Doom III display questions

[Jim Bancroft]

I have an A64 with a Leadtek 6600GT. When I run in high-quality mode @800x600 things are good, but if I go to ultra quality I get a fair amount of frame stutter and jumpiness....can someone point out the differences between the two modes? I'm not complaining, or expecting a smooth ride at ultra quality, just curious. Thanks.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.

High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.

Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.

Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.

Robert Duffy

- M4H

 

[blurredvision]

Since it's been a while since the whole Doom 3 excitement, I can't prove what I'm about to say. But from what I remember and what screenshots I saw, even the most discerning eyes are hard pressed to see a tangible difference between screenshots of High and Ultra quality modes. I say don't even bother with ultra quality, as it's not worth the performance hit you may incur.

 

[BFG10K]

You'll need a card with 512 MB VRAM to run Ultra quality properly.

 

[biostud]

Ultra is a very small improvement, mostly the textures hasn't been compressed so as BFG10K said 512 mb Vram.