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What is TruForm?

D

d34dly

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 3, 2003
Messages
2,342
Ever since the NV40 stuff has exploded I have seen many people bring TruForm back into the picture. I know that this is an ATI specific ability but what exactly is it?
 
i remeber seeing something about it a while ago.
something about making a boxy model look alot smoother.

ill try to find the pic. it was just a low polyied up ut2k4 model, and then applied truform to it and it was alot smoother and looked better.
 
It is a tesselation technique that takes low polygon objects and subdivides the polygons to obtain a higher polygon object. Basically it makes things smoother without the game needing to use high poly objects.
 
truform.jpg

here ya go, the before and after (truform on the right)
i think its a ut2k3 model.
 
Truform on Truform off

truformy.jpg
notrue.jpg


Taken with standard tesselation and a Radeon 8500 in UT2004.
 
unfortunately it can also cause problems, it wreaks havoc with the half life engine and in Raven Shield (which explicitly supports trueform) it causes clipping problems. HOS also cause problems with things like parallax mapping. (an advanced technique that achieves a bump mapped like surface, that still looks correct from a wider range of angles)
 
Yeah, it can look pretty weird on some game engines that is for sure.

But I can say without a doubt in UT2004 it is perfectly flawless. Not a single texture seam anywhere, and nothing looks "overbloated" I think it is Nvidia getting ready to do their N-patch environmental thing, which is similar to truform technology.
 
I thought that that was in the nv2x, but never really exposed, and removed in later hardware? plus all HOS are n-patches I believe, that is the name for Trueform in the ut2k4 .ini
 
Yeah I heard it was in an earlier NVidia board (before the Radeon 8500) too... I don't think they ever officially enabled it though.

What I heard the difference was that it still did straight lines along the tesselation, so it was still blocky. ATi went one further and put an estimation curve on the lines. But neither tech got off the ground, as everyone was rightfully looking to better performance at the time.

Its time to look back on all the old image quality tweaks, cuz it looks like CPU's are gonna take a couple years to catchup with the speed of the videocard.
 
I think that the displacement mapping with tesselation from a texture that vs 3.0 brings to the table is a far better option than any higher order surface tech, of course it is more work for the dev too, but no more than bump mapping would be.
 
I remmember the steering wheels in GTA: Vice City, but i run truform because i heard what it did and they wheel still looked like a square....
 
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