It seems that ATI's new Truform technology for virtual enhancing of 3D models in realtime is already catching on a month before the Radeon 8500 even ships. An article on VoodooExtreme has pointed out a forum thread that links to a patch for the PC OpenGL version of Unreal Tournament. This patch, combined with some "leaked" ATI drivers, allows users of current Radeon cards (the original, not the upcoming 8500) to use Truform model enhancement in the game.

As discussed in our preview of the new chipset, Truform is a technology which enhances the resolution of game models by essentially averaging a model's existing polygons into "high-order" curved surfaces, simulating a much higher-poly model. The result, as you can see from some of the example images posted, is a smoother, curvier model which has much more realistic lighting effects.

This patch is only for the PC version of UT, and does seem to cause a big performance hit because it is not running on the Radeon 8500, as intended, but on the original Radeon. However the fact that it works at all is remarkable and is a sign that ATI might migrate this technology to the entire Radeon product line through future driver updates.

As the server with the original thread is very busy, we have linked to two of the example images below. Be sure and open each in a separate window and do a comparison, as the difference is quite remarkable. With any luck this Truform-enabled patch will migrate over to the Mac OS version of the game -- perhaps when the Carbon version of the game is complete.

ATI Radeon 8500 Preview

UT Trueform Renderer at VoodooExtreme

Unreal Tournament "Before" Image

Unreal Tournament with Truform Enabled

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