John Carmack admits Texture Compression Broken in Quake3

[CyberSax]

Found this little tidbit in the readme file of the latest version of Quake3:

/r_ext_compress_textures was renamed to r_ext_compressed_textures and
defaulted to 0. If you are using an S3 video card, you will want this to be set to 1. All other users should set it to the default of 0.

That's not good :Q

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Texture compression works fine on all the latest gen cards. nVidia's cards seem to have the texture corrupting problem, but other than that, I can't imagine why JC would promote keeping it set to 0.

 

[EMAN]

Because Nvidia pays him

 

[Sunner]

Umm, yeah, right.
The man drives a F50 to work, somehow I dont think nVidia could pay him enough money for him to care, otherwise M$ would have bought him looong ago.

 

[EMAN]

Why does it matter what car he drives. Nvidia pays him to say two simples words. "Compression Broken"

Was it so hard? Gets another F50 just for saying 2 words. Wouldn't you say it???

Hiring him as a programmer and saying some bull crap is a differenct field.

He doesn't have to work so hard to say 2 lousy words.

 

[oldfart]

Q3 TC is not broken. It works just fine on video cards that use a good TC method. S3TC is broken. Nvidia uses S3TC. 3DFX and ATI use better methods. Theirs work just fine. All the info here.

 

[Sunner]

You really have no clue what a F50 costs do you?

Anyway, for the people who cant read between the lines, what I was saying is that I think he has more integrity as a programmer than to sell himself for a sum thats probabaly no more than pocket change to him.

 

[Mem]

LOL...EMAN how much is 3DFX paying you to say that?

 

[RoboTECH]

uh.....Carmack said nothing at all about Q3's TC being broke. Nothing.

It's nvidia's (and S3's, apparently) method of realtime compression that is broken. The 5500 and the Radeon have far better image quality when TC is enabled than the GTS. I'm not speaking out my ass, nor about what I've read, I'm speaking about what I've SEEN with my own eyes.

In UT, using the precompressed textures on the 2nd CD, the GTS looks great using the exact same TC scheme (S3TC). In Q3, where compression of textures is necessary, the GTS looks like hell and the 5500 and Radeon look fine.

so, TC isn't "broke" in Q3, realtime TC is "broke" on S3 and GeForce cards.

 

[Zenith]

For everyone's information the texture problem with nVidia cards doesn't only appear in Q3, ever played Motocross Madness 2? The textures look like sheit when compression is on. Futhermore let's not asume that everyone always is for sale.

Just my 2c.

 

[EMAN]

Mem, LOL $.02

 

[EMAN]

yikes, First douple post.