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Old 05-15-2007, 07:01 AM   #625
feldon34
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
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Originally posted by Tiny Turtle:
Ok, but how come the screenshots in the links I posted have extremely boring appearances in the DX6 & DX7 versions?
I dunno about Alan's.  
Game developers have to make a choice.

Do they spend a lot of time writing software emulation to do effects that DX8 and DX9 can do on-the-card?

There's a lot of variables in play, such as, if you try to guess what computer the typical user of a DX7 card will have and if it will be able to handle the native DX7 graphics plus some software emulation that tries to show some of the goodies provided by DX8 and DX9.

In the case of Marine Aquarium, the concern is not overtaxing the CPU or video card in most cases, since it runs on some pretty low end hardware. The concern is whether people have DirectX 9 cards and DirectX 9 even installed. So I think it's a good fit for MA3 to do some of the graphical effects on DX8 that are freebies in DX9 and DX10 by writing some extra code.

I'm glad to hear that Jim had gotten the Cardinal Tetras the proper reflection in FA. Most people either don't realize, or are daunted by the fact that Cardinal Tetras have 3 different types of reflective scales. Maybe some day I will get to see it in motion.
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