Digit Life's Sapphire Review

They don't appreciate that the control panel AF is doing. Because they only 'see' it with UT2003 they think that this is a specific case.
 
DaveBaumann said:
They don't appreciate that the control panel AF is doing. Because they only 'see' it with UT2003 they think that this is a specific case.

Well, as they mention, it is a bit strange that in Unreal II (same engine and which also isn't as commonly used as a benchmark) the aniso forced through the control panel works just fine.
 
its not necessarily a question of what engine it uses, its a question of what textures are used and how they are applied in the specific game - does Unreal 2 use detail textures? Are they the same type? are they applied in a similar fashion?

You might want to take a read in the tech forum - someone asked why this was occuring on their flight sim engine a few months back.

I'm told digit have updated this review now anyway
 
McElvis said:
I thought this quote from their review was a rather different stance to take -

In general, everyone is guilty including the game developers

:eek:
DAMN THOSE EVIL GAME DEVELOPERS AND THEIR CHEATING WAYS!!!!!! :devilish:

Wait a minute, how can a game dev cheat? Isn't it like automatically an optimization if a game dev incorporates a performance short-cut/optimization?
 
DaveBaumann said:
its not necessarily a question of what engine it uses, its a question of what textures are used and how they are applied in the specific game - does Unreal 2 use detail textures? Are they the same type? are they applied in a similar fashion?

You might want to take a read in the tech forum - someone asked why this was occuring on their flight sim engine a few months back.

I'm told digit have updated this review now anyway

Ok, read the update. But doesn't the question still remain. Should it really be different from game to game ?

And maybe Ati's isn't saying that you will get full trilinear when you select quality but they do say highest quality possible which isn't necessarily the case depending on the game. What i want to know then is, is there anything in this game that stops Ati from enabling full trilinear when you select quality ?

Anyway, i remember that Open GL guy mentioned that there was a possibility for another (or more ?) options with regards to aniotropic filtering which i'm guessing will get rid of this "problem".
 
And maybe Ati's isn't saying that you will get full trilinear when you select quality but they do say highest quality possible which isn't necessarily the case depending on the game. What i want to know then is, is there anything in this game that stops Ati from enabling full trilinear when you select quality ?

If you want full trilinear then use application preference. Ati has stated multiple times that they don't recommend using the control panel to set AA and AF options, it is supposed to be a last choice for games that don't have the options built in. Ati's stance has been to use Application prefrence whenever possible and choose your options in the game in order to have the graphics as the game developers intended. They have not made this a secret.
 
Bjorn said:
DaveBaumann said:
They don't appreciate that the control panel AF is doing. Because they only 'see' it with UT2003 they think that this is a specific case.

Well, as they mention, it is a bit strange that in Unreal II (same engine and which also isn't as commonly used as a benchmark) the aniso forced through the control panel works just fine.

well it doesn't ,U2 has the same problem as ut2k3.

You can use tweakers like rtool(http://exxtreme78.bei.t-online.de/DE/rTool-setup.exe) to set tril/AF on every texture stage , maybe digit-life is to stupid to use it. I remember that i/they had to use rivatuner for years to even use AF in D3D on nvidia cards , digit-life never had any complaints about that of course.

digit-life is not much better than [H]
 
This is partially of Epic's doing as they allow you to set AF via manual editing of the ini file, but don't provide a corresponding control in-game. I thought Digit-Life was right in that regard.

My favorite quote:

[url=http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/radeon/r9800pro-ue.html said:
Digit-Life[/url] (end of UT2K3 section)]NVIDIA: there are cheats as usual...
:LOL:
 
Bjorn said:
Ok, read the update. But doesn't the question still remain. Should it really be different from game to game ?

Might as well ask, "Shouldn't all 3D games be alike?"...;)

All 3D games do things differently from each other in some regard. IHV drivers which work properly in displaying FSAA'ed fonts in one 3D game fail to do so in another--and the IHV implements what's known as a bug-fix in its drivers specific to the application that fixes the problem. That's because 3D games are coded differently, even 3D games which use the same game engine. It's important to remember that even using the same engine such games are different pieces of software, put together by differing individuals (programmers) who have techniques, approaches and preferences that are often as unique as fingerprints.

I remember with my GF3/4 (not sure which) I used one of Unwinder's RT versions which provided for, among other things, the ability to force AF on various texture stages, up to all four, as I recall. I experimented with the option in several pieces of software and found that there were few, if any, that benefitted in IQ improvement from the default setting of 1st stage AF to setting it up for stages 2-4 additionally, in any order. But I did in several games as I recall notice a measurable performance hit when going beyond 1st-stage texture treatment. So I wound up going back to driver defaults of 1st-stage AF treatment.

Ideally, we'd all be able to set our driver control panels to Application Preference and adjust whatever settings we'd like from within the application. But unfortunately most 3D games, especially older ones, don't allow for that. So, the IHVs compensate by designing in overrides to force the settings we want by way of the control panel. When they do so, they have to try and predict the most likely settings for the bulk of games which can only be controlled through the control panel. In this case ATi made the choice of doing it for the first stage only, and as it turns out this is a very good choice, as as far as I know, UT2K3, because of the unique way in which it layers textures in the game, is the only game for which this isn't sufficient. If 3D games were coded properly in this respect we could set each one up internally and never have to leave the game to return to the control panel to change settings--since we could set up all of our games individually from within.

So with respect to UT2K3 and the current Cats, to get full trilinear it is necessary to turn it on from within the game, using the UT2K3.ini, because of the difference in which UT2K3 layers its textures compared to most other 3D games (if not all of them.) Folks should understand that because all 3D games are programmed by differing individuals the only thing an IHV can do through the control panel is attempt to force a setting in a game based on an estimation of what all programmers will do.

In UT2K3 the Cat control panel instructs the driver to treat only the first texture stage. But when UT2K3 itself instructs the driver, it tells the driver to treat stage one and stage three (or whatever the other stages may be.) It's really that simple. [What's so very different about the Detonator behavior here is that when UT2K3 tells the nVidia driver "Give me treatment on stages 1 & 3" the driver is hard-coded to ignore that command, and substitutes something else.]

The point is not that full trilinear in the game isn't possible from the CAT control panel, the point is that it *is possible* to get full trilinear from within the game itself from the CATs. The only difference is in the instruction provided the driver.

In a sense, I blame Epic since they are bound to know that their texture layering scheme differs from most games, even from other UT2K3-engine games like Unreal 2. I'd like to see them do up a little GUI for people to adjust the .ini settings--as it seems so many seem to find it overly complex as a text file. It's really a problem of assigning responsibility to the developer for the support of IQ settings within its game, I think. But as long as developers continue to skimp in this area, the IHVs will have to plod along as best they can, making correct guesses when they can and doing per-application bug fixes when they can't.
 
Bjorn said:
You might want to take a read in the tech forum - someone asked why this was occuring on their flight sim engine a few months back.

The process applied is no different from game to game - if you enable "Quality" AF texture stage 0 has Trilinear applied and all other stages have bilinear, so there will be a Bilinear and Trilinear blend - again, in all applications. What you should be asking is "Why is this evident in some applications and not others", and thats probably down to the textures in operation and how they are applied - and in UT's case, the interaction with the mip colours could be another issue.
 
DaveBaumann said:
The process applied is no different from game to game - if you enable "Quality" AF texture stage 0 has Trilinear applied and all other stages have bilinear, so there will be a Bilinear and Trilinear blend - again, in all applications. What you should be asking is "Why is this evident in some applications and not others", and thats probably down to the textures in operation and how they are applied - and in UT's case, the interaction with the mip colours could be another issue.

Ok, so Ati is consistent, but the games are not. All we need now then is (the semi promised :)) a option for forcing trilinear on all stages and then we can all be happy :)
 
Bjorn said:
Ok, so Ati is consistent, but the games are not. All we need now then is (the semi promised :)) a option for forcing trilinear on all stages and then we can all be happy :)

As has already been pointed out, thats already available to tweaker apps or those that want to edit the registry. Given its already there that may not be exactly what ATI were talking about when they mentioned more controls.
 
Bjorn said:
Ok, so Ati is consistent, but the games are not. All we need now then is (the semi promised :)) a option for forcing trilinear on all stages and then we can all be happy :)

But...would you be happy if you forced filtering on all texture stages when the game's rendering engine only displays filtering for a single stage, and your performance plummeted with no increase in IQ?
 
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