A quesiton about Doom III's Graphics

[PrayForDeath]

Can anyone explain to me what are the "Specular" and "Defuse" features in Doom III? I searched in many reviews about their meanings but I couldn't find any. Are they bump-mapping? Or what?
And does normal-map in Doom III mean detailed textures? Because I see no detailed textures in this game. This demo shows normal maps with different compression methods (3Dc, DXT) But the graphics in Doom III don't look like this at all, so I don't know where are the normal-maps in Doom III.
I also noticed that textures in Doom III have a very low resolution even on Ultra High! I mean if you stand close to any wall you'll see blurred textures unlike FarCry, I've attached some pics as examples, they were taken with Ultra High quality, so this (I assume) must be the maximum graphics quality, unless I am missing something!
1
2
3
And here's a pic from X-Bitls labs' review that showes bad textures too
Textures look okey from a distance, so I guess there's nothing wrong with my setup.

 

[reever]

Generally Doom3's textures are just bad, but the blockiness in pic 2 happens just because of the compression used in medium and low quality, going to high or ultra fixes it

 

[VIAN]

I didn't see it fixed at High Quality. I played the game at Medium. Medium Quality gives you the best Quality look with the best Performance. Then you can set AF yourself if you want it.

We've been playing with compressed textures for a long time, why stop now.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: VIAN
I didn't see it fixed at High Quality. I played the game at Medium. Medium Quality gives you the best Quality look with the best Performance. Then you can set AF yourself if you want it.

We've been playing with compressed textures for a long time, why stop now.

Yeah, I know, but why do FarCry's textures for example look far more detailed than Doom III's? You never see blurry textures in that game, and they say there are normal-maps in Doom III!
And can anyone explain for me those visual effects I mentioned before?

 

[Drayvn]

I think the reason why the textures dont have that much detail to them is the fact that much of the detail goes to the lighting of the normal maps, while in HL2 from what we can see now, is that faces and characters and stuff like that are very detailed but dont have any normal mapping, there ahs to be a balance, and Doom 3 is on the extreme of normal mapping while HL2 is on the extreme of detailed textures, u have to sacrifice a few things

As the the reason why Far Cry looks more detailed even tho it uses normal mapping, as normal mapping isnt used on all textures as with Doom 3, so the can balance the detail with the lighting of the normal maps, while the textures of the islands are just textures without normal mapping they can possibly use this overhead to increase the detail of the characters which have normal mapping, which means u have ok looking ground textures with high detailed normal mapped characters, u sacrifice here to get an improvement there, really, thats why i think there are differences....

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: Drayvn
I think the reason why the textures dont have that much detail to them is the fact that much of the detail goes to the lighting of the normal maps, while in HL2 from what we can see now, is that faces and characters and stuff like that are very detailed but dont have any normal mapping, there ahs to be a balance, and Doom 3 is on the extreme of normal mapping while HL2 is on the extreme of detailed textures, u have to sacrifice a few things

As the the reason why Far Cry looks more detailed even tho it uses normal mapping, as normal mapping isnt used on all textures as with Doom 3, so the can balance the detail with the lighting of the normal maps, while the textures of the islands are just textures without normal mapping they can possibly use this overhead to increase the detail of the characters which have normal mapping, which means u have ok looking ground textures with high detailed normal mapped characters, u sacrifice here to get an improvement there, really, thats why i think there are differences....

Well said, I guess you're right.
So normal maps are lighting that reflects off surfaces? And what about "Specular" and "Defuse"?

 

[VIAN]

Yeah, I know, but why do FarCry's textures for example look far more detailed than Doom III's? You never see blurry textures in that game, and they say there are normal-maps in Doom III!
And can anyone explain for me those visual effects I mentioned before?

Normal map compression technology sucks, that's why ATI released their lossless compression.

 

[OinkBoink]

guys with 6800's.crank up all ur settings to the HIGHEST(at ultra high quality).1600*1200,full AA,full AF,all effects on at max and everything.i noe u might get some 20 fps but plz take a pic and post it.

 

[reallyscrued]

doesnt AA blur it more?

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: VIAN

Yeah, I know, but why do FarCry's textures for example look far more detailed than Doom III's? You never see blurry textures in that game, and they say there are normal-maps in Doom III!
And can anyone explain for me those visual effects I mentioned before?

Normal map compression technology sucks, that's why ATI released their lossless compression.

But even without compression (Ultra High) the textures look blurred and bad.
And I don't think AA blurres more! It just softens the edges.
So, can anyone provide a link explaining (Normal maps) (Difuse) and (Specular)? I wanna know what they exactly are.

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: PrayForDeath
Yeah, I know, but why do FarCry's textures for example look far more detailed than Doom III's? You never see blurry textures in that game, and they say there are normal-maps in Doom III!
And can anyone explain for me those visual effects I mentioned before?

Far Cry has it's share of blury textures all over it too:

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2
3


You just don't see them as much because Far Cry doesn't use bumpmaps and speculars all over the place like doom3 and were Far Cry does they keep the texture variety low to compensate. As for the meanings of specular and defuse; those are terms you can find in any dictionary.

 

[PrayForDeath]

But you don't see blurry textures in "every" wall in FarCry unlike Doom III, and even when you do, they don't look as blurry as Doom III's.
And why do bumpmaps and speculars add blurriness to the textures?

 

[kylebisme]

The texutres i am aiming at in those pics look as blurry as anything in Far Cry to me, and i could surely spend all day taking shots of more textures like that if i wanted to.

As for why bumpmaping and specular highlights make texture blurry, they don't. The thing is, bumpmaping and specular highlights requre more memory; and, since our videocards only have so much ram to go around, you have to reduce the resolution of the textures to compensate.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Do not forget the detailed textures in FarCry, they add alot of realism for walls and objects, that's why there's not much bluriness in FarCry's textures. So ID wasn't able to add detailed textures to Doom III because that would take so much video memory combined with bumpmapping and specular, right?

 

[Insomniak]

High detail textures will always beat polygons, but Doom 3 DOES have high detail textures. You have to understand, diffuse maps, specular maps, etc are all texture data...they add to the way a texture is rendered. One might say that Doom 3 has the most detailed texture rendering ever done, if not the most detailed base art.

 

[Drayvn]

Originally posted by: TheSnowman

Originally posted by: PrayForDeath
Yeah, I know, but why do FarCry's textures for example look far more detailed than Doom III's? You never see blurry textures in that game, and they say there are normal-maps in Doom III!
And can anyone explain for me those visual effects I mentioned before?

Far Cry has it's share of blury textures all over it too:

1
2
3


You just don't see them as much because Far Cry doesn't use bumpmaps and speculars all over the place like doom3 and were Far Cry does they keep the texture variety low to compensate. As for the meanings of specular and defuse; those are terms you can find in any dictionary.

What settings did u take that at, becuase even the Ultra and XT cant run that high a frame rate with the highest res and with AA and AF turned on and set everything to ultra high?

 

[kylebisme]

Far Cry only goes up to "ultra high" for water and "very high" for everything else. As for my settings, i have all that all the way up with x2aa and x4af.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I beg to differ that normal map technology sucks. Take a look at the Unreal 3.0 engine, think normal maps suck now? Oh, and by the way, ATi's compression is not lossless, and also, it does the same thing normal mapping does (see next paragraph).

Ok, normal mapping is the card taking a low polygon/detail model and then calculating what an super-high polygon/detail model will look like and then coming up with a solution that looks super high polygon/detail, but is really using very few in comparison.

Specular is basically the shiny/reflective look that surfaces have.

Defuse is, I believe how lighting plays over surfaces (diffuses if you will). I'm probably wrong on this, though.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: darkswordsman17
I beg to differ that normal map technology sucks. Take a look at the Unreal 3.0 engine, think normal maps suck now? Oh, and by the way, ATi's compression is not lossless, and also, it does the same thing normal mapping does (see next paragraph).

Ok, normal mapping is the card taking a low polygon/detail model and then calculating what an super-high polygon/detail model will look like and then coming up with a solution that looks super high polygon/detail, but is really using very few in comparison.

Specular is basically the shiny/reflective look that surfaces have.

Defuse is, I believe how lighting plays over surfaces (diffuses if you will). I'm probably wrong on this, though.

Thanks! That was the information I've been waiting to know :thumbsup:

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: darkswordsman17
I beg to differ that normal map technology sucks. Take a look at the Unreal 3.0 engine, think normal maps suck now? Oh, and by the way, ATi's compression is not lossless, and also, it does the same thing normal mapping does (see next paragraph).

Yes, it does suck now.
Of course future tech is going to look better, it will also require more rendering power.

The theory is fine, but the ability to put it into practice isn't really there given the current tech.
I would say that Doom 3's engine, when used in the future, will probably look much better when devs can add more detailed textures and use normal maps, like what happened with the numberous Quake 3 engined games.
For now, in Doom 3, normals maps don't make up for crap textures.

 

[nvfx]

The guy only asked for the definition of compression and DXT stuff.

I need to know that too...

explain.

Ok, DOOM III is think uses 8x anisotropic filtering on High Quality settings internally.

So, dont think your running doom III at high settings thinking there are no AF options.

But than i have tried to set AF through driver upto 8x and the game goes super slow.

ATI catalyst 4.8

X800 Pro

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: nvfx
The guy only asked for the definition of compression and DXT stuff.

I need to know that too...

explain.

Ok, DOOM III is think uses 8x anisotropic filtering on High Quality settings internally.

So, dont think your running doom III at high settings thinking there are no AF options.

But than i have tried to set AF through driver upto 8x and the game goes super slow.

ATI catalyst 4.8

X800 Pro

That's weird because on my 9800 Pro, there's NO performance hit between 0xAF and 16xAF! But there IS image quality difference. That's on 1152x864 res