   Render to Depthstencil on older hardware?
  I''m trying to get my game to work on older hardware and I''m running into an issue that for shadow mapping my voodoo5500 doesn''t have the ability to make a texture with the usage parameter D3DUSAGE_DEPTHSTENCIL. Is there anyway to do shadow mapping on older hardware without a depth stencil?~Wave 
  You can always render to color buffer. But, you`ll need pixel shaders then Do D3DUSAGE_DEPTHSTENCIL rendering work on Radeon8500/9000?;  Well the issue is more the access to the depth buffer. See you can render to a depth buffer but then accessing it for the use of as shadow map is not there. I''m pretty sure the 8500 and 9000 can do D3DUSAGE_DEPTHSTENCIL but weather it can make a lockable depth buffer is the problem. The thing is that Nvidia cards have overloaded their depth buffer type so that you can actually get access to these depth buffers but it doesn''t work on ati cards. I came across this topic:http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=194355it brings up the issue. I was reading the paper "Hardware Shadow Mapping" from the nvidia site and they mention how they can overload the depth buffer and I thought that this capability was on all cards but I should''ve guessed it was only on nvidia Geforce cards.I''m actually working on a work around currently that will allow for shadow maps on older hardware. I''ll post my findings. 