32 Bit Z Buffering and Games

[Jerrohd]

Does turning on the 32 Bit Z Buffer in the display properties make any difference in games such as Unreal, UTDemo, and Homeworld?

I had a friend told me that some strange glitches I get in HomeWorld might be fixed by enabling this and I am wondering if it will have any impact (positive or negative) on any of the games I am playing.

System Specs:

PIII-500 on Asus P2B MB
256 MB of Ram
Matrox G400 MAX
Windows 98 with Direct X 7 installed.

I am a little disappointed in UTDemo performance at 1024x768x32 bpp on the indoor deathmatch levels when I used Direct 3D mode (all the bells and whistles turned on). It plays smooth at 800x600x32 bpp. I hope the new drivers will straighten some of this out.

[DigitalWelfare]

I would like to know the answer to this as well- I recently "enabled" my z-buffering, because my V2 said that my SLI will Support 1024x760 100+fps with Z-BUFFER! I dont know what it does....but only my G200 gives me that option.

I thought the D3D version of UT was/is terrible.... My fps went from 60, to 30, and evrything was flat. GLIDE looks wonderful on UT, I dont really think its optimized for D3D if it was- its not good.

It almost plays as if its the tribes source code, which favored greatly on Glide.... You may wanna try the Glide wrapper, and check it out..... but 1024x760 shou;d run/look fine.

[Ozymandis]

The Z-Buffer determines which objects in a 3d scene are displayed where (in terms of depth). It COULD help fix some visual defects, but it will lower the performance maybe 2-5 percent. Some games support an independent z-buffer ie 32bitscolor/16bit z. Other games require that they be the same. I think Homeworld can use independent z-buffer, so try 32bit z and see.

[Digital_Hell_Native]

I also had problems in UT with 32 Bit Z-Buffer but a game you should only play with it enabled is Delta Force 2. Wooohow, there are a lot of clipping errors if you dont!

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this message was posted by Digital_Hell_Native
I love Matrox...