Well here it is, its not my idea, i just copied a post from VBB. Cant remember the guy who posted this, but any credit should go to him.
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I know this isn't new, but maybe it will help some people new to the board.
I just got a Visiontek GF3, and for the first time in FS1 I saw the disappearing stars and smeared text I've seen talked about.
Following the advice of those people who posted here in response to others with these problems, I went to the Descent-Network site with the "Registry Hacks" page, played around a bit and managed to fix the stars and the text.
Here is what I did:
To fix the text:
D3DTextureOrigin DWORD
Changes the way texture coordinates are mapped. This mostly affects text and explosions.
- 0: assumes center of texel is lowest value for uv
- 1: assumes uvs go from 0.0 to 1.0
Added this variable to the registry and set it to "1".
To fix the stars:
D3DLineOffset DWORD
Changes the coordinates used to draw a 1-pixel long line.
- 0: one way
- 1: some other way
- else: autodetect at startup (default)
Added this variable to the registry and set it to "1".
All of the "Registry Hacks" and what I set the variables to follow. Everything is cut-and-pasted from
http://www.descent-freespace.com/ddn/kb/registry/ except my settings, which are preceeded by three asterisks.
VideoCard String
Selects which renderer gets used
- "3Dfx Glide": Uses 3Dfx Glide if available
- "Direct3D":; (default) Uses Direct3D
- "No acceleration": Uses Software (default)
***This variable was the only one that already existed; I left it alone.
D3DUseExecuteBuffers DWORD
- 0: code uses DrawPrim commands (default)
- 1: code uses Execute buffers
- else: same as 0
***Added this variable and set it to "0".
D3DTextureOrigin DWORD
Changes the way texture coordinates are mapped. This mostly affects text and explosions.
- 0: assumes center of texel is lowest value for uv
- 1: assumes uvs go from 0.0 to 1.0
***Added this variable and set it to "1". This fixed the smeared text.
D3DLineOffset DWORD
Changes the coordinates used to draw a 1-pixel long line.
- 0: one way
- 1: some other way
- else: autodetect at startup (default)
***Added this variable and set it to "1". This fixed the disappearing stars.
D3DPreloadTextures DWORD
- 0: never tries to upload textures into VRAM during level load
- 1: always tries to upload as many textures as it can into VRAM during level load
- else: preloads as much as it can on cards with 6MB or more of texture space
***Added this variable and set it to "1".
D3DTextureDivider DWORD
Sets the rendering routines based on amount of texture RAM:
- 0: autodetect as below
- 1: optimize for > 16 MB
- 2: optimize for > 8 MB
- 3: optimize for > 4 MB
- 4: optimize for <= 4 MB
- else: same as 4
***Added this variable and set it to "1".
D3DUseLargeTextures DWORD
- 0: use 256 as max textures size (default)
- else: max size the card can use as the max
***Added this variable and set it to "1".
By default you can see that Direct3D bashes all textures down by a factor of 4 in each dimension and then if they are still larger than 256 in either dimension, it bashes them down to 256. So if you have an AGP card with lots of VRAM you can make your textures look much nicer by tweaking D3DTextureDivider and D3DUseLargeTextures.
This worked for me, hope it helps you out