Dithering in 16 bit with 5.30 and G400

[Snake-Eyes]

Has anyone elsed noticed the dithering in 16bit mode?

What I mean is this- with any of the older drivers in 16bit mode (D3D or OpenGL), I never noticed an dithering effects anywhere in the games. With 5.30 (and the TurboGL) in 16 bit mode, I can see dithering pretty clearly in any explosion or fogged areas of games. It looks a lot like the effect you get when looking at something through a screen door. I've also noticed that the area around lights in some games (UT) now exhibits some banding in 16 bit color, where there was never any before.

I've seen this in UT and in Q3Test1.08 so far. The only reason I haven't seen it elsewhere is because I haven't played anything else recently, I'm sure.


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Ace

[Snake-Eyes]

I'll be playing tonight again, so I'll have another look at 32 bit mode to see if I can see what you're noticing too, Andrei.

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Ace

[Tumu]

Recipe for ugly 16 bit dithering in current PD:

1. Change to 16 bit desktop.
2. Take one Quake 2 3.20.
3. Start single player game.
4. Toggle console and set gl_texturemode to GL_NEAREST. Run vid_restart.
5. Go to nearest wall so that it fills the entire view and look the very beautiful (NOT!) dithering.
6. Change to 32 bit desktop and go to step 2. See the difference.
(7. Take a screenshot from both scenes and compare them. The 32 bit scene even has LESS colors in it.)

Even Voodoo 3 does better dithering in 16 bit modes.



-Tumu, done that, been there.



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Celeron 333 (not overclocked), GigaByte 6BXE Intel 440BX AGPset (bios v3.3),
64MB PC100 RAM, G200 AGP 8MB SGRAM (not overclocked, a fan, bios v2.6),
PD5.30, SB16 Value, 3COM Fast EtherLink XL, Sony Multiscan 100ES, HP8210i
Win95OSR2.1 finnish

[Snake-Eyes]

I HAVE seen that effect on the G400's only with the 5.30 drivers, though. I agree, the V2/V3 dithers better than that. Any of the older drivers I've used have looked (much!) better. I even noticed some of this same dithering last night in UT (800x600x32bit this time) during rocket explosions. I guess I'm going back to the 5.21/5.25 drivers for awhile. I hate to do it, because TurboGL has really improved the Q3 framerates. I just can't give up that image quality, even for 10 more frames per second.

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Ace

[Tumu]

The 5.21 had the ugly dithering too. I did extensive testings with different mipmap-modes and 16/32bit modes in Quake 2 with 5.21. Posted the results here, but got no answer. I still have the pics from those tests and could do a repost, but I'm curious to see if next release does fix that dither . I don't remember if 5.13 had that ugly dithering.

-Tumu


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Celeron 333 (not overclocked), GigaByte 6BXE Intel 440BX AGPset (bios v3.3),
64MB PC100 RAM, G200 AGP 8MB SGRAM (not overclocked, a fan, bios v2.6),
PD5.30, SB16 Value, 3COM Fast EtherLink XL, Sony Multiscan 100ES, HP8210i
Win95OSR2.1 finnish