Unfortunately EQ2 was written to support Geforce3 video cards which only support Shader v1.1
So all of our shaders are written in ASM and would have to be upgraded to HLSL which is a huge amount of work.
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When EQ2 went into development, they wanted to support GeForce3, and wanted the game to look just as good on lower hardware. So the only choice was to do many things on the CPU since the graphics card couldn't do it.
The idea at the time was that as processors got faster, the performance would improve over time.
Unfortunately science didn't lead us in that direction.
Comments
The engine is pathetic, yes, it's normal.
agreed -- from one of the SOE devs
http://blog.gregsplace.com/2008/03/armchair-programmers-4tw.html
Unfortunately EQ2 was written to support Geforce3 video cards which only support Shader v1.1
So all of our shaders are written in ASM and would have to be upgraded to HLSL which is a huge amount of work.
---
When EQ2 went into development, they wanted to support GeForce3, and wanted the game to look just as good on lower hardware. So the only choice was to do many things on the CPU since the graphics card couldn't do it.
The idea at the time was that as processors got faster, the performance would improve over time.
Unfortunately science didn't lead us in that direction.
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