Just wanted to remind you of a great company.

Project Tourque with SFFT Alpha 57:


More Screenshots: http://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=6338347&postcount=657

Unfortunately there are various texture- and performanceproblems...

Any openGL-coder (maybe koolsmoky?) would like this idea?:


What about taking bumpmaps, specularmaps and diffusemaps from DoomIII, QuakeIV or Prey and render them in a new texture - in realtime. Sure, this is very timeintensive but you could save these new textures in a file - just like wickedGL does.


The big advantage would be a much better ingame quality with ABSOLUTELY NO LOSS OF PERFORMANCE! (because you render ingame just the same amount of textures. The only difference is, that these textures wouldn't have that bad contrasts und poor structures like diffusemaps have normally. They would just look as good as they would do on a DX9 card!!! (except the dynamic lighting)


I think this idea is really worth to think about, isn't it?

A few reasons why releasenotes are NOT that bad:


- people get an idea what they should test
- people get a better reason (than a higher versionnumber) to install the new driver
- sfft gets an survey of older driver releases (does anyone remember in which way sfft33 was better than 32?)
- 3dfx users could give better assistance for coming driverreleases (ok thats like point 1)



So the final question is: IS THERE ANYONE BESIDES ME, WHO SUPPORTS THE IDEA OF PUBLIC RELEASENOTES?

Made the screenshots with my Voodoo5 5500 PCI from the ingame menu (@1280x1024/4xFSAA). Game crashes when loading a track with sfft alpha 48

• 
  
  4xFSAA issue in LFS2 Alpha 1024x768x22 fixed.
  
  [-]
  D3D-registry-keys issue (wrong path)
  BMW M3 Challenge crashes when loading a track.
  
  

a problem which occurs afaik with al sfft drivers: voodoo5 6000 aa screenshot support is broken. The driver only does screenshots without aa.

any news?

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
Anyone try it out, yet?

Yes. It's working perfectly...

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
I already do that with the Glide64 texture enhancer library. It uses the system memory to cache realtime enhanced compressed textures to achive speed. The cache will also be saved to disk so it can be used next time you run it.

sounds good.

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
As for the Glide fps-counter, isn't there any other tool like fraps?

-KoolSmoky

Not that I know of. (fraps doesn't work under glide)

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
You have to understand that we are dealing with realtime compression.

Just like WickedGL. You only have to compress the textures once, if you save the in a swapfile.

But a glide fps-counter would be also a nice (imo easier to implement) feature.



Maybe we should start a petition for metabyte to make wickedgl open source.

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
In fact, Gonetz and I have made a texture enhancer library with forced texture compression for Glide64. Check it out at http://www.emuxhaven.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6427

seems interesting. I'll have a look on it. on the other side i'm quite sure, that later glide games like operation flashpoint nfs5 and (maybe even) ultima9 would profit from compressed textures.

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
Temporal AA is old news. Daniel and I have implemented it a long time ago. Glide3x and OpenGL has it. Set FX_GLIDE_TAA_TOGGLE_KEY and you'll get temporal AA. 2xFSAA will give a 4xFSAA effect and 4xFSAA will give 8xFSAA. "144" will let you toggle TAA on and off with the "NumLock" key. You'll need at least 100fps to fool your eyes.

good point.

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky
SLI would be difficult to do because you need strict signal timings. AFR or Split screen rendering would be more feasible but you'd still need a hardware mod. The feature connector on the VSA board is not a SLI connector. To get this done, Hank's help is a must. There is also a lot of work to do the driver side of things.

-KoolSmoky

Ok, mayby i'll propose this to hank, after he finished his 256mb ddr vsa101 6000

QuoteOriginally posted by koolsmoky

Unfortunately I do not have the time to work on D3D. Besides, you always have SFFT's excellent D3D driver. I can only find time to spend on Glide related projects.

Unfortunately SFFT is not so communicative and seems to ignore my ideas. but another neat idea would be a fps counter in glide. i'm shure raff would update his nfs5 benchmarks.

wow. thank you very much. now it will be finally possible to take voodoo5 6000 aa-screenshots with good texturequality

but there are still a few featurerequests - if you run out of new ideas *g* :


x) a possibility to force FXT/DXT compression in d3d/glide/opengl:
x) an option to force 16bit wbuffer instead of zbuffer in d3d.
x) an option to force 16bit rendering in d3d
x) an option to surpress vendor id's (if it's possible) - to run   FarCry eg.
x) an option for temporal aa (switch aa sample pattern per frame)
x) a software tnl-engine
x) a software pixelshader-engine
x) a modification which allows to use 2 voodoo5 5500s in sli - per feature connector

I'm talking about glide3x.

Here are some Q3a Screenshots which illustrate the problem: http://www.keepmyfile.com/download/f9da801748814

EDIT: card is a voodoo5 5500 pci, but a 6000 also has the same problem...

Hi koolsmoky,

I really appreciate your great work. But there is a big problem concerning all newer glide drivers:

A modification of the texture LOD bias affects only the first VSA100. For example if you use 2xAA and a default LOD bias, the mipmaptransition of the second VSA100 is at LOD -0.5. If you change the bias to -0.75, the other transition is still at -0.5 instead of -1.25 - which leads to crappy imagequality.


Oh, and plz also fix the SLI-****up.