PC hardware forum: Pixel shader emulator

but usually these emulators are done at your own risk and arent written by acknowledgeed professionals and are open source.

The EE message you referenced mentioned Thief - The Dark Project. This game only needs DirectX 6 support which practically any PC/video card made in the past 5 years will support.

Even F.E.A.R. only needs a GeForce 4ti/Radeon 9000 to run and those are 4 year old cards. If you use a shader emulator, then your frame rates are going to drop so much that the game will be practically unplayable.

sorry, but i can't locate an emulator. the post below indicates that pixel shaders can't be emulated.

geeks.com has a radeon 9000 that should work in a AGP 2X slot for $35.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ATI9000-64-64-D&cat=VCD


From: Dr Bombcrater - view profile
Date: Wed, Jun 4 2003 7:02 am
Email: "Dr Bombcrater" <v...@blackhole.org>
Groups: uk.comp.homebuilt

> MX440 doesn't have any vertex/pixel shaders?

> That's strange - when I run 3DMark2001SE on my Geforce2 MX 400, it
> claims that the card has vertex shaders, but no pixel shaders.

DirectX contains a software vertex shader that's used when the graphics
card, like the GF4MX and your GF2, doesn't have hardware vertex shaders. The
emulator works okay but the performance difference between it and a hardware
vertex shader is considerable.

Pixel shaders can't be software emulated so anything that needs them will
either not run on an MX card or have to drop back to a reduced quality
rendering mode.


## Doc

you could try swiftshader 3.0 or 2.0 that worked for me. by the way swiftshader 3.0 emulates pixel and vertex shader 3 it also emulates T&L.