What is Hardware TnL?

[12ozProphets]

I've seen some posts about Hardware TnL. What is it and how do I know if I have it?

Thanks!

 

[maartena]

T&L stands for "Transform & Lighting" and is a set of graphic calculations used in a 3D environment. The calculations are calculated by a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on the video card, which is why it is refered to as "Hardware based T&L", because the video hardware can process the needed calculations without taxing the CPU (Central Processing Unit).

Most desktop based cards started having hardware T&L capabilitie from about 2000, 2001 or so with the Geforce 2 and the ATI Radeon 7500 among the first cards to carry hardware T&L by default.

Because of heat production, energy consumption, and more space required on the video card, you won't often find hardware T&L on laptops. Only some of the top-end laptops will have hardware T&L built in, and some of the medium range ones that don't have the Intel Centrino chipset for mobile use. Also some of the cheap desktop computers and many office computers have an Intel Integrated Grapics chipset and are not compatible.

Check the link in my signature to find out if your videocard will work with Civ 4 or not.

 

[12ozProphets]

Thanks,

I'll give that a try tonight...

--bill

 

[Dudeitsciv]

Well, I do not have hardware tnl on my laptop (hp ze4700 with ati 320m (worse than radeon 7000))..But I can still play the game by enabling vertex shader 1.0 through radlinker: (seems to work on most low end mobility atis..)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=139074

The black terrain issue can be fixed by changing the xml setting as in
message number 18 (by Pyerun) in this thread :

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137475

You will see the whole map, but there will still be fog of war.. So you
wont see other units / villages in the beginning..

These fixes coupled with some changes to civilization.ini (under my documents/my games/civilization4..).. The game is playable..

I used:

MinimapTrilinearFilter = 0

AllowScreenShots = 0

PlayMusic = 0

AudioEnable = 0

(it would run with audios.. But turning them off does give you some speed)

...With these settings I beat the game once already..(time victory 25million people score 4300..)

I think the black terrain issue has something to do with pixel shaders.. I tried a experimental software pixel shader emulation from:

http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/sourceforge/s/sw/sw-shader/

It is in the package DirectX8-DLL.zip (d3d8.dll).. I copied it into windows/system32 (in safe mode, first I renamed the original d3d8.dll to something else..) ..

Well.. I tried it.. But the map looked even crappier.. So that did not work..
I reverted back to original d3d8.dll..

 

[12ozProphets]

Thanks Dudeitsciv,

After reading up on my laptop's video card, a mobility radeon 9000, it seems it is a directX 8x card, and the min requirements are 9c...

Is this a show stopper?

 

[Hardin]

Click on this http://nvidia.com/object/transform_lighting.html