Tag Archives: shadow mapping

Catalyst 7.9 and Radeon 2K Shadow Mapping Bug

I found this bug while I was coding a new small soft shadows demo for GPU Caps Viewer. Soft shadows are built on shadow mapping and my OpenGL shadow mapping code works perfectly on all Geforce 6/7/8 and Radeon 1k but not on Radeon 2K (2400/2600/2900). Why ? Because of the shadow mapping comparison function that had a serious bug! To be short, the comparison function was supposed to return a boolean value (if shadow returns 0, else returns 1) and before Catalyst 7.9, this function returned, for Radeon 2K, the depth buffer value (as if the comparison function was disabled). But this bug is now a memory since Catalyst 7.9 has fixed it.

I guess we can say thanks to Quake Wars, that has been released few days ago and that is an OpenGL game. For this game (that is really nice), ATI has fixed all major OpenGL bugs.