DescentBB

This is interesting... I run Descent 3 on my 1.7 ghz AMD Athlon, it works fine. There is a problem though, MatCenter visualizations do not work, bots just appear and no "beams" (or whatever it is) show up. Then, powerups have halos but they have no sparkles under them. So I set my D3 folder as shared, and run this exactly same copy of the game on my Pentium 3 computer over my home network, this time sparkles and MatCenter animations work. Could this be due to differences between P3 and AMD, and is there any way to get full animation effects on my AMD computer? (both computers have Geforce FX 5200 cards)

Descent 3 supports some of the SEE extensions that the Pentium III has. The sparkles from powerups and motionblur on moving robots are some of them, it also accelerates the indoor engine about 10%. Any CPU with SSE should work (including the Athlon XP and later series) unless you have SSE disabled in your computers BIOS.

Right, I just ran WINCPUID, tells my SSE is on. Any other ideas? Do any of you, AMD Athlon users see MatCenter animations or D3 was not made for Athlon?

Just curious, but what command line options are you using?

My thoughts exactly! Meant to post that earlier when I saw this topic and got a phone call...glad to see you're more on the ball.

the athlons support SSE and a few other extensions, but my guess is that d3 just detects a non p3-cpu and disables the special p3-calculated effects. (1998 there was no amd-cpu with SSE, amd had 3dnow this days)

i have an athlon xp too, but never had a look if these effects are missing. will have next sp-mission.

btw. there is a commandswitch to disable a pentium3 detection (-nopentium3) but no one to force using the SSE extension or whatever.

Ok this is interesting. Under Direct3d mode, Pyro, Phoenix and Mag are all missing wings... In magnum I can see right through the holes where wings used to be. This problem shows up in Direct3d, under OpenGL there are no anomalies. I spent about 2 hours using RivaTuner and checked every single Direct3d setting avaliable (yeah all these restarts add up). Still had no luck getting my ships to fully render, they are shown only as partially rendered models with holes. This occurs both, with EMBM enabled and disabled. Even changing all d3d settings to compatibility mode or turning off all advanced features does not help, I load up the game, do "byebyemonkey" and see my magnum, missing its wings. Any ideas?

Use OpenGL

Descent3's D3D support is and always was a little more buggy.