Shadow Rendering Shadows Not Rendering I am guessing the shadows don't render in most older zones? Or this feature is no longer enabled in most areas? Radeon 5700 XT Mostly default settings and install. I searched about an hour and could only find some posts about how they were buggy in EQ2. I would prefer buggy shadows to not, but feeling like this will all require editing the INI directly which I am not really in the mood for. I can live without them. I just don't know what to think about it.
Yeah, I think this is a compatability issue between my Radeon 5700 and directx9 implemented on windows. Not a Everquest problem at all. Totally a radon driver issue. I am attempting to use a wine3d opengl wrapper to see what happens!!!! The game runs smooth and doesn't crash so it is not a critical issue. I just was confused as I did keep trying to turn them on and off. I was really looking forward to it now that I finally have a powerful graphics card lol! I had pretty bad results with dgvoodoo as that just converts dx9 calls into dx10 and 11 calls. So I don't recommend that option unless you can't even get the game to run at all for whatever reason. Thanks for checking in on the issue! I will report back if the wine3d implementation works, as the game runs pretty smooth under wine on linux with my card.
Well I tried https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag the 64 bit version maybe didn't load? but with the 32 bit version the launcher will not work So I guess I am out of luck unless I compile my own wine or run this under linux with wine there. I don't really feel like pestering anyone, its just sad there is no built in backwards compatibility to the AMD Radeon drivers. Going to chalk it up to Microsoft wanting to sell more dx 12 dev kits, as this could be easily fixed with a native update to the d3d libraries to call the newer vulkan spec, but its also not Microsoft responsibilityto make sure AMD is fully supported... ugh. I feel like a rube with just enough knowledge to know what is broken but not enough ability to fix it. I would voluntarily create a solution and give it to DBG/Darkpaw if I had the skills. There are a lot of options available without putting the calls in the eqgame engine or modifying the game itself in any way. I don't blame anyone at all for no longer wishing to support old graphics APIs from a decade ago. It is what it is. Thank you so much to those who have worked on this over at DBG, AMD, and MS, for getting this to work at all on my modern computer! There are ways of running wine builds natively under windows with cgywin but i am not very tech savvy not sure i want to go through all that effort over broken shadows... they are sooo cool though! Also the Vega 8 is a great card. It is running different firmware than the R7 (RX 5700 + series). So your card supports native dx3d9 calls.
I don't know if anyone can help answer this, but does the current client make dx9 or 10 calls? or some combination thereof with fallbacks? I would assume that it is fully dx9 as that is the era it sort of lived in most.
LOL I got it to load thru the dxvk wrapper but i dont think it supports vertex shader 3.0 i've tried disabling some settings i havent figured out how to get the engine to run shader 2.0? I am guessing maybe my card will not support shader 2.0 and I am totally guessing thats what I got going on because I have no idea I am not a guru... hence the totally black ground But, I did get it to load shadows. They are pretty narly lookin i like them. sigh... i may post something over at the dxvk forums see if they care to look into it any https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk as this is the mainly maintained branch, hopefully as the project matures it will get better support for these old games
Anyone think it would be safe to downgrade to a different video card that is dx9 era? And I could just run with that in this machine. Or will maybe still have problems in windows 10? I am guessing this is more of an OS issue then a AMD issue still, though one of the commenters were saying the OS issue is bringing out the AMD issue, in that AMD has dropped a lot of its architectural support for directx calls in its navi 10 gpu. The Vega GPU looks like it works, but I can't shell out $400 for a card over that, but I could spend $99 or something and be happy with EQ working properly. I know its picky, but I kind of feel bad after all these years not being able to run the game properly lol I use to run it on a tablet which could barely run it at 800x600 I guess I cannot complain. Still. /brain/melting/rant off... it works nearly .. flawlessly without the wrapper so... I can just try to forget about it lol.
It should not have any troubles with Windows 10 but should have mentioned in your initial post this was not a Windows OS but Linux. I am not able to assist with a Linux installation, directly. Just FYI, from Windows XP to Windows 10, the default OS installations only have/had a base version of directx 9. Even if you were to load up Windows 10, you would still need the last update made for directx 9c - Directx 9c (June 2010, version 9.29.1974) And best to utilize the redistribution package. It will install/reinstall files, overwriting any corrupted files. Directx 10-12 is not backward compatible to directx 9c. And EQ runs shadows on Windows 10. At first, I thought something was broken, then forgot I had Shadow clipplane to zero . I usually run without shadows. The Vertex Shaders version listed has to do with what your card supports, not what is required by EQ. EQ runs with Vertex Shaders 1.0, iirc. There used to be an check on/off but thankfully DBG removed that. It was originally added for when there were a few GPU which could NOT do the rendering. The uncheck box allowed/forced it to software rendering but would cause major FPS issues with modern GPU. Lots of fun. People would uncheck it trying to increase their FPS but would end up hosing it even worse.
Hey, thanks for your reply. It is very informative, and I am sure some will find it useful. I would like to clarify that I am running this natively on a windows 10 machine. I can see where that is confusing because I mention wined3d, which is also a windows implementation of wine and dxwrappers. I did install the June 10 redistribution 'run as administrator'. Did a fresh reboot. Re updated my AMD 20.4.2 adrenaline drivers. I would like to mention shadows don't display either with the 20.2.2 WHQL drivers either. So this is definitely a windows issue. That's where I got to the first point. Shadows still don't work natively for me in windows 10. One of people over on the AMD forums said its because windows 10 uses a wrapper for its directx9 calls. I am assuming those dlls in the June 10 distribution are wrappers upgrading the dx9 calls to 10, and or 11. And that the Navi 10 GPU does break with those calls as many games and other software like Blender don't function well with GPU acceleration on this GPU The Vulkan API is much better supported by AMD than the Directx API, so I figured I would try running the wrapper natively under windows (not through wine). This is as far as I got. I gave up trying to use wine under windows with the wined3d wrapper to upgrade the directx calls to gl, vulkan, that way. It seems silly, but for compatibility, yep, windows 10 just doesn't work well with directx anymore sadly. There's a deprecated project called DXUP that was designed to upgrade 9 calls to 11 or 12 I cant remember. I haven't tried that as that project seems to have died and been merged into DxVk. Anyway I am pretty sure that the directx9 shader calls are just not supperted in the DxVK wrapper yet, and its just tough luck that I won't be able to work around my graphics card, windows support issue with the Vulkan API. I don't think there is a solution other than getting microsoft to release a patch or update their d3d9 version so that the Navi 10 card can process the call properly. Or to have everything go through the Vulkan API anyway. Sadly due to the nature of my hardware this game would probably run better under wine on linux. I haven't tried that as I dont feel like re-partitioning my drives and doing a dual boot or messing with VMs. VM Workstation crashes on me trying to do anything GPU related. And that is an even more messy workaround lol.
oh yeah, vmware super illegal lol. so i wont be using that! my bad. makes sense. I am pretty close to getting it to work on my end, once it does, I will forward the methods to the eq dev team and see if they are interested in it! Because it could maybe even be implemented into the launcher at some point. Would be super cool option to have as a checkbox! and its open source, so there's that too! --- I am sharing this stuff publicly with the community more for informational purposes, than anything else, just crowdsourcesing my thought process here! Thanks again for all your input and if this down the road leads to better d3d9 support from AMD or Microsoft, or a simple vulkan wrapper that makes this game function properly on windows 10 with Navi 10 GPUs, all for the best.
Pretty sure besides some miracle on high from Microsoft or AMD my best resolution to see old EQ in it's full glory is to buy a 2cnd PCIe card with a different driver and older firmware and run that out of another monitor or dual boot into it under windows 7. I hit a brick wall trying to troubleshoot and debug this on the outside with the help of some graphics gurus. Going to say ::: _issue_is_resolved_ :::: AMD 5700 XT and windows 10 does not support shadow rendering with stock june 2010 d3d9 redistributable
Going forward into the future if anyone wants to weigh in or contact AMD, here is the link to the issue on AMDs support website: https://community.amd.com/message/2975946?commentID=2975946#comment-2975119
I I'm also using a Radeon RX 5700 XT. EQ looks fine except that the shadows don't render. My CPU is a Ryzen 7 3700X, not sure if knowing specs can help or not. I find it weird that my old computer running a Pentium 2100 and an old Geforce GTX 1050 Ti is showing shadows fine, but my new build can't. It's not a huge issue, but it's a little frustrating.
