Jedi knight outcast: loading times ???

[3dfx]

Basically I think I have mentioned this in the past but with my Parhelia the loading times are abysmal. Especially when I set the textures above High. Anyone know if Matrox intend to rectify this problem in the next driver release???

[DGhost]

i didn't think this is a problem with the Parhelia...

it took forever and a day to load high quality textures on the 8500 i had when i was playing it...

[3dfx]

your probably right I just found it a little strange that ut 2003 loaded so quickly compared to a title based on the quake 3 engine. Though I have heard that when on full settings the game uses 256mb textures and there is only 128 on parhelia. Do you think it might help if I adjust the agp aperture size? to say 256? instead of 128.

[DGhost]

UT2k3 *could* take 256mb between textures and geometry information, but that assumes you are not using compression, and have a lot of other memory gobbling features enabled.

as far as loading times, I found there was very little difference between Very High and High visually, but quite a difference in loading times. Its a problem with the game itself, adjusting system settings won't help.

[3dfx]

Thanks for clearing that up ghost

[GNEP]

I *think* I read somewhere here or at the Matrox Tech Support forums that the long loading times were going to be shortened with an upcoming Parhelia driver release. I could just have imagined it though, and am now propagating my own strange ideas...

[TdB]

Originally posted by GNEP
I *think* I read somewhere here or at the Matrox Tech Support forums that the long loading times were going to be shortened with an upcoming Parhelia driver release. I could just have imagined it though, and am now propagating my own strange ideas...

well, i have read the same thing.

the horrible loading times is a driver bug , and it has been fixed AFAIK, so the next driverset might improve loading times a bit.

AFAIK the loading times is not the problem, it is the time it takes to compress those 200mb+ textures at loading time.

[GNEP]

TDB - yeah but I have the sneaking suspicion that you might have been reading me when you read it before - and I have no factual basis to go on...

This process is what starts those threads that the M lawyers don't like...

[TdB]

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37464

No, I was thinking at ROM´s response.

As for the loading, it's because it's compressing 1024x1024 textures, all 200 megs of them which don't fit on a 128 megs board. We are working on making it load faster in the next drivers, you'll be surprised how fast it will load, stay tuned,

[Novdid]

Originally posted by TDB
well, i have read the same thing.

the horrible loading times is a driver bug , and it has been fixed AFAIK, so the next driverset might improve loading times a bit.

It's not a bug, it takes a long time no matter what board you have.

AFAIK the loading times is not the problem, it is the time it takes to compress those 200mb+ textures at loading time.

You said it yourself, how can it be a bug if it's the compression that takes time?

And I think it's in this thread that R0M makes a statement on the driver side of things.

Edit: TDB, you beat me to it. And I still don't believe its a bug, I think it's merely some optimizations from M's side.

[TdB]

"bug" might not not be the correct word here, but I get the impression that they figured out how to improve the compression-time.

maybe a new algoritm, or better use of texture-cache or something.


edit: it seems like we agree.

[GNEP]

Cool - thanks for searching that one out TDB and Novdid - I'm not going nuts then!