What is force mipmap? And is it worth using?

[FearoftheNight]

Hi guys.
In the driver settings, how do I enable: trilineear optimizations, anisotropic optimizations, anti-alising optimizations? The driver won't let me adjust the tabs. Should I turn them on? THanks.

Edit: What about forced mipmap?

 

[McArra]

Put the slider in Quality, not High Quality. That way you can enable them.

 

[FearoftheNight]

Is it worth enabling these optimizations? What about the foce mipmap? How big are the performance increases compared to the image quality losses? Thanks .

 

[McArra]

The IQ with optimizations on is very good for me at least. I don't know what Force Mipmap is, I have it off.

 

[FearoftheNight]

Anyone know about forced mipmap?

 

[biostud]

Mipmapping is when there's different textures for an object. When you're far away it uses a low resolution, as you get closer it switches for higher resolution textures. It saves video memory. I don't know if it would benefit to force it or or not, I would leave it on off.

 

[FearoftheNight]

thanks...does can anyone shed more light on the mipmapping situation?

 

[Slappy00]

just like biostud says, mipmapping forces the video card to use degraded textures for objects that are far away, if you are playing a fast pased game where textures are constantly getting loaded into memory (esp in FPS games) and you have to vew things at a distance, then mipmapping might give you a boost in performance, but then again my conclusion is purely speculative.

 

[uOpt]

Mipmapping is not about speed or memory saving but for quality. In fact a texture with its full mipmap childs takes up exactly twice the memory than the original texture.

Carefully pre-scaled textures look much better than a fullres textures just rammed into 1/100th its native resolution, that is why you use mipmaps.

What excatky the "forced" means I'm not sure. The name implies that even if the application doesn't ask for mipmapping the card will just always do it, aka on texture loading you just always generate mipmap textures of it.

I feel confident to say this will improve visual quality of old games, at the cost of performance and memory but for older games you probably have overkill hardware anyway. It will probably do nothing for newer games that are ware of mipmapping and it will most probably not do anything for a game using mipmapping.