nVidia Texture Compression Article

[BenSkywalker]

GameBasement has an update to their nV compression article, it is more in depth and they produce an answer as to what is causing it, click here for the article.

 

[Czar]

thats one good article, explains everything, its all about drivers and Quake3 coding

 

[oldfart]

Yes, very interesting. Looks like the S3TC driver that Nvidia uses doesn't do real time compression very well at all. The Radeon and V5 5500 have no problem since they use a better TC method.

 

[AngelOfDeath]

Yes, that's a damn good article, and quite enlightning. Nice with writers knowning how to describe things in a way so that even dumb @ss like I can understand it

AoD

 

[NFS4]

Damn good article

 

[BFG10K]

First, and most importantly, the huge variation we are seeing in texture compression quality in Quake 3 is not due to faulty hardware implementations.

I am glad I was right about this and that it can be put to rest. I must admit for a brief time I was worried that maybe the issue was a combination of Quake 3 and nVidia's hardware, but I am glad it wasn't.

Also it looks like nVidia's drivers are at fault when the real-time compression takes place. I can't believe they left this problem for so long. They had better fix it because they are going to annoy more and more people with it.

 

[Goi]

BFG10K: Well if they're actually following the S3TC algorithm by the book like the article said they were doing, then I don't think they're obliged to do anything about it. They are, after all, doing the right thing, although it might not look good. Of course, they could come up with some sort of a hack in their drivers to improve the image quality like a slider or some sort.

 

[jpprod]

Very good article, especially since it confirms what I've been saying about the issue

But what's up with the compressed lightmaps? Seeing that framerates don't dip dramatically as dynamic lights are being used, how on earth does Quake III handle realtime lighting without updating the S3TC'd lightmap texture? Is there a seperate light texture being blended with static lightmap instead of direct, procedural texture manipulation (latter is how I understood dynamic light mapping to work)? Or does Quake III use a completely seperate dynamic lightmap layer?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Jukka-

"Or does Quake III use a completely seperate dynamic lightmap layer?"

That's how I always thought it worked??

There has been an update to the article with some screenshots from StarTrek Elite Forces added in, the game is based on the Quake3 engine but seems to be significantly less problematic(and from the demo seems to be a decent game).

 

[glen]

off topic, but you need to download the demo of StarTrek Elite Forces.

I got scared when the Borg were chasing me and telling me, "Resistance is Futile."

This is a must see demo.
I have enjoyed Deus Ex more, but the graphics of StarTrek Elite Forces are better.