K1 Modern Driver Compatibility

K1 Modern Driver Compatibility is a patch for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic that restores the game’s full lighting on current graphics drivers.

The Lower Shadowlands on Kashyyyk, distant fog and grass are rendered incorrectly and missing. — The Lower Shadowlands. Without the patch, no grass is drawn, and the distant fog doesn't blend properly.

The same location, with grass covering the ground, and the distant fog rendering correctly. — The Lower Shadowlands. Without the patch, no grass is drawn, and the distant fog doesn't blend properly.

KOTOR supports two ways of shading each pixel, one from ATI and one from NVIDIA. AMD’s and Intel’s Windows drivers offer neither, so on those drivers the game draws with much of its lighting off: lightmapped surfaces ignore the lights in the room, shiny surfaces lose most of their reflection, there is no bump lighting, no soft shadows, and no screen effects, and the grass stretches into the sky. The patch rebuilds the game’s lighting on GL_ARB_fragment_program, which AMD’s, Intel’s, and NVIDIA’s drivers and Mesa all carry, and puts every card on that path.

Where to start

To play, install the patch. You don’t need anything else to play.
To see what changes, read What the patch fixes, which covers each fix with a comparison.
If something looks wrong, send logs/K1DriverCompat.log from the game folder. The log holds one session. Settings lists the settings that help narrow down a fault.
To understand the problem, read Why the game looked wrong and How the patch works.
To make mods that use normal maps or the game’s other unused rendering, read Lighting for mods works.
To change how the game looks, read Replacement shaders. To change the patch itself, read Building.

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K1 Modern Driver Compatibility

K1 Modern Driver Compatibility

Where to start