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Sorry if these sound like stupid questions, they probably are, but if someone could help me I would be most gratefull.

1: Bump Mapping; Cartoon Shading; Rainbow Shading; Reflection Shading; Shadow Shading; Pixel Shading - None of these work on my PC. Should I really miss them? What do they do?

2: Surely I can produce reflections, because the 'Spaceship Cruising / Sphere Mapping' Demo works a treat - or is this a fake reflection texture, like in PS1 Gran Turismo?

3: Also in the other demos, the lighting of 3D objects is brilliant, and the real time shadows are great! How are these different with my unavailable features?

4: Does the Cartoon Shading feature enable black outlined and 'posterised' graphics, like in so called "cell-shaded" console & arcade games, Eg JetSetRadio, AutoModelistica? (That would ROCK, especially for producing an action RPG or FPS)

5: Lastly, are these features unavailable because of a lack of CPU power (I have 800Mhz Athlon) or is it due to my graphics card? (I have an AGP 64Mb GForce2, which I thought was pretty good...) its not my ram or operating system, cos I have 512MB & WinXP.

Apologies for my lack of technical knowledge on the subject, can't wait to become informed Thank you in advance for your patience!

1. As far as I know the Gforce 2 does not support Rainbow, Cartoon or Cubic, but is fine for Spherical and Bump

2. The speherical "effect" is from a specially produced texture applied to the object and tagged with the spherical shader (see that demos source files for an example of how these are made) Will work on GF2 I found that unless the model was exported as a .x the spherical mapping didn't work properly (It even screwed up if I used DPPro primitives - go figure)

3. Lighting shouldn't change - Can't be certain if shadows are supported on gf2 and if so, they will be very slow regardless (even on a 4600ti they ain't exactly fast - but they are impressive on simple scenes)

4. Yes, but your card must support realtime cel shading - GF3 and up should do it. This can be achieved on the gforce 2 using software methods but DBPro went for a hardware solution on this one - which kinda sucks, since it limits the market you can make games of this style for.

5. Just the card buddy - You can get a gf4 4400 for around $100 or so on the web or a gf4 mx for under $100. Failing that - wait a few more months and go on ebay - you'll probably pick up a ti for $50 - $80

AsylumHunter

As far as I know the Gforce 2 does not support Rainbow, Cartoon or Cubic, but is fine for Spherical and Bump

Strange.. my much older TNT2M64 supports them all, even shadow shading..

Thanks guys most useful

Whilst I obviously would like to upgrade my graphics card, u make a good point about the effects not being compatible with other people's pc's. I am developing games with a hope to release them for sale / shareware (as many of us are!) and maximum compatibility is obviously a big bonus.

Glad to hear its not my CPU, altho obviously I would in an ideal world upgrade that too.