Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: RandomTiger on December 06, 2003, 06:53:44 am
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Now that both OGL and D3D both support compressed DDS textures I want to see how many video cards can take advantage of it. The benifits of DDS images and textures are that they take up less space on disk and more importantly in video memory. To find out if your card supports any of the 5 formats run the new version of the launcher (in my sig) and go to the DX8 section and press the 'Test DXT' button. Its probably safe to assume if your card supports a format in DX8 it will in OGL as well. OGL fs2_open supports formats 1,3 and 5, DX8 fs2_open supports all 5.
Please post your results in this poll, it would be useful if people with minimum or no support post their card details so we get an idea of the cutoff threshold.
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Aww crap, I forgot to make it multiple choice.
Could people hold off until a moderator changes it please.
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GeForce 2 GTS: all supported.
Edit: Yup, multiple choice would help. :-)
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everything is supported
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Everything supported (Radeon 8500)
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If an fx chip doesn't support them I want my money back, so go for 'em all!
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All of them supported
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GeForce2 MX 400 PCI. All are supported. :D
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GF4 4200TI - all supported
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I can merge threads. I have teh power. The original thread was deleted and all old posts moved to this new one. Enjoy!
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Gainward GF4 Ti48, all supported :cool:
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uh OGL only supports 1,3,5 so i think that settles it
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But does it work with every gfx card?
It looks like it, but it doesnt hurt to ask.
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GF2 MX (pre200/400) 32MB AGP, all supported under D3D, though I didn't try under OpenGL, since I don't plan on using that mode anyway.
Later!
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Anyone with old cards?
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My Intel 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller thingy supports all five.
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GF2 Ti - supports it all.
I could beg my sister to test it on her TNT2 - but that'll take a while.
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All supported :)
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64 Radeon 9k Pro: all supported :D
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Radeon 9600 Pro, 128 MB. All good here.
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TNT2 and voodoo 3 don't support texture compression. Every Savage card supports compression (They were the first cards with texture compression support), GeForces and Radeons all also support texture compression.
DXT 1, 3 and 5 are the useful formats. 2 and 4 are premultiplied alpha formats, which are rarely used. I suggest not supporting them, since using premultiplied alpha textures isn't worth breaking compatability with OpenGL.
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Be careful with DXT1 on GeForce cards up to 3, dont know about above still checking.
quote from http://udn.epicgames.com/pub/Content/TextureSpecifications/
DXT1
DXT1 is a four-bit compressed color format that allows for opaque, and one-bit alpha textures; that is, textures with no transparency at all, and textures with a single transparent color. A hardware bug in all nVidia chipsets, including the NV20 (GeForce3), potentially makes DXT1 textures gross and ugly. Specifically, decompression is performed in 16-bit color mode internally, making the resulting texture potentially unacceptable for use, especially when combined with other operations. Test your DXT1 textures on nVidia hardware before committing to their use. All other DXTC formats on nVidia hardware are okay, as textures are decompressed in 32-bit color internally.
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I've just found a bug in D3D DXT code so best stay away from it till I've nailed it down.
Also thanks for the info guys.
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Everything supported. Mobility Radeon 7500.
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Radeon 9700Pro supports them all. No issues. Nice new launcher too!
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I don't know really, I have a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra. So that is TNT 2.
But I would suggest PNG format. Much easier and the best is, no data loss, not a single pixel!
[EDIT]Ok, I just found Launcher v3.3 and I tried it, sorry not a single DXT is supported :(.
I do hope to get a new card in Februari, heck a new computer as a matter of fact (another matter of fact is, I hope to be able to buy a new comp).
[/EDIT]
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PNG doesnt have any advantage over TGA though.
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What about animated pngs? Can TGA's be animated?
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GF4mx 420 64mb - all supported
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i wonder how hard it would be to string together some DDS images to make an animation.
edit: i don't know if this has been mentioned, but IIRC DDS textures must have power of 2 sizes
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There goes that then, the Orion as well as a lot of V ships have several non-standard maps.
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they can be resampled, in game if need be (though that would be painfuly slow)
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No support here. TNT2.
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Well there is an animation brother of PNG, it has a little brother called MNG Multi-image Network Graphics.
Here is the PNG site:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
And here is the MNG site:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
Please don't forget it is open source (so you can add any wisttles you want). And it is free.
Here is MNG licence: http://www.libmng.com/license.html
It also supports Alpha and transparanty.
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i thought PNGs were hella slow to decode
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I never noticed that.
I ounce wrote a PNG2BMP converter + catalogizer (so it also viewed tumbnails of the images), it converted 100MB of PNGs (thanks to my little brother for gathering) to about 300 MB of BMPs. That in just 1 minute :). Then I got a blue screen (this was a couple of weeks later, and it had nothing to do with the PNG converter, just another program from Macrofracture (guess who I mean) in which I lost the program).
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odd. its pretty slow with browsers. PNG may be worth a shot.
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Well maybe it is the plugin that is slow, or many people using the same piece of lib at the same time.
Or Microsoft hating open source things better than their own products (as if that is very hard).
Or a combination of the above named explanations.
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Well DDS support would only be needed for models that don't already have textures, and the edges on a DDS don't have to be equal powers of 2, so 1024 x 512 textures are fine, and since a large area of Black takes up almost no space with most compressed images, I wouldn't think it a problem.
Flipside :D
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You guys really should consider PNG's. The decoding is not slow at all compared to any other format that has similar compression capabilities.
The LibPNG (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html) is free. It's very fast to implement using it, I did that to a project of mine in just 3 hours.
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If I recall correctly, I made my PNG2BMP prog within 1 hour. But then it is not that complex...
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Originally posted by MLeoDaalder
If I recall correctly, I made my PNG2BMP prog within 1 hour. But then it is not that complex...
I had to write some custom hooks for my memory management and file I/O, so that'll probably explain it. Or because I'm not that fast of a coder, whatever ;)
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Do PNG's support Alpha layers for Bump Mapping etc?
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you'd use a separate normal map generated by photoshop for bumpmaps. as for alpha, i have no clue
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You can do that or modify the code of PNGLib to do just that.
And I forgot who asked. TGA can be animated.
Here is a tutorial: http://www.bcfiles.com/file.stuff?body=TutorialsAM
Don't ask me how to do it for FS2, I didn't made the tutorial.
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This thread is about DDS
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How can I create DDS files. Is there a photoshop plugin? I'd like to convert some of the UBER textures from my Sovereign class conversion. The pcx's on that baby go up to 4096x2048. I'd like to see if that will increase performance and speed up load times.
Many of these ship textures do not like Fred2_open. I can't even load them with out crashing it. I have to dumb down the textures just so I could make test scenarios for these conversions
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Originally posted by Omniscaper
How can I create DDS files. Is there a photoshop plugin? I'd like to convert some of the UBER textures from my Sovereign class conversion. The pcx's on that baby go up to 4096x2048. I'd like to see if that will increase performance and speed up load times.
Many of these ship textures do not like Fred2_open. I can't even load them with out crashing it. I have to dumb down the textures just so I could make test scenarios for these conversions
You can find the tools at nVidias website, in the developer section.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html should get you started.
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What does Freespace do with the Alpha channel of a DDS file?
I converted all of my Sovereign textures to D3DFMT_DXT5 and I got some strange results. The model was transparent in certain parts. Not complete transparancy.
The TGA textures I converted from, that came with the Sovereign model, contained an Alpha channel which originally meant to designate the glow maps. This is the first time I converted with the alpha's intact. I was expecting Freespace to use the alphas as a glow map which would save me a lot of time. But it seems as if it used the alphas as OPACITY MAPS.
This is VERY interesting. If my suspicions are correct, Freespace can have windows or transparent areas now. Can someone confirm this?
I reconverted the TGA's to D3DFMT_DXT1 and that got rid of the alphas and all is normal procedure from there. Treated like a pcx.
Performance wise I didn't see a boost in FPS but a reduction in loading time. Then again I'm working with a Geforce4 MX.