Image quality in Q3 arena - come in

[Sword]

I had some problem with my GeForce V6800 32Mb DDR in Quake III Arena in Win98 with this setup :

PIII550Mhz Katmai
P3BF
128Mb PC100
V6800 det 3 (6.xx)
Quantum Fireball CR
ASUS 40x

In fact, with the help of this forum and some try i finally found what was wrong :

You can setup Texture Filter to be Bilinear or Trilinear. If you choose Trilinear there are major graphical bugs but bilinear is OK.

In addition, the water and the sky are not or seems to be not well rendered.

BUT, what is really interesting is that i tried QIIIA on the same computer but in WinNT4.0 sp6A.

First the image quality is much better in WinNT4.0 but its slower too....

Second, i can use the Trilinear option in WinNT4.0....

Any comments or suggestion ??

Thank you

 

[RoboTECH]

not sure about the bilinear/trilinear thing, but the crappy sky (and water and wall textures, etc.) are caused by the poor implementation of texture compression the GeForce cards use.

search in your q3config.cfg for the following :

r_ext_compress_textures 1

turn it to "0"

you'll get a framerate hit bigtime on a 32MB DDr, unfortunately (That's why I grabbed a 64MB GTS)



good luck

 

[Sword]

not sure about the bilinear/trilinear thing, but the crappy sky (and water and wall textures, etc.) are caused by the poor implementation of texture compression the GeForce cards use.

Try the bilinear/trilinear thing please.

The crappy sky and water is no more in WinNT !!

 

[BFG10K]

Sword, either:

The Win NT drivers have actually fixed the DXTC bug with Q3 and your slowness is just a side effect of immature drivers on Win NT (good news!).

Or Q3 on Win NT is somehow already setup to not use DXTC, and this could also explain the slowness but higher image quality in Quake 3.

Do exactly as RoboTech suggests on both platforms and report back to us.

 

[Sword]

I try this this evening...

Thanks for the info guys

 

[dawks]

The proper term is S3TC

DXTC is used in DirectX. S3TC is used in OpenGL.

 

[RoboTECH]

aw, picky picky!

 

[Sword]

There is 0 fps difference in NT4 sp6a with s3tc on or off.
The image quality is the same with trilinear or bilinear BUT there is 5 fps difference between the 2 option.

I am using last ASUS driver, not the det3.


I will give more details soon with det 3 in win98SE

 

[BFG10K]

There is 0 fps difference in NT4 sp6a with s3tc on or off.

Yes but what is the picture quality of S3TC on/off on NT?

Give the new 6.26 drivers a go too.

The proper term is S3TC

Yes it is. I have just gone to edit another post where I made the same mistake.

 

[Sword]

I dont see any difference in image quality with s3tc in winnt40...

Is there a way to keep ASUS programs with det3 ?

 

[BFG10K]

I dont see any difference in image quality with s3tc in winnt40...

Well that could mean that the NT drivers have fixed the problem.

However you did mention that you get 0 fps difference between having it on/off. Run some Quake 3 benchmarks at High Quality, high res (1024 x 768 and above) with S3TC on and off, and post your results here.

Then we can look at your scores and see if they differ from the benchmarks on the web.