Trilinear filtering.....

[Phrostbyte]

I was reading some forums and someone said that turning off the trilinear filtering in HL improves performance. How do I turn it off?

[Rags]

I don't believe HL uses trilinear filtering. If I am thinking of the same post as you, I was referring to Q3.

Rags

[Phrostbyte]

hehe, well sorry, I am looking for a way out of my 30 fps too :P

[IceStorm]

Look for Kruzin's suggestions. He's posted them quite a bit.

There's Trilinear filtering in HL? *consults halflife.pcgame.com* Sure doesn't look like it in the game. I belive my gl_texturemode is set to GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR, which is supposed to be high quality trilinear filtering.

You can SEE the effects of trilinear on/off in UT. Go to the DM board where there's carpets in the castle. Look down a hallway with the carpet and run down the carpet. With trilinear on, the carpet stays smooth all the way to the "horizon". With trilinear off, you'll get three sections - far away, middle, and close-up, and you can see the breaks in the carpet between each region.

The problem with UT is that trilinear exacts a serious performance penality. I don't use it.

In HL, I always see this far/middle/near divide. I'll have to double check that trilinear is enabled now.

Just my $0.02

[This message has been edited by IceStorm (edited 23 February 2000).]

[Nuno]

To set the texture filtering to bilinear set
gl_texturemode gl_linear_mipmap_nearest
to the config file.

IceStorm is rigth, gl_linear_mipmap_linear is trilinear filtering.

To even more performance (and for Matrox Mystique flashbacks) set it to point sample: gl_nearest

[Rags]

Hi Nuno,

I thought that that command did not enable trilinear filtering, but rather trinlinear dithering. Which, the G400 treats the same way as true trilinear filtering but the visual result is still a dithering. I thought this was a limitation of the Q2 engine. On a side note, using a TNT2 there is very little performance drop using linear instead of nearest. Then again, HL uses a modified Q2 engine, and it may very well do it properly...I'll have to do some digging

Rags

[Nuno]

Hi there Rags

I´m positivly sure that gl_linear_mipmap_linear stands was always intended for true trilinear filtering. Nvidia just fakes it, that´s all - althought they implemented it properly with the Ge-farce. The G400 does correct trilinear with gl_linear_mipmap_linear. You might see some dithering if you are in 16 bit color. Start Q2 in 32 bit color, take a few screenshots with gl..._linear and gl..._nearest, magnify them and you can see no dithering at all with trilinear in 32 bit.

I think you can get half-life to run in 32bit mode if your desktop is at 32 bits and you add -32bpp in the shortcut command line.

[Phrostbyte]

Ok so which gl_texturemode for HL works best with the Matrox G400? Im also looking for any commands in HL that could increase my fps.

[Nuno]

Because HL is very cpu-dependent, the video card almost always has some time to spare and trilinear filtering has little impact on performance. I always use trilinear. But try for yourself and find out wich is the best compromise for you.