What are the 3d effects like?

[Tormentor]

ive never seen them , because i havent got a openGL expensive 128mb or whatever video card. so i'm limited to bg2 just without the 3d effects, and 32bit. Are they any nice? do they actually add something more to the game?...

[ 01-15-2002: Message edited by: Tormentor ]

[Glorfindel]

IMO they make the game just that little bit betta

[andrewas]

with less than a geforce 2 they just slow down the game unacceptably. with a geforece 2 or better - turn em on and enjoy the show. theyre good. very good.

if you have some weird card post what it is and someonell tell you if its good enough or not. and in any case almost any card can be made to run opengl to some degree, go to www.glsetup.com and run the web setup. at worst itll leave your card with the same performance, and it could be well worth it.

oh, and you cant be limited to 32bit colour, cos thats more than the maximum the human eye can distinguish (and dont let any console boy tell you different, a 128 bit console still runs in 24 bit colour, although the processor is different). in fact, no gaming PC yet built has more than 32 bit (in terms of colour or cpu)

[Jim]

The eye can distinguish 16.7 million colours (32bit) as thats the number of colours needed for a "true colour" representation i.e. optimal colour depth. In BGII, especially using software rendering you probably won't see this difference, but 32bit does allow for much smoother colour blending over a surface which eliminates the colour contour banding seen using 16bit, but BGII isn't the best example to demonstrate this.

It does look nicer using 3D acceleration, especially the spell effects, and the line of sight shadow is more progressive and smooth rather than all "bitty" due to the dithering used in software mode. Using 3d acceleration won't speed up the frame rate though, it adds special effects, which, as andrewas correctly pointed out will slow the game down with some older generation video cards.

Overall it helps greatly to improve the atmospherics of the game.

[andrewas]

actualy, the only difference between 32 and 24 bit is that in 32 bit colour, all the data has a byte of padding which serves to align the data so the cpu can process it faster, it includes no aditional practical data. the look is identical, but 32 bits runs faster if you have the memory for it. 16.7 million colours (2^24) colours either way. the advantage over 16 bits is awesome if you can display it. but this is wandering dangerously off topic.

the 3d effects in BG2 have a huge performance hit unless you have a good card - and 2fps hurt atmosphere far more than a true-3d mantle effect can ever add. in short - try it, if it works good keep it. if you have the hardware (i dont, a voodoo banshee is not enough, even with a k2-400 to back it up) it'll look excellent. you might have to turn them off in the big fights though.if it lags when three mages throw five mms each, forget it.

[Ike YarakZ]

so i am wondering, would the 3d effects work with a TNT2 32Mb Card???

[andrewas]

short, short answer:

try em and see.

but to hazard a guess - the TNT2 is the same generation as my banshee (give or take) so i dont think youll get optimum performace. specficaly itll tend to drop the frame rate during bigger battles. theyll still look nice of course. it might help to run glsetup (www.glsetup.com), assuming BG2 actualy uses opengl as it was originaly intended to.