Polygons in Quake 3 sky with 9700 Pro?

[jakobkraft]

This is not helping to shape a positive opinion of ATI drivers; yes, it seems the dark legends are true. Having just gotten a 9700 Pro, my first ATI card, after testing all my other, more intensive games, went back to some Q3 strictly for fun, thinking that's the one game I wouldn't need to test since it's old and runs smoothly on most of today's cards...and wouldn't you know it - a problem. Polygonal lines in every sky of every outdoor map, including ID's. I uninstalled my old Nvidia drivers completely using Det. destroyers a second time, I uninstalled my Cat's 3.2 and reinstalled them and uninstalled and reinstalled Q3 and still same thing. If anyone else has had this problem can you please suggest a fix since ATI doesn't offer any help on their site....thanks. If there is no fix, guess I'll be returning this soon...

 

[kylebisme]

i have never heard of any such issue but the cat3.2's do have some other issues with opengl that i know of, i use the 3.1's and just tested out q3 to find everything working great.

 

[BFG10K]

I've never had any issues in Quake III with any of the drivers, right from the 2.2s to the 3.2s. Would you be able to post a screenshot? What are your system specs? Do you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers installed? Do you have any background programs (especially 3D tweakers) running?

And before anyone says it, no, it's not texture compression. I run the game using texture compression and it looks great.

 

[kylebisme]

r_ext_compress_textures looks fine but r_ext_compressed_textures give me ugly sky, no polgon lines but just blotchyness like was always the trouble on geforce cards. granted it is not like texture compresson is really neaded in q3 with a 128mb card though.

 

[BFG10K]

r_ext_compress_textures looks fine

That's the old command which no longer has any effect.

r_ext_compressed_textures give me ugly sky,

That's the one I use and it looks just fine.

no polgon lines but just blotchyness like was always the trouble on geforce cards.

It looks nowhere near as bad as non-GF4 cards. Not even close. Like I said before, I leave it on all the time.

 

[CraigRT]

do you guys think the 3.1 drivers are the best to use overall?
my 9700 pro will be here very soon

 

[oldfart]

The sky will always look worse with DXTC compression on any card. The GF2/3 cards were worse with the 16 bit rendering in DXTC 1. There is a hack to force DXTC 3 that works well. With cards as fast as they are now, there is no need to run compression in this game. Turn it off. "Sky quality" from best to worst goes something like this:

No compression
DXTC 3
DXTC 1 on non GF2/3
DXTC 1 on GF2/3 (butt ugly)

 

[kylebisme]

ah that is what i was guessing on the old command BFG, thanks for confirming that. as for compressed textures on, i noticed it right away and i think it looks pretty bad, although it has been a while sense i used a gefroce without the hack so i suppose i was probably exaggerating by comparing the two. seriously though, try turning of the compressed textures and note the sky looks less blotchy.