Palletized Textures and Anisotropic Filtering

[Alec]

Hi, guys! (it´s the second time I write, so I have a reason to be excited... oh, by the way, I´m from Portugal)

What does palletized textures do if I enable the with the PD5 registry hacks? Is it faster? Does it make the texture quality worse? And what about anisotropic filtering?

Cheers and thanx in advance.
Congratulations for these forums, they´re great!


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Celeron 433, G200 8Mb AGP, Intel Atlanta 440LX, Soundblaster PCI 128, 96 Megs SDram, 15" AOC monitor.

[Scytale]

Good question. I know what palettized textures are, but I don't have a clue about the effect of this driver setting.

Anyone?

[Maggi]

Hi Alec,

enabling 'Palettized Textures' in PD will force the drivers to generate textures that are not true color, but palettized ...

It mainly reduces the memory consumption (for example 8 bit compared to 24bit) and should also improve the raw speed.

...

Anisotropic Filtering is another way to filter mapped textures and it is superior to trilinear mipmapping.

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Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[Alec]

Thanks, people!
I found an article in 3dgpu.com about palletized textures.
Ok, it´s from Nvidia, but we are all playing the same game...
It´s at http://www.3dgpu.com/editor/pallets.cfm

See ya.

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Celeron 433, G200 8Mb AGP, Intel Atlanta 440LX, Soundblaster PCI 128, 96 Megs SDram, 15" AOC monitor.

[Nuno]

Oi Alec Portugal rulez! De facto és dos primeiros portugas (eu próprio incluído) que aparece por aqui...

E agora àcerca da filtragem anisotrópica em Inglês (macarrónico, infelizmente ) , para o pessoal daqui tb perceber alguma coisa...

Anisotropic filtering, as Maggi said, is superior to bilinear/trilinear filtering. To filter a pixel, it takes the average of the color of a variable number of the surronding pixel to determine the color of that same pixel.

G400 doesn´t properly suport anisotropic, neither it could, because REAL anisotropic filtering involves too much processing power, that the G400 can´t achieve. It partially suports it (minimizing filters, wasn´t it?), so the marketing departement did the rest. So don´t bother about it.

Um abraço de Viseu para Braga!

[Scytale]

Thanks Maggi. I'm wondering if there are special conditions to be met for this setting to become effective, because I don't notice any difference with UT.

[Alec]

Obrigado e olá para ti também Nuno (e de Braga para Viseu!)

I finally noticed a HUGE difference with and without Palletized Textures, particularly when playing Thief-The Dark Project. (Can´t say the same with anisotropic filtering).
I still find the image quality of the old G200 difficult to believe. It´s fantastic.

Listen all ya all, check out PD5 resolution manager v. 2.0, i´ts good...



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Celeron 433, G200 8Mb AGP, Intel Atlanta 440LX, Soundblaster PCI 128, 96 Megs SDram, 15" AOC monitor.

[Pauly]

Hmm, not been here for a long while - but here goes....

I can't see that enabling a switch like that in the registry could do what you all say.

Most games with paletted textures have had the artists painstakingly juggling with colours across all the textures to ensure that the palettes don't have to be changed often.

This can't be done automatically.

Especially since changing palettes has to be done explicitly with some API call.


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Paul Groves.
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http://home.clara.net/paulyg
OpenGL for Beginners

[Scytale]

Pauly, you are pondering what I'm pondering. And welcome back.

I have no problem understanding anisotropic filtering (thanks Maggi), but palettized textures are not just a yes/no thing.

If I remember well, this setting was introduced with the G200 drivers (4.11 maybe?) for supporting FF7. I assume the drivers did/do not allow for palettized textures when this switch is not enabled. But why not? What's the catch???

[Alec]

Hi, Scytale and Paulie.

I found a great difference in Thief in particular, and I don´t feel like I´m mistaken in this point. The colors are much more vivid.
What might have happened is some kind of change, because I reinstalled Windows inbetween the possible change. The drivers are the same, but I did not do merge the PD5 registry hacks. I ran PD5 Res Manager 2.0, which has those built-in, and I didn´t enable Palletized Textures.
My Thief game is cracked, so I didn´t have to install it again. I upgraded to W98 SE, portuguese version. All the rest is the same.

P.S. GLQuake seems to not have changed, for example.

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Celeron 433, G200 8Mb AGP, Intel Atlanta 440LX, Soundblaster PCI 128, 96 Megs SDram, 15" AOC monitor.

[Scytale]

Thanks Alec. That does make sense.

I haven't tried Thief yet because I was really trying to get more fps out of Unreal Tournament, one of those 'the more fps the merrier' games. With my settings it looks butt ugly anyway.

[Maggi]

Hi Scytale,

you could check it out with 3DWB99, because that one distinguishes between various anisotropic filtering and that's how I found out that the G400 doesn't support the maximizing version of anisotropic filtering.


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Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 100MHz FSB
Celeron 333A @ 500MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[Pauly]

Actually, the realisation that the G200 has palettised texture support was one of the reasons for me plugging it back in.

I'd been playing with a TNT because it did 'proper' OpenGL. I even dug out my PowerVR (!) card to have a play with its Quake2 wrapper...

Getting back into the 'scene' was quite a shock. (Shame I had to reregister, I'd built up quite a tally of posts )

Anyway, there's no-one slamming Matrox on this message board for an incomplete OpenGL ICD
No people claiming that TNTs are going to take over the universe. Its all much more civil
On top of this I've got back the lovely colours that I'd forgoten about and those really really high rock steady resolutions...

TNTs, by the way, don't support palettised textures - HA!

------------------
Paul Groves.
-
http://home.clara.net/paulyg
OpenGL for Beginners

[Scytale]

The W9x ICDs are here, TurboGL is impressive, a working G400 is an excellent card, and even tech support has improved - I bet you were shocked. It's more like a zealot party these days...

Anyway , I agree that palettized texture support is a cool Gx00 feature, but it's going pretty much undiscussed here. Sorta strange because the topic is red hot - it's being widely discussed on the net, and it's considered a simple yet very effective contender for texture compression. Mean and dirty maybe, but very usefull for online FPS...

[Alec]

Yes, Scytale, I agree, and furthermore, I believe that Palletized Textures should be always an option, for two particular reasons:
Firstly, to play over the Internet, like you said; secondly, for those with more obsolete machines that want to squeeze a few more framerates out of their games (although I´m not sure if the difference in framerates with PT´s on and off is significative. In Thief, for example, I didn´t find i much slower.)
Anyways, I always chose image quality in detriment of raw speed... That´s why I bought a G200 and not a Voodoo or a TNT (the latter being a tad more expensive). I´m pleased with Matrox.

Seeya...

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Celeron 433, G200 8Mb AGP, Intel Atlanta 440LX, Soundblaster PCI 128, 96 Megs SDram, 15" AOC monitor.