Graphic Cards and Normal Mapping?

Lore

I not sure if this should go in to the 2d/3d Discussion or here. So I’m putting it here unless you guys think this should be in the 2d/3d Discussion.

But here is my concern. My current Graphic cards (GeForce 2) can't calculate or apply Normal mapping nor display shaders in real time in the viewport. So I'm wonder what chipset and cards support Normal mapping and real-time shader support?

I’m also wondering what cards you are doing your normal maps with?

Thanks.

iMag

any card with pixel shader and vertex shader 1.0 support basically will allow normal mapping.

pretty much any card past the geforce 4's have the ability to display normal maps. as for what I use just a plain old geforce 4 ti4600.

EarthQuake

Actually any card that does DOT3 bump mapping will do normal mapping AFAIK, its specular that you need pixel shaders for. I ran ORB(open render bump http://engineering.soclab.bth.se/tools/177.aspx On my geforce 1 when i had it tho it was very very slow. Theres also a program to emulate geforce3/4/5/6 features as well you can get here: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvemulate.html just remember emulation is VERY SLOW. Havent used this one in a while but i got the doom3 alpha to run on geforce1 and a crappy geforce4mx that wasnt really supported at the time with a program similar.

I think pixel shader 1.0 started with geforce3s (1 and 2 had vertex shaders iirc) but if you're looking for a good cheap card i would say get a geforce fx 6600GT, it runs everyone out there today very well and at only $200. If thats out of your range you can pick up a ati raedon 9600 for about $80 on newegg and those are supposed to be good cards for the price. Whatever you do stay away from the low end cards like fx 5200 or fx 6200, they suck balls.

KDR_11k

Doom 3 works with GF2/GF4mx cards, too.