1.5 Feature Request

Posts relating to the currently in development and sure to be released 1.5 patch.

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Zopharks
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Post by Zopharks »

Ammar wrote:Oh, well ok lets improve the textures with better resolution ones on all buildings and terain. Another thing I just thought of is, can we actually implement weather effects in multiplayer games? Like the rain in singleplayer...If so maybe we could create a great snow map.
Nice idea. When do you expect to start working on the replacement textures?
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Post by SSJBardock »

Loop_Goose wrote:I dont think its my hardware, because I can make bigger textures, but if I save like a sky that is 120dpi or 150dpi, and try importing it into Giants it doesnt seem to work.

I just updated my videocard, and flashed its BIOS... now its an
ATI X800XT PE 256MB. This should be able to handle more than 100dpi surely ;)
I'm niot sure what you mean by dpi, other than that it means dots per inch and is used when printing and scanning. Some random sky I downloaded (Red Horizon) was 2048x512 pixels in size, and 2048x2048 is the maximum texture size most modern videocards use.
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Loop_Goose
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Post by Loop_Goose »

yeah I see what you mean now.

ATI cards have a max of 2048x2048, whereas NVidia cards are at 4096x4096.

Basically, the problem I have, is that when I finish off a sky in photoshop, it looks fine, but then when it ends up in the game it loses clarity.

I can double the size of the texture, but it usually triples the size of the file. I'll give 7-zip a go and see how far it shrinks it, but I thought maybe it was a limit of the Giants engine.
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Post by SSJBardock »

Look at this: http://home.hccnet.nl/borre.mosch/sky.rar (it's "dark sky")
It's 33.4 KB, as opposed to 101.69 KB it was before.
Run unpack.bat to retrieve the tga.
Maybe you could compress your maps like that...
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Nullpointer
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Post by Nullpointer »

These are the texture size limits I know of:

Voodoo 1 - 3: 256x256
Kyro: 1024x1024
Radeon 7000 - 9999, Geforce 1 - 4: 2048x2048
Geforce FX, Radeon X800: dunno, possibly only limited by RAM
SSJBardock
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Post by SSJBardock »

I looked it up,
the GF FX texture size is 4096x4096
http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/viewre ... report=926
and the Radeon x800 still has the 2048x2048 limit
http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/viewre ... eport=1107
the size of the textures is also a factor.
a 2048x2048 pixel texture is 12 MB big, which is an aweful lot on a 32/64 MB videocard
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Post by RichardMH »

I just updated my videocard, and flashed its BIOS... now its an
ATI X800XT PE 256MB. This should be able to handle more than 100dpi surely ;)
Talk about buying the wrong grahic card
the newest Nvidia card is almost twice the quality of the ATI X800 cards
some games X800 wins but not with a long shot
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Post by Ammar »

how do u know that? not to be rude or anything but ive heard the x800 is undisputedly, the strongest most powerfull graphic card yet...
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Zopharks
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Post by Zopharks »

Yes. Please cite some benchmarks.
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Post by Loop_Goose »

ok, I will accept that the NVidia 6800 Ultra is faster than the X800XT PE.

BUT...

there are a few conditions:

1) The ATI card uses less power than the NVidia cards.

2) The NVidia card has 2 power connections, that must be connected to
different power rails.

3) The NVidia card requires a high quality 480W power supply to run.

4) The ATI card takes 1 expansion slot, but the NVidia takes up 2.

The ATI X800 Pro actually uses less power than the ATI 9800XT, even
though it is faster.


In terms of benchmarks, they often compare the speed of Doom 3
between NVidia and ATI. and they tend to compare Open GL games.

The NVidia 6800 Ultra is better at Open GL than the ATI card too, but the games I play are more DirectX based rather than Open GL, so once again it is testing a feature that doesnt mean much to me,
as I wont really be using it.

By upgrading to a new videocard driver for the ATI card, I gained about 10-15 fps in Doom 3.

The NVidia card uses Pixel shader 3.0, and the ATI uses 2.0
This may make a difference in the future, but by the time most games are using pixel shader 3.0, I probably will have bought a new card anyway. ;)

The ATI card is not as fast as the NVidia in Doom 3, mainly because
John Carmack was working closely with NVidia while he coded Doom 3.

When Half Life 2 comes out, then I think it will be a fairer comparison, because HL2 was coded with the ATI cards in mind.

How it ends up doesnt really matter overall, because either way, both cards are very fast, and render pretty pictures.

In the past, ATI gave better picture quality, and NVidia gave better speed.
I have several ATI and NVidia cards, and I fired up Giants to compare the two.

The Geforce 4 Ti4800SE displays sharper edges on the models and landscape, than the ATI 9700 Pro. Both give good frame rates, like 60-80 fps.

In comparison to the ATI 9700 Pro, which I upgraded from, this new card has a bigger fan which spins slower, and is much quieter.
The frame rate in Giants now is usually about 80 fps. sometimes it goes over 100, but yeah that doesnt matter, its the graphics quality that I enjoy most.
Crossmaniak
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Post by Crossmaniak »

does this mean the 1.5 patch is on development??
and yeah i'm back :roll:
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Shardz
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Post by Shardz »

It means exactly that.
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STEELIX
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Post by STEELIX »

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE CROSS IS BACK!!!!!111111
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Post by Crossmaniak »

ooh steelix is happy im back :P ^^
wel i thought the 1.5 patch was cancelled or somtin :?
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Post by Infinity7 »

In response to Loop Goose talking about the 6800 Ultra, since I've gotten one recently. Here are my comments.

1) The ATI card uses less power than the NVidia cards.

I am not sure about that statement. Power draw may actually be pretty much the same. In the past I have used a 9700 Pro and a 9800 Pro which only had one power connector and there were a quite a few posts in forums about problems with those cards getting enough power from most commonly used power supplies. ATI support was recommending at least a 350 watt power supply that had at least 15 amps along the 12 volt rail. ATI support had suggested Antec power supplies to me specifically.

2) The NVidia card has 2 power connections, that must be connected to
different power rails.

It is true that it has 2 power connectors. One is labeled primary and the other secondary. In the installation booklet it says that it is better to have it connected to a different branch of the power supply harness for best performance during really high moments of system output, but it said that you could just hook it up to the same branch of the power harness. Some website review I read about this card said they tried hooking up just one of the power connectors to test the card and it ran fine that way for them.

3) The NVidia card requires a high quality 480W power supply to run.

The installation booklet for the card says that it will run with just a 350 watt power supply, but that anything greater than that will be better for best performance under high moments of system output. I have used a 9700 Pro and a 9800 Pro card before so I know that also the ATI cards will run better with more wattage power supplies also.

4) The ATI card takes 1 expansion slot, but the NVidia takes up 2.

The second slot taken up by the NVidia is for the large heatsink and fan. This card is nicely quiet. Because the slot below the AGP slot generally is assigned by the motherboard the same IRQ as the AGP slot those people wanting best system performance should not install a PCI card in that slot anyway, so ya may as well have that slot space taken up by something that is gonna help keep the video card quieter and cooler for better graphics performance.

Other comments:

The 6800 Ultra runs very fast and very stable. The x800xt ultra is also fast reportedly.

Some people will talk about ATI vs NVidia like they are cheering for competing football teams. For me I don't care which company it is. I'll use whichever one seems to be the best idea at the moment. I think it is pretty crummy that the game developers and graphic card companies are dividing the gaming industry by having certain games optimized for certain vid cards. Even so, after a new game comes out both NVidia and ATI always have a new driver version come out which has new optimizations for the most currently new games that recently came out. So after a short time of a new game coming out both 6800 Ultra and x800xt pe will probably run at pretty much the same performance.

Also I noted that my graphics quality has noticeably increased by my going from the ATI 9800 Pro to the NVidia 6800 Ultra.

Both ATI x800xt pe and NVidia 6800 Ultra are super fine cards. I cannot get caught up in talking like ATI and NVidia are competing football teams. It would be nice to have both of those cards I suppose. Sometimes when I see people watching football I ask "Why don't they just give *both* teams a football so they won't be fighting over the thing?"
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