QEMU Direct3D Table Fog on Modern GPUs in WineD3D for Good Old Games
7Featuring Games:-
LucasArts SHADOWS of the TheEMPIRE (1997)😁
LucasArts The Phantom Menace (1999) (EAX)
Looking Glass Thief II: The Metal Age (2000) (EAX)
Legacy Direct3D versions prior to Direct3D8 support Table Fog as one of the implementation for fogging special effect used in 3D rendering. 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics the most prominent PC 3D accelerator in the late 90's support Table Fog in hardware and games programmed with the 3Dfx GLIDE API were able to fully leverage Table Fog to create such special effects for improved realism in 3D games. Both NVIDIA, ATI and other vendors in the PC graphics accelerators at the time was playing catch-up to support Table Fog in their hardware since Voodoo Graphics.
Table Fog was featured on the Fixed Function Pipeline 3D hardware architecture. As time moved on, GPUs evolved from Fixed Function Pipeline into programmable shaders. Nowadays, all modern GPUs no longer have FFP hardware, it is all about unified shaders, more the merrier and software/firmware are simply tasked to emulate legacy FFP in GPU shading languages.
WineD3D seems to have 2 different implementation to support Direct3D Fog. The first implementation maps Direct3D Fog states to legacy OpenGL Fog, some ARB/EXT/NV extensions and ARB_shaders. It is a hit-and-miss, some games work. some do not and different GPUs may have different results for reasons yet to be known. Intel and AMD GPUs can render Fog in Thief II this way but not NVIDIA GPUs. OpenGL Fog falls under OpenGL Core deprecation for fixed-functions can be implemented in GLSL shaders. However, it wasn't very clear if ARB/EXT/NV extensions related to OpenGL Fog fall under the same deprecation.
WineD3D 2nd implementation is to simply rewrite fixed-function Fog in GLSL shaders. This is the default since Wine 4.0 default to OpenGL 4.4 Core profile. Unfortunately, the codes had issue and made Table Fog non-existent in the pixel shader output. The issue had been fixed in all versions of QEMU WineD3D in preserving Good Old Games for ALL modern GPUs among Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. Never shall one ever spend a single penny on used, yester-years GPUs that support Table Fog or requiring Voodoos emulation to play Good Old Games that look great with Table Fog for the BEST visuals quality.
QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx with WineD3D delivers the BEST in Games Preservation by enabling Table Fog on Modern GPUs. Unlike whatever "Trash"Boxes or "JUNK_PC"em, there is absolutely NO \*BS\* about Voodoos emulation, period-correctness or virtualization making modern CPU too fast for games. For games that can't manage high frame rate on modern machines, frame rate capping within WineD3D can be used without slowing down CPU. SHADOWS😈 of TheEMPIRE😁 is the best example on how WineD3D frame rate capping perfectly locked the game at all-time 30 FPS playability.
An Overkill NVIDIA RTX2050 for Win9X games on Windows 98 VM in thin-and-light laptops, only with QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx -- The WORLD's BEST and HIGHEST performance VMs for Good Old Games.