Dawn ATI Fling Official

Dawn was beautiful, ethereal and possessed a certain graceful quality, possibly due to her amazing resemblance to T'Pol from TV's Enterprise. Most importantly Dawn belonged to nVidia, but how can you hope to confine such a unique creature to one family of graphic cards. A group of MIT engineering students decided that they would offer Dawn her freedom and created an OpenGL wrapper that allows any ATI DX9 video card owner to run nVidia's amazing Dawn demo.

The real story behind the development of this wrapper is rumoured to be the disappointment the students felt at the performance of nVidia boards while playing the demo. The wrapper has been tested on a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB DDR II by Rage 3D and was found to work very well.

nVidia are bound to be extremely disappointed by this development, especially if some claims that the demo performs better on ATI cards, see below, persist.

These are some unconfirmed features added to the dawn demo by the use of ATI cards:

-It runs 15 per cent faster than NV30 on the 9800pro, and it also runs faster than NV35
-Creates higher quality images than the original due to the normalization being done in a fragment program (dp3/rsq/mul) instead of in a normalization cubemap which the FX extensions does directly in hardware
-The OpenGL wrapper adds more overhead, as it has to interperet code calls for Nvidia extensions and map them to ATI/ARB extensions, and yet it still runs faster on the ATI card, due to its more sophisticated pixel shader engine.

Requirements

A graphic card that supports GL_ARB_*_program and GL_ATI_vertex_array_object
Nvidia Dawn Demo
512MB System Memory
Patch works with the following chipsets
R350 based cards
R300 based cards
RV350 based cards
M10 chipset

Installation

Unzip and place opengl32.dll into the bin directory of the installed demo. Default example would be c:program filesnvidia corporationnvidia demosdawnbin

How to change resolutions

Select properties for the args.txt or args_ultra.txt in the bin directory and deselect Read-only attribute
Change to desired resolution which has the commented line "// Window width/height", default resolution is 1024x768
Go back to properties and select Read-only attribute

Experienced issues

Selecting Wireframe mode or Point mode under Drawstyle results in the demo crashing
The dll does not work with other GeForce FX demos