How to get the up to 40% gain on ATI w/o shader replacement

Discussion in 'PC Gaming' started by Ruined, Aug 11, 2004.

  1. nggalai

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    Well, the first sentence would be quite sad, no? I mean, if you force AF through the Control Panel and ALL textures get filtered, I'd expect better quality in any game that, in-application, only filters one or two texture stages. ;)

    I think the issue here is the white dots and artefacts you mentioned in the other thread when running DooM3 with AF application controlled. Which does look somewhat like a bug to me, as I wasn't able to see those issues on either NV or Matrox hardware. No artefacts there when using in-game AF.

    93,
    -Sascha.rb

    P.S. The Parhelia runs the game very, very, very slowly for me. Quite sad indeed. -.rb
     
  2. KimB

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    If I remember correctly, the Parhelia has four textures per pixel pipeline. This is pretty absurdly inefficient for DOOM3-style rendering.
     
  3. KimB

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    By the way, there appear to be similar performance differences on nVidia hardware between application AF and control panel AF as well.
     
  4. TheAlSpark

    TheAlSpark Moderator
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    how about image quality?
     
  5. nggalai

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    Yes, same here and all over our forums, too. Seems as if Doom3 only filters diffuse (and perhaps normal map?) anisotropically when set in-game.

    No artefacts, though. Image quality looks about the same to me between CP and in-game AF.

    93,
    -Sascha.rb
     
  6. TheAlSpark

    TheAlSpark Moderator
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    Does that include smooth mip-map transitions? and thanks for checking :)
     
  7. nggalai

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    Yes. Albeit only if I leave the "Image Quality" slider in the NV control panel on "Quality". Anything below that -> Mipmap banding from Hell(tm).

    I do have slight issues with moiree patterns on the grate floor textures, though. No matter what settings I use, either in the CP or in-game. Anybody seen something similar? I couldn't check it on the Parhelia, as I've only had a couple of minutes at it (visited a friend of mine).

    93,
    -Sascha.rb
     
  8. fish99

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    ruined/

    What you seem to be suggesting is that the humus tweak will only work if AF is forced on (to whatever setting) in the CP, but I've always had AF on application preference and I still got an FPS improvement with the humus tweak.
     
  9. TheAlSpark

    TheAlSpark Moderator
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    hm.... interesting.... could you take a screenshot please? Maybe... in the same area as that screenshot someone took in Humus' thread (comparing the AF in CP versus appPref)?

    This could just be worth an argument, but I just would like to see if you don't mind taking the time... :)
     
  10. nggalai

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    Yup, will do so tomorrow--I'm sitting at my Linux box right now, and id still hasn't released the binaries. :D

    93,
    -Sascha.rb
     
  11. Ruined

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    I'm suggesting you will only get the advertised "40%" boost from the original Humus thread if AF is forced on with the CP (instead of using application preference and DoomConfig.cfg settings). Without that, you might get a small boost of 1-2fps with the Humus tweak, but thats not the huge boost Humus was talking about.
     
  12. TheAlSpark

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  13. Ruined

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    If you like I could provide the reference screenie
     
  14. TheAlSpark

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    Do you also see the thing that nggalai sees :?:

    :)
     
  15. Ruined

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    No, i didn't notice any visual artifacting.
     
  16. fish99

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    Ok, that's fair enough. Still, a few fps (or just one) is worth having :lol:
     
  17. Humus

    Humus Crazy coder
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    Yes, but that's normal. It's a general problem with per-pixel lighting, especially with specular and repeative high frequency bumpmaps. It's something I constantly have to fight for my demos. There are some ways to reduce it, but it can be quite a bit more costly. NVidia have a paper on a technique for reducing specular artifacting in per-pixel lighting. I've tried it out with decent results, but it doesn't solve it 100%. I have meant to write a demo using that technique, but I haven't gotten around to do that. Maybe I'll spend some time with it this weekend.
     
  18. Illestone

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    Okay, I could be wrong, but isn't ingame AF bilinear and CP AF trilinear?

    Also, doesn't the CP apply AF to EVERYTHING, therefore making it look better?

    So a 1-2fps increase, and you get trilinear and AF applyed to everything for free? Seems a good trade to me....

    Correct me if I'm wrong, i'm noobish....
     
  19. Ruined

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    Only for ATI cards, and this looks like a seperate bug as performance between ingame AF and CP AF is the same when the "Humus Tweak" is used despite the difference in IQ.

    In this case it presumably applies it to all stages of the tex lookup table, which would really yield no benefit and a speed decrease. By eliminating the tex lookup table, Humus' tweak gets around this. You can similarly get around this using Application AF, as the app will not ask for full AF on all stages of the tex lookup table.

    Well, ideally ATI should fix whatever is causing their degraded IQ in their OpenGL driver with Application AF - Nvidia cards do not suffer from the same artifacting. If that can be done, ATI users can then use Doom3's original lighting and get similar performance (trilinear + "Free" AF) as the Humus tweak (minus 1-2fps) by using Application AF.

    In other words, unmodified Doom3 v1.0 will run just fine on ATI cards with Application AF, assuming the filtering IQ bug in ati's driver is fixed in the next release.

    Also, its worth noting that the official Doom3 benchmarks were not affected performance wise by the CP issue or Humus Tweak, as HardOCP used Application AF to conduct the benchmarks. ATI users using CP-AF were actually getting performance below that of HardOCP's benchies, and this is what Humus' tweak (and this thread's tweak) alleviates.
     
  20. phial

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    I think this whole "application preference" AF performance increase is FUD


    I had it set to AP AF before in the COntrol Panel, and used the Doomconfig file to set the degree of filtering. this was before the mod was released. Putting the original shader mod (the POW one, none of the others seem to work as good) into the Pak000 file gave me INSTANT and very CLEAR increases in framerates.
     
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