Graphic card secrets found in games directory

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[b]Graphic card secrets found in games directory[/b]
[i]How carless can you get?[/i]

HUNTING AROUND the game directory of top new title Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, the Inq has found some interesting and curious little bits of information.

In the Drivers folder, in the main game directory, there are four standard text documents which appear to be used to configure the game. The four documents contain lines of code which are, helpfully, fully annotated.

nvidia.txt contains a few choice words from the programmers, Relic Entertainment. 'Nvidia's driver thinks that this is impossible, when it is possible - Override...' is one. 'The 50 (Forceware) series drivers... all report that these can't be done - they most certainly can - Override...' is another. The comments refer to obscure texture manipulations that Nvidia's drivers don't seem to handle correctly and which therefore have to be botched.

The ATI configuration file doesn't appear to contain anything at all, but that doesn't mean that the Canadian giant isn't mentioned. spdx9_config.txt curiously refers to environment-mapped bump mapping, a feature first introduced way back with Matrox DirectX 6 hardware. The config comments that whilst ATI handles the implementation arithmetically correctly, it makes the art assets look weird - presumably, Relic didn't develop the title ATI. ATI's standard handling of the feature is disabled, meaning it takes a small (and undeserved) performance hit.

Dawn of War is an interesting title from a technology perspective. The engine is a heavily modified version of an engine Relic created for the TNT/TNT2-series cards. Each little Warhammer chap in the new RTS is the same polygon count and texture map as a full-size character would have been back then, only there are hundreds of the blighters on screen now in some lushly rendered scenery.

In a sign of the times, the config file contains a list of device vendors and appropriate configurations for their cards. Whilst 3dfx is given a vendor ID in hexidecimal, it is commented with a poignant 'Crap - allowdevice 0'.

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