New matrox drivers have texture compression

[Rob M.]

I've enabled my 32-bit z-buffer.

Maybe it's possible it's only been implemented for non-intel chipsets. i know when I had a BX board I could put the detail slider to the max and there wouldn't be much of a performance hit, whereas on my via board I lost 10 fps.

[dZeus]

when you start q3a, scroll up in the console to see if you can see this: "GL_s3_s3tc not found", just after Q3A initialises OpenGL.

If you can find that, you don't have S3TC.

[Alec]

I went to check that, and that message was there, too.

I don´t believe the speed comes from texture compression, otherwise the GL extension would have to be there. Also, I tried 32-bit and the sky was looking the same as ever, with no pixelation or dithering.

[wumpie leBeumb]

Call me ignorant but,
what has the Z-buffer to do with the color depth of the textures in a game ?

[atko]

Me and my friend wrote a small D3D application which detemined what kind of texture modes were supported by G400 and the new 6.10PD.
Matrox G400 and PD 6.10 supports 11 texture modes (9 RGB, 2 YUV) but none of these modes uses texture compression. It is sure that the new Matrox Win9x drivers don't contain any kind of texture compression (DXTC or S3TC).

[Alec]

wumpie, I think that it has nothing to do it, it has to do with the rendering precision of the Z-axis. The G200 and G400 can render in 16 and 32 bits-per-pixel independently of a 16-bit or a 32-bit Z-Buffer.

Anyway, check this: http://www.tweak3d.net/3ddictionary/3ddictionaryZ.shtml

[Alec]

Robm, maybe you left 16-bit textures enabled (or Default, which is 16) and just changed the color depth to 32 bits.

[Ali]

Spent a long time benchmarking last night, and came up with the following:

PD 6.14.051--------PD6.20.028
Quake3 Clean install (no updates)
Lowest settings possible:
102.8fps-----------108.6fps
Highest settings possible:
9.2fps-------------9.2fps

That alone suggests there is no texture compression, otherwise you would expect a rise in the high quality setting.

Q3 at standard 'fastest' settings
demo001:
115.1----------------115.6
demo002:
112.7-----------------112.7

'high quality'
demo001
41.2--------------47.4 (15% increase)
demo002
41.7--------------48.8 (17% increase)

Shows a good jump in speed there

'high quality' and textures set to max:
demo001
30.2---------------33.7 (12%)
demo002
31.7---------------36.8 (16%)

high quality, textures to max, and 1024x768:
demo001
20.0-------------22.9 (15%)
demo002
19.7-------------24.8 (26%)

Thats all I could be bothered doing. Each demo was run twice and averaged.

The computer is a P3 1Ghz
256MB CAS3 Ram
Abit BX6r2 mobo
G400 32Mb DH (not overclocked for this)
SB live X-Gamer
Adaptec 2940U/UW
Seagate Cheetah UW SCSI Hard Drive
Windows ME

Note the AGP bus is overclocked, so these results arnt very scientific, but dropping the CPU down to 750Mhz made pretty much no difference.

Ali

[Greebe]

There is no texture compression in the drivers.

[cerb]

I saw a jump of around 10% in quake 3.

My settings (based on the "Normal" settings, but increased to 800x600 and both at 32bit colour) were as follows
Win2k 5.14 Win2k 5.20
52.4fps 57.3fps (demo001)
58.2fps 64.6fps (demo002)

I didn't do as extensive testing as Ali, but the system seems stronger across all settings, and is now playable on highest geometric detail and max textures.

That's darn impressive, whether it's s3tc, dxtc, or just plain code optimisation. :-)

Cerb

[Greebe]

It's plain old code optimization and nothing else

[Ali]

Its good news anyway.

Who else thinks its about time Matrox stops worrying about speed increases, and starts putting all the development time into making the ICD work on more applications.

I know Im happy with the speed now, and I think they should spend more time on proffesional programes. I dont use them myself, but it seems like the smart thing to do now.

Good job Matrox.

Ali

[atko]

Yes, Matrox did a very good code optimization!
OpenGL ICD become very good. For example they support the acceleration of line drawing (in textured environments), which is very useful if you use wireframe models with textures. So I think Matrox does a very good job with this driver release.
I'm very happy.
So this stuff is very good at all!

[This message has been edited by atko (edited 09 November 2000).]

[cerb]

Here's hoping that the level of maturity of the G4x0 drivers carries over into any imminent hardware releases. :-)

Would be interesting to see someone go back to the G400MAX vs TNT2 Ultra comparisons just to see how things have changed... These new drivers vs Det3 :-)

Cerb

[Rob M.]

Quake3 says texture compression is disabled.
Right below it says I'm running at 800x600x32 with 32 bit zbuffer.

However, I can't explain the fog, skies and even the 'Quake 3' logo in my menu otherwise. If it's not TC then whatever the new drivers did, they produced EXACTLY the same results. This was enabled by the new drivers. I was testing the opengl extensions option in q3 when I found out the new driver had been released. I installed the new drivers and noticed immediately the compression artifacts.

Can we maybe get sky screenshots from the others who are reporting a large increase in framerate?

One other thing, I'm running DX8 (final as of 10 mins ago). Maybe that's related.