Whatever happened to ' TRUFORM '

[Leon Retro]

My brother mentioned the ATI TRUFORM technology, which was touted as really pushing graphics forward in 2001. We then realised that little mention had been made since that time.

What happened to the technology, and why have ATI removed all mention of it from their site?

Here is a link explaining things:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1476

The main reason I made this post is simply because my brother is always mentioning TRUFORM as if it was to be a real revelation in the graphics world. Look at the comment on the last page of that website, which shows another guy is also interested in finding out " What happened to TRUFORM?"

[Magnakai]

Was it silently incorporated into the card tech?
Or maybe it's just known under a different name?

I can't really browse through, cause I'm at work, but is it normal mapping?

[andrewfee]

Sadly, it never really took off. I remember on my Radeon 8500 it tended to cause huge performance hits, but adding something like 10-100x the polys will do that...

The 9700s didn't have hardware support for it, iirc, and then it was pretty much ignored.

The problem was that it did a great job on some objects, and not others, if it wasn't properly coded into the game. The only games I can remember ever using it were Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and there was an unofficial Morrowind tool to enable it.

Unfortunately, it was pretty much dropped with "modern" engines; it doesn't play well with normal mapping / stencil shadows. I seem to remember Carmack saying that while it made the character models in Doom 3 look really nice, it got applied to the model after the engine had calculated the shadows, so they decided not to add it to the game.

I think the main reason it's not widely used is that it added so many polys to the scene, but to be honest, most of the time it didn't make nearly as much of an improvement as it did a performance hit. Here's a few Morrowind shots as an example:

Wireframe:


Ingame:



Not only that, but you got some weird bugs unless it was specifically told what it could and couldn't apply it to. Things like the Morrowind TruForm was applied to everything and caused some objects to look very strange.

Check out the wooden post in the background of this picture, for example:




More shots here: http://tes.vasya.stepanets.info/twea...ot.html#npatch

As you'll see though, it really improved the lighting due to all the additional polys in walls etc, so it had some pretty big improvements in older games.

[Magnakai]

Oh wow! That's pretty fascinating...

[Leon Retro]

Thanks for all the info Andrew, it really explains things!

Looks like it was a pretty good development, but ultimately got left behind in the fast moving world of 3D graphic techniques!