Hardware TnL 1

[electronicsfreak]

Ok ive tried looking up some things on this but havent found much luck. What is harware tnl?

 

[felixc]

Hardware tiling and lighting. It is the ability for the graphics chips to handle in hardware the light effects instead of letting a software driver doing it. The surface of a 3D object is made of small virtual elements called tiles, or triangles. Each tile carries attributes like color, texture, transparency, reflectivity. The more tiles the more realistic the object. The lighting effects can be seen as how does a light positioned in the 3D realm reflect on an object. This is done by calculating the reflection angle of each tile, for the given light source, reflected towards the screen (the point of view). A nice object is made of thousands of tiles, so for each one these values are to be calculated in order to see the light reflecting on the object. Now picture a whole 3D world and many light sources, with all these calculations to be done, 30 times per second. If a 3D chip can do these calculuses itself, you can imagine how much processing power it offloads from the PC main processor. Most recent 3D cards do have this feature.
Felixc

 

[electronicsfreak]

Ah well the reason I asked I had been getting an error on a new game i got called thief deadly shadows. Kept saying video card did not support pixel shading when it indeed did. So i asked the company about it and the response I got was that my video card did not support hardware tnl. Card worked fine for half life 2 . so im curious to how much better the graphics are on thief since it cant seem to handle it.

 

[felixc]

What is your video card? Usually the hardware pixel shading is a step further than Hardware T&L.

Are there any menus in the game to enable the 3D features?

 

[electronicsfreak]

Heres all the information on my card.

http://global.aopen.com.tw/Products/vga/aeolusmx4000-dv128.htm

Thanks

 

[felixc]

I saw on other forums that this card isn't compatible with the game. But no details. Duh!

If it uses the same game engine as the latest Tomb Raider (from Eidos too), I had all sorts of bugs with this game.

 

[electronicsfreak]

Yeah I figured out that it wasnt compatible lol. Its on the box that much but I was still wondering about the other info and figured might get lucky and have a way around it. Anyways I plan on later on getting a better video card so ill play the game when I get one. Appreciate the help though.