![]() ![]() At first glance it might remind you of Austin Powers, as it too is a paraody of 60s spy thrillers. Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, even Half Life. Tone and humor: When we think of First Person Shooters, particularly in the late 90s, we tend to think of violent, bloody games. There are some rough spots here and there with the stealth gameplay, but nothing that quick saving can’t solve! And if things go to hell, then going in all guns blazing is also extremely fun. ![]() but at the end of the day it’s all about killing the enemies without being seen. You also have an array of gadgets to help your missions, from lockpicks, body removers, poisoned perfume, etc. Sounds play an important role here, listening to footsteps can tell players where the enemy is coming from and shooting someone through a wall because you heard them coming is extra satisfying. You’ll often find yourself moving very deliberate across the map, trying to not make any noise and keeping an extra attention to the environment. With that in mind, what makes it such an extraordinary one is not simply its well crafted gunplay, but how it manages to incorporate stealth elements. Great match between amazing gameplay and light stealth elements: make no mistake, NoLF is first and foremost a FPS. I guess that most 1st or 2nd generation T&L cards, without memory optimization technologies (LMA, HyperZ, etc), would hit their bandwidth limit way before suffering any slowdown in their T&L engine.Ps: I also recommend reading this article about female protagonist in FPS, which has a section dedicated to NoLF. ![]() But this means that GPU will get vertex data directly from VRAM, not from system RAM, therefore it will use some VRAM bandwidth for vertex data transfers. Hardware T&L is almost useless without proper support for hardware vertex buffers (that is, the ability to store vertex data in VRAM). What I want to say is that, even if you think that a particular game is T&L limited, it may actually be bandwidth limited. Imagine the performance drop Kyro II suffers when it eats up its limited bandwidth with W-buffer reads. The internal Z-buffer gave some rendering errors that had to be fixed by forcing an external W-buffer. But this was not the only problem Kyro II had with Giants. That was an incredibly clumsy workaround that prevented Kyro II from using Dot3 bump mapping. I read somewhere that Giants developers did look for Dot3 bump mapping caps by checking HW T&L availability, instead of checking D3DTEXOPCAPS_DOTPRODUCT3 flag by calling IDirect3D::GetDeviceCaps() API. But it doesn't mean that the problem was related to T&L itself. ![]() Graphics cards without HW T&L did have problems with this game, indeed. One of the mentioned games is Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Leileilol pointed out some T&L demanding games in this thread about Kyro II: BTW can anyone name a game from the GF 256/GF2 times in which T&L actually mattered? ![]()
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