Geforce 4 440 Go -- When did they disable the vertex shader?

[otherwise]

Hello all. To make a long story short, I updated my video card drivers on my laptop which uses a GF4 440 Go. I lost vertext shader support, and as a result my framerate in WoW was cut in half.

After a lot of googling, it appears that at some point the nVidia's drivers had a "software assisted" hardware vertex shader support for the GF4 Go series. Because of how incredibly buggy it was, at they canned it.

The point they canned it is fairly obvious. The supported vertex shader version returned by the drivers went from 1.1 to 0.0.

Anyone know exactly when they did this? The software/hardware vertex shader might have been buggy, but it was good enough from WoW, and without it the game goes from "slow enough in new content to finally upgrade my drivers" to unplayable.

 

[BlacKJesuS]

off topic.....


why even TRY to game with a mx440 geez

 

[Goi]

The MX440 actually does very well in older games like Q3 and UT2K4.

 

[rogue1979]

If you want more performance, remove the current driver.

Use the 44.03 and enjoy about a 20% performance boost.

If you want to be daring you can then use coolbits and overclock some, but I don't know if that's wise in a notebook package.

 

[Munky]

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe the gf4 go cards are based on a gf4 mx core, and as such they have no vertex or pixel shaders. Whatever "vertex shader" you may have been using before was probably emulated on the cpu through the drivers, and for whatever reason they decided to stop supporting it.

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: munky
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe the gf4 go cards are based on a gf4 mx core, and as such they have no vertex or pixel shaders. Whatever "vertex shader" you may have been using before was probably emulated on the cpu through the drivers, and for whatever reason they decided to stop supporting it.

Apparently he knows what it is going on, and he is asking starting from which driver revision Nvidia disable the emulation.

 

[otherwise]

Thanks for the advice. Back to the 40.x series I go

Re: munky

From what I dug up in the DirectX dev groups the GF4 Go does have some sort of vertex acceleration . . . but does not support the full features in hardware and some are done via software. Also gleened from that group, this solution was buggy as hell as there were a lot of questions on how to specifically disable vertex/pixel shaders for the GF4Go. I guess nvidia's solution was to can it completly, because there are also a bunch of threads about why the latest drivers return vshader support as 0.0 instead of 1.1 as expected.

Anyways, at the lowest possible settings, in Ironforge at the bank on a busy weekday night I get about 33-40 fps with the vertex shader off, and about 60fps-100fps with it on. It's doing something.

Since the latest det drivers completly remove any sort of support for a vertex shader though, I really wish nVidia flatly stated this somewhere so people like me don't have to try to dig up why things just don't work like they used to. An option to turn on the buggy vshader would be nice too.

At the very least though, stop advertising that the GF4Go has programmable pixel and vertex shaders if you don't want them enabled.

This whole affair has left quite a sour taste in my mouth. I didn't think nVidia ever performed something this shady

 

[rbV5]

From what I dug up in the DirectX dev groups the GF4 Go does have some sort of vertex acceleration . . . but does not support the full features in hardware and some are done via software.

GF4 MX has no pixel/vertex shaders, it has the old T&L engine. Its probably software T&L vs Hardware T&L for the driver differences.

The G0 4200 and Go 440 are 2 different chips. The GO 4200 uses the same chip as the desktop GF4 ti4200 rather than the disgused GF2 MX chip that the MX series sports...big difference.

If you read carefully they tout "nfiniteFX II engine'" for Go 4200. Their featrure support pages are a riddle to be perfectly honest.