Anybody have any ideas about the new pvrdev kyro drivers?

[Tygrus_Artesiaoa]

There is a new set of kyro drivers at their Dev site. Anybody have a clue what are the fixes for, I dunno if it would be even feasible for performance gains unless they did something radical in the drivers which I doubt since performance has been similar last couple versions?
BTW some site in a review lately on AF had some kyro AF pics, personally I've used it and prefer the option in d3d that auto mip maps since it seemed detail was much enhanced. Its also an option that can be done globally.
That and AF had a similar hit to AA in my kyro and kyro2.

 

[Tagrineth]

AF kills Kyro's performance... Brutal bloody screaming death. Even in DOOM Legacy...

The 1.6's seem to be a little smoother in UT2k3 OGL. A little. Maybe.

 

[Tygrus_Artesiaoa]

hmm

I mainly tested it's AF with Slave Zero and JK2

btw do you have the web page url of the site that was working on the 3dfx v 1.09x drivers with Aqueous or well he was the head man...I seem to have lost the url somewhere...and I know you might have it, no seeing as you've posted about them before

Thanks.

 

[Gubbi]

You need to force texture compression. Then AF becomes almost free.

Cheers
Gubbi

 

[GetStuff]

You need to force texture compression. Then AF becomes almost free.

I thought that was trilinear filtering that became free?

 

[Tygrus_Artesiaoa]

about kyro/2 and AF

texture compression was enabled via config files for both games. While it did make Trilinear free, it doesn't make anisotropic filtering free at all. Kyro/2 SuperSampling AntiAliasing is just a tad cheaper than it's AF with texture compression on including light maps, rgb maps, etc.
BTW my kyro and kyro2 really do need compression on for smooth gameplay in max detail textures for JK2. Doing that increases load times but textures are better. Too bad that with Kyro/2 you can really tell that compression is on if you were to be scenic. Then again I try to only be scenic when I've killed everything in sight.
Ideally one day maybe we'll get lossless compression. DXTC3 ain't bad but I still can see it. And IQ can be seen when compression is on vs off. Even DXTC3 in 32 bit. Ati cards for me seem the cleanest, then NV...then we'll it doesn't really matter after those eh. Oh haven't checked out Parhelia, or S2000, or sis 315/xabre.
Compression on the V5 is pretty necessary to run many games. Unfortunately because of the many passes the cards often have to do to render...that can muck things up as well.

 

[Tagrineth]

You need to force texture compression. Then AF becomes almost free.

Cheers
Gubbi

Hardly. AF is a complete performance masher on K2 no matter what you do, oddly enough.

And I always force texture compression if it isn't an in-game option...

 

[Gubbi]

Hmm, It's 4 months ago since my K2 fried, but as I remembered AF only cost me 10-15% in Counter Strike when enabled (texture compression on, dont compress lightmaps on). But then again I always played in 800x600 to ensure a 100 FPS frame rate. Of course today I play in 1280x960 with 6xFSAA and 16x AF and it's smoother 8)

Cheers
Gubbi

 

[Simon F]

Re: about kyro/2 and AF

... BTW my kyro and kyro2 really do need compression on for smooth gameplay in max detail textures for JK2. Doing that increases load times but textures are better. Too bad that with Kyro/2 you can really tell that compression is on if you were to be scenic. Then again I try to only be scenic when I've killed everything in sight.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by scenic - I presume that you are saying you can see compression artefacts - i.e. a loss of quality.
When you force texture compression in the drivers, it uses a 'cheap and cheerful' compression routine. Obviously a better quality compressor could be used, such as that used by developers during the artwork creation process, but that would mean much slower texture loads.

DXTC3 ain't bad but I still can see it.

I said, a better compressor could help. FWIW, DXT3 (8bpp) is identical in quality to the much cheaper DXT1 (4bpp) for opaque textures. It's just rather unfortunate that a leading IHV compromised the DXT1 quality which made a lot of developers use DXT3 which ironically was not flawed.

Ideally one day maybe we'll get lossless compression.

Lossless compression means that in a lot of cases you'd get very little compression . Look at PNG for example. You'd be lucky to get a 50% reduction in image size and, furthermore, AFAIK it's not of any use for a texturing system as random access of pixels is impossible.

There are arguably better lossy compression systems but whether they get adopted into DX is another matter.

 

[Gubbi]

Also, regarding compression of texturesand artifacts, make sure that the "dont compress lightmaps" tab i checked. In older drivers, there were no such options. Enabling compression would make simple textures (like concrete floor tiles) multicoloured (from yellow to blue). This I never understood as DXT should be perfectly capable of encoding lightmaps in shades of grey.

Cheers
Gubbi