shadows in some older games

[Anarchist420]

Buffer shadows (or shadow buffers) don't work in splinter cell with nvidia anymore (they never worked with ATi/AMD). Why is that?

I'm not one to usually care about shadows but in some games they're really important.

 

[Amit3945]

The shadows worked just fine on my Ti 4200 back then but I could NEVER get them on 7900G and more recently on HD 4850.
I am sure someone can shed some light and provide a workable solution.

 

[fralexandr]

i don't know much of the issue, but:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-36904.html
you might be able to open the splintercell.ini and adjust the forceshadowmode to forceshadowmode=1 or forceshadowmode=0
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1306810.html

i dunno if that'll work though, since it seems they used some legacy nvidia directx stuff that was only meant for select (xbox) hardware or something
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33712236

to bad drivers back then weren't as universal as they are now, based on the internet, only a few driver versions actually had working shadow buffering due to the game being a console port

 

[Anarchist420]

I actually think that uniform standards have been a bad thing.

I find it kind of odd that nvidia's superior implementation didn't win out but that's actually the way it's usually been because Microsoft's DX specs have usually only required the minimum. The only time ATi/AMD ever really exceeded the required feature set that I can think of was when they made it so the ROPs could do AA with FP framebuffers on the x1k series (nvidia couldn't and that was kind of what sucked most about the Geforce 6/7 series). However, they also didn't have hardware filtering for HDR maps.
Microsoft really should've required both in the SM3.0 spec, but they included neither.
Then DX10.0 was missing a lot of essentials from DX10.1, like MSAA with deferred rendering.

Anyway, does anyone know if it would be hard for nvidia to emulate them? Splinter Cell isn't the only game that used shadow buffering.

Also, thanks for the replies