Capabilities

Back in the days of PCs and "PC Clones" Flight Simulator was the defacto standard for compatibility. If your clone ran FlightSim it was golden and everything would work. The FS team took compatibility seriously, and we worked really hard to work on as much hardware as possible, from a sales perspective (the bigger the addressable market the more sales) and from a brand marketing standpoint.

Being compatible with lots of different hardware got much easier when DirectX rolled out. First was DirectDraw for video cards, then DirectSound for audio and DirectPlay for input devices. It became Windows problem, and as long as the Windows hardware folks did their job it was much easier for us game developers. Now just because all video cards responded to the same API didn't mean they were all the same. They had different amounts of memory, different processors, and generally speaking, different capabilities. And of course as developers we were supposed to take advantage of all of them AND give the user the ability to turn things on/off iif they wanted to trade visual realism for frame rate.

DirectX had a feature that helped us out, the CapabilityBits. Basically you could query the driver and it would return a list of things it could do and features it supported. Great idea, right? Check what you can do, then only do those things. Simple.

Or not. Every bit of information in that structure was true. The OEM support team made sure of that. But they didn't validate all the possible combinations. On some cards you could have stencil buffers and you could have depth buffers, but you couldn't have both. Maximum texture memory was accurately reported, but only achievable if you didn't use a depth buffer. Double buffering rarely caused any other degradations, but if you wanted to triple buffer then all bets were off.

So what did we do? We built our own compatibility lab and started to document the interactions between the capability bits. And then we used that matrix to define recommended and possible settings for different graphics cards.

So in the words of the old Russian proverb, Trust, but verify. Just because you know something is true in isolation doesn't mean it's true in combination with other things.