CAn you buy Half Life with SmoothVision separate from Radeon 8500?

moocat

Platinum Member
Oct 25, 1999
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I think you mean Half Life with Truform. Smoothvision is a function hardware and drivers. It doesn't require any special coding in the game to enable it.

As to your question about buying it apart from the retail 8500...I have no idea. Post a want ad on the forsale forum. There are going to be alot of people getting their Dell/Radeon 8500 cards shipped to them, there may be some people willing to part with a copy.
 

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,709
2,998
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I thought you could download the patch for free? Why would you need to buy it?
 

The_Lurker

Golden Member
Feb 20, 2000
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It's included in the newest Half Life patch and with the newest Radeon Drivers, it's automatically enabled. If you're running the original Radeon (7000, 7200, 7500, Radeon DDR 32mb, Radeon DDR 64mb, Radeon LE, Radeon VE, AIW Radeon, etc) all have it enabled automatically as well, but will not perform well. So basically, yes, Truform comes enabled.

If you really meant smoothvision, all smoothvision is a algorithm for FSAA designed specifically for Radeon 8500 to get better performance/quality ratio. So with the R8500, you can enable smoothvision in any game as long as it's hardware accelerated either D3D or OpenGL. So to more accurately answer your topic, no, you dont have to buy a special half life for smoothvision (or Truform), it's included in either drivers or patches.
 

bunnyfubbles

Lifer
Sep 3, 2001
12,248
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The retail boxed Radeon 8500 just comes with those HL games as an extra perk to help justify its $299 retail pricetag. While $299 may not seem that bad when we consider that the original msrp for the 8500 was $399, paying roughly $300 for any computer part is rather overwhelming for your average target customer. Having those games come with the board may ease some of the pains caused by a lighter wallet.
 
Jul 1, 2000
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bunnyfubbles -

Who the hell pays MSRP? Most of us are paying $220 or less for the Radeon 8500 Retails...
at that price, who really cares what is bundled with it?

It is still a much better deal than the Ti 500, dollar for dollar.
 

Hawk

Platinum Member
Feb 3, 2000
2,904
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And do you remember how much people paid for the Geforce 3 when it came out? And how much is the Ti500's MSRP? No one (well, no one in their right mind) pays retail.