Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Nuke on February 28, 2004, 06:23:40 pm

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: Nuke on February 28, 2004, 06:23:40 pm

i converted my skybox textures to dds and it literally doubled my framerate. im using bobboau's latest test build. ive decided to convert all my tga textures to dds, its gonna be cool.

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: Lightspeed on February 28, 2004, 06:31:01 pm

its gonna be ugly compression artifacts on some of them.

Test carefully - Some look okay, others don't.

I'll still have to try that DX SDK coverter though.

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: Nuke on February 28, 2004, 08:33:58 pm

i used the nividia photoshop plugin and saved to a dxt1 format. ive yet to see a compression artifact. those may be caused by the mipmaping code. the pluggin i used gives many options of how to generate mipmaps.

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: RandomTiger on February 29, 2004, 02:18:59 am

Dont generate mipmaps, it will take up more memory, Im fairly sure OGL cant use them and D3D will ignore them and generate its own anyway. I suppose this may change though.

Never use mipmaps for background bitmaps ever.

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: KARMA on February 29, 2004, 03:48:58 am

RT, what happen if a GPU doesn't support DDS?
and how many GPUs support em?

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: Nuke on February 29, 2004, 05:50:06 am

even with mipmaps their alot faster and use less memory than the tgas did. iv'e had a 2x framerate increase and the game loads alot faster than it did with tga textures. the degradation in the texture quality is minimal but the performance increase certainly justifies it. however if there are other compressed formats that *do not* get decompressed in video memory then by all means let me know. i like to keep my options open.

also let me know if removing the mipmaps would adversly increase performance. seeing that my framerate never drops pelow my monitor's pathetc refresh rate im not too sure removing the mips is a good idea.

and as far as i know dxt1 has been around for some time (sence the voodoo days if i recal). id figure any card that supports htl would also support dds.

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: RandomTiger on February 29, 2004, 09:41:53 am

Nuke: If you make mipmaps currently they wont be used because the code will only load the top layer, then it will make them itself.

However this could change and it wont waste any memory ingame to have them there so I guess leave them if you want. It will just make the file sizes a little bigger.

Karma: Most GPU's seem to support them, I did a poll somewhere dig that up to get an idea. If your card doesnt support them D3D will convert it as it loads into an uncompressed bitmap.

This means it will load OK but will take up a lot of memory again. Im not sure what OGL does.

Title: DDS Rulez!
Post by: Nuke on February 29, 2004, 03:47:34 pm

i will leave them in there for now in the event that they will someday get used.

*edit*

i use theese:

there is a photoshop plugin by nvidia, which works pretty good.

you can get the plugin here (http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/dds.8bi)  and you also need theese (http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/DLLs.zip)  dll files in your system dir. i also recomend this (http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/DDS_viewer.exe)  to let you preview dds textures in explorer as well as photoshop's file browser.