I cannot believe how good and how much better this game looks when it is played with a 3Dfx card. I have an IBM Aptiva that I used to play some older games and it had a 3Dfx card in it. I made the mistake of selling that card for a hundred bucks before I finished this game and now I have not touched the game since because I can't get past how ugly it looks now.

People forget that 3dfx stopped GLIDE development 16 years ago, and had officially transitioned to D3d before the company went under. Yes, the D3d version looks very nice in my system (Win10x64, R9380 4GB, Crimson 16.3), and all of the original GLIDE effects render fine under D3d these days (D3d surpassed GLIDE in supported effects years ago) and I actually think it looks substantially better than GLIDE looked on my old 3dfx cards. When the game originally shipped, the better experience was definitely the GLIDE version, but that hasn't been the case for a number of years, now, for the obvious reasons--volumetrics and other effects are no problem at all in D3d today.

I read the running it with Glide is the best experience but i suffer from horrible banding visuals when using that mode. Anybody have a fix for this? It just looks horrible and can't remember ever having this back in the days. Also the first level nearly looks like daytime with Glide, that can't be right can it?

So they modified and remapped all the special effects from glide to work with modern D3D API now? If so that's cool.

I know some developers did a similar thing with Deus Ex to add directx10+ support.

I installed the latest (as of now) 1.05 version of and the latest (as of now) 1.01 version of the [url=https://www.gog.com/forum/clive_barkers_undying/widescreen_working_correctly/post36]Undying Widescreen Fix

Unfortunately I'm still having problems with banding, I clearly and easily see it on the light emitted by the lamps (halo), it has 5-"steps" or something). Isn't this a sign of 16-bit dithering? I thought this was resolved in the latest version of nglide (actually from 0.93 onwards)?

What am I doing wrong? (with d3d 32bit I don't have this problem, it looks fine, just like clive.jpg from this post. It does not look like clive3.jpg)

w7x64 gtx960 i5 realtek_audio

Im trying to run it as "designed", as I understood that glide has better graphics than d3d.

who's "they"?

Later edit: screenshots attached - one can clearly see the lamp halo banding.

Yes, the one weakness to Glide 3DFX games is that the early models were 16 bit video cards. So the game had to use 16 bit textures and dithering for certain things.

The "special effects" from Glide are the same "Special effects" D3d supports...;) Volumetric lighting, the whole bit. Glide was 3dfx's API, which 3dfx officially abandoned for D3d before the company bit the big one. D3d supports everything Glide did and much more--32-bit support, higher resolutions, etc. Glide and nGlide are still fine for a bunch of older games--but this isn't one of them...;) Nothing *wrong* with Glide in this game--it's just that D3d is superior in terms of rendering IQ.

Apparently at one time there used to be dramatic difference between the Glide and the DIrectX version at the time. DirectX couldn't handle all the features that Glide could. It was mostly dealing with some extra lighting effects. The distinction between light and shadow.

https://www.gog.com/forum/clive_barkers_undying/differences_between_glide_and_d3d

https://web.archive.org/web/20160527014424/http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9091474

"

So it did look somewhat more 'interesting' on glide system vs. direct3d.

Unfortunately the pictures showing the differences back then no longer exist on that website.

Newer systems cause 'banding' and other artifacts problems which make 16-bit look worse than it did back then.

Fan patches have probably fixed all the old issues, and given Direct3D all the features that Glide had over Direct3d at the time, and then some.

Hello,

I never heard from GOG supporting packages for win8/10. Where I can get a GOG D3d configuration file for Clive Barkers Undying (CBU)? Do you talking from dgVoodoo2?

I could edit the system.ini or user.ini in the system folder of CBU. Did you mean this posibility?

I've sat down and done some comparisons between 3DFX vs the Direct 3D version supplied in GOG currently....

Things I've noticed while yes technically nglide forces 32bit for compatiblity (according to their site).. The actual game defaults to 16bit color assets. This means that lighting for example appears 'banded with a noticeable gradient shift between shades in the light'... A benefit to 32bit mode in directx3d is that halo does not have the banding, and the gradient is more smooth, as more color is obviously put into the texture being used.

A big noticeably difference and one that can't be screenshotted for some reason is the lighting intensity of 3dfx vs direct3D. 3DFX is noticeably brighter in rooms where there is light, and darker in rooms without light. There is more contrast between dark and light.

While Direct 3D tends to make every room dark.

While shadows do appear in both versoins, another interesting factor is that shadows in in 3DFX have more contrast against the brighter rooms... The edges around the shadow tend to be 'harder' in the Direct3D and more of a smooth gradient from the darker region to the edge of where light starts blend into it. Interesting considering 16 color limitations of the light source halos for example... the shadows actually look much nicer in 3DFX mode, compared to DirectX.

As I mentioned before you can't screenshot the brighter light effects that 3DFX glide produces in rooms for some reason if you do take ingame screenshot it'll just look like DirectX 3D 16 bit lighting conditions... I don't know technical reason why screenshot can't pick up on the brightness effect....

I've tried to include an example of 3DFX and Diret3D using an external camera... It's not perfect as there is some glare on the screen... But it in this brighter area it shows off the difference between light 'halo' form 16-color sprites vs the 32-color sprite.

It also shows off the 'softer edged' shadows in 3DFX, vs the hard-edged shadows in Direct3d.

The second set shows off the higher contrast in 'darker' rooms with an external light source such as blue glass window. Which shows that in 3DFX there is more light as well as contrast between shadows from furniture vs where the light falls form the window. As I mentioned before just trying to take a screen grab will make 3DFX look essentially like the regular direct3D version without the contrast/lighting...

In this final set of pictures, I show off grand entry hallway.. Where you can see various things like the high contrast of lighter areas and shadowed areas like area under the grand stair case. And another interesting thing is the light cast on the walls from the light sconces that radiate in a more definable circular pattern on the wall, see left side of the screen (sconces on both top and bottom floor.) In 3DFX there is very little light on the wall itself, its extremely dark and bland. There is also perhaps a softer 'glow' coming from the large stain glass window at the top of hte stairs that's more noticeable in the 3DFX setting as well..

In this video you can see those areas being played on an actuall Voodoo 5 5500.... One will notice the brightness and contrast of light and shadow, and the softer edges around the shadows is there (as that seems to be pure 3DFX feature), although the color banding on the lamps is less noticeable. The banding in the lamp halos still exists but its not nearly as bad... as it appears in the wrapper on modern system however.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5y_DkL4vc&t=57m20s

I just wanted to correct the assumption that Glide couldn't do 32 bit rendering. In fact Glide could from version 3 onwards. However as far as I know the Unreal engine was glide2x so games based on that engine like Clive Barker's Undying were limited to 16 bit rendering.

Glide on an actual later 3dfx card (voodoo 4/5) would display 16bit color as 24bit color in the actual card. It was quite a thing to experience back in the day compared to the directx cards of the time (Ati rage pro were buggy messes and nvidia really didn't get fast and good until geforce)

I know, since I bought my Voodoo5 in September of 2000 :-) I still own it, but it's out of service since ~2005 because I still have not found the time to recap the fitting mainboard.