on some of the more reflective fish disappeared. However it did not look that much nicer...

I am trying to decide if it is worth upgrading my 8500. I am happy with the FPS i am getting now... but if there is a huge difference in image quality, then i might be persuaded...

[3dfx]

What you have to remember Paddy is that the Reef demo was not designed for a Radeon. It was made for and optimised for the Parhelia so of course it is going to look a lot better. In any case if you are looking to improve on your existing speed, well the Parhelia might not be the right choice. Though if you want to run the reef demo how it was meant to be run and you want better 2d go for Parhelia.

[Snake-Eyes]

Thanks for the tip about 3DAnalyzer. It runs perfectly well on my 9700Pro, with no artifacts that I can see whatsoever (using the latest released drivers from ATI). After ticking that box for the fix, I can even run the demo WITHOUT loading 3DAnalyzer. (Note: I don't know if the first run with 3DAnalyzer 'fixed' something in the demo that lets me do this afterwards without 3DAnalyzer or not- ie. I used 3DAnalyzer to fix it AND to run it on my first attempt, and subsequently out of curiousity tried the fish demo by itself, with the same results.)

The only thing that I can't do, and it was expected that I wouldn't be able to do, is to expand the fish demo over two displays. The demo appears to be hardcoded for two resolutions- 1 that corresponds to a single display (common to all video cards now), and one specifically for the triple-head surround gaming mode of Parhelia. I looked in the directories for the fish demo to see if I could find a file that would allow me to manually add a resolution equivalent to only 2 displays, but since I didn't find any, I'm guessing it's just not possible. Not that it wouldn't be cool to see a bit more of what's happening outside the main viewing area on a single monitor. (for example, if I recall correctly, the shark has a fish in its mouth in one screenie I saw taken by someone with a Parhelia).

[GNEP]

Is it me or do Paddy's pics look a little less "shiny" than on the P? (It's a while since I have run it...)

Plus, do the seahorses look all bumpy? I wondered if they used displacement mapping for those... (probably not...)

Gnep

[Maggi]

something's gotta be wrong with that "simulator", because on my Parhelia it looks like this:
Pic 1 in 3200x1200, ~1MB in size
Pic 2 in 3200x1200, ~1MB in size

[cjolley]

You are such a bhaaaaad boy.
chuck

[Paddy]

This is a bit better lit...

So does it look much better on a P?

[Jon P. Inghram]

If you don't turn the HW TnL caps thing on, do you get wierd artifacts like these surrounding the logo in the corner?

[Paddy]

nope. I am fine. The only artefacts that I can see are on the most reflective fish.

[Jon P. Inghram]

That's odd... what DirectX, Catalyst, and Windows you running? DX9, Cat3.1, and Win XP SP1 here. I assume your AIW has 128 megs on it? My 8500 only has 64 megs, perhaps that's what's causing my problem, though I don't see how.

[Paddy]

nah 64MB here... did you change the config reef config file?

[Jon P. Inghram]

Only thing I did was turn it down to 800x600, but it still happens at 1024x768.

[GFX MODE]
Width=800
Height=600
Bitdepth=32
Frequency=85
AntiAliasing=0
UseHighResTextures=0
[PATHS]
EnginePath=.
SystemPath=.\Data\_System_
FontPath=.\Data\Fonts
MeshPath=.\Data\Models
ScenePath=.\Data\Scenes
SoundPath=.\Data\Sounds
TexturePath=.\Data\Textures
ShaderPath=.\Data\Shaders

[Paddy]

my ATI control panel is set to quality...

[Indiana]

Matrox apparently has pulled the ReefDemo now that this 3DAnalyze version is out. Really embarrasing, if you ask me...

They should remember that all those great looking ReefDemo pictures now floating the web still have Matrox and Parhelia written all over them.
And this can only help to improve the general publics image of the Parhelia (which is about as bad as it could be). Seeing pictures of the ReefDemo mostly leaves the general (=dumb) user impressed of Matrox, it does not really matter if these pictures were done on a different gfx-card.

Any working link for the ReefDemo?