Links 2003 current state of affairs with AMD / NVIDIA cards.
Posted: March 25th, 2020, 3:29 am
Hello all, long tenured player from the old old Links: Challenge of Golf days. :)
I had occasion to go through some video card updates recently and thought I'd give a warning as to the state of play with the latest cards from the red and green team. This is on a desktop system.
I previously had an AMD Radeon 390. With current drivers (20.02.2) this card played Links fine, it did anistropic filtering at 16 and did anti-aliasing at 8X.
Unfortunately I had to replace it and moved up to the new navi architecture based 5600XT. This is when things went south. The drivers plus the card produced a very ugly checkerboard effect on the golfer and other places where it was trying to anti-alias. I reported this to AMD in this thread:
https://community.amd.com/thread/249039
I returned the 5600XT and got a Radeon 590 which was the prior generation. That worked ok again with Links and the latest drivers, but it was overheating in other areas so that went back.
I then decided to try team Green for the first time in 12 years or so, and got a Geforce 2060. Apparently NVIDIA has long had problems with Links 2003 and anti-aliasing and I hit that, certain graphic elements are missing with AA turned on. However, you can get around this by turning on FXAA which applies an anti-aliasing to every pixel. This works better in fullscreen mode, NVIDIA now also has sharpening options so you can sharpen the image up a bit when using FXAA. Using NVIDIA you also get access to the opaque shadow for the golfer if you want. I urged NVIDIA to fix the problem too, here:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... links-2k3/
I don't have a late model AMD to see if they have fixed the issue yet w/ 20.03.1. NVIDIA is working alright w/ FXAA as mentioned for now. Good luck!
I had occasion to go through some video card updates recently and thought I'd give a warning as to the state of play with the latest cards from the red and green team. This is on a desktop system.
I previously had an AMD Radeon 390. With current drivers (20.02.2) this card played Links fine, it did anistropic filtering at 16 and did anti-aliasing at 8X.
Unfortunately I had to replace it and moved up to the new navi architecture based 5600XT. This is when things went south. The drivers plus the card produced a very ugly checkerboard effect on the golfer and other places where it was trying to anti-alias. I reported this to AMD in this thread:
https://community.amd.com/thread/249039
I returned the 5600XT and got a Radeon 590 which was the prior generation. That worked ok again with Links and the latest drivers, but it was overheating in other areas so that went back.
I then decided to try team Green for the first time in 12 years or so, and got a Geforce 2060. Apparently NVIDIA has long had problems with Links 2003 and anti-aliasing and I hit that, certain graphic elements are missing with AA turned on. However, you can get around this by turning on FXAA which applies an anti-aliasing to every pixel. This works better in fullscreen mode, NVIDIA now also has sharpening options so you can sharpen the image up a bit when using FXAA. Using NVIDIA you also get access to the opaque shadow for the golfer if you want. I urged NVIDIA to fix the problem too, here:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... links-2k3/
I don't have a late model AMD to see if they have fixed the issue yet w/ 20.03.1. NVIDIA is working alright w/ FXAA as mentioned for now. Good luck!