Walt Posted February 23, 2000 Posted February 23, 2000 Hello all, I'm runing Combat mission an a Pentium MMX 200mhz with a Voodoo2 8meg. It is a great game, and I'm definetly looking forward to the final release. But I've noticed that the graphics qualitly is not nearly up to the standard of most of the screen shots I've seen. Most of them were taken on newer graphics cards like the Voodoo3 or TNT/TNT2/Geforce. Is there anything I could possibly do to improve the graphics? And is there a way to fool around with the graphics settings? I'm leery of the game not allowing me to choose resolution, API, that sort of thing. I guess I'm just used to Quake. Well I hope that the game doesn't get hung up too much in production, that would just upset me way too much. thanks Walt
Schrullenhaft Posted February 23, 2000 Posted February 23, 2000 Unfortunately your graphics quality is going to be tied to the video chipset/drivers. Many drivers often sacrifice quality for speed. In a lot of applications this doesn't really hurt, but in some games it can show up badly. Since you play Quake you may already be highly familiar with all of these details and are already running the latest and, uh... "greatest". But I'll just assume that you are not... I'm not very familiar with the Voodoo2 based cards and their driver options. I believe you have another video card in your system that is actually acting as the display adapter while the Voodoo2 is strictly just a 3D Accelerator card. I can't recall what options you may have for tweaking DirectX visuals from the Voodoo2 drivers, but you may want to look around your Display Control panel - Settings - "Advanced" button and check out the "tabs" that may be available. For now and the foreseeable future CM will run with DirectX on the PC. Sorry, no OpenGL or (especially) GLIDE versions will be made (though OpenGL may be the API of choice for CM in a couple of years). First off I'd suggest that you get the latest drivers for your video card (if you know what model or chipset it is). Next you may want to get the lastest Voodoo2 driver for your card. Often the 3Dfx reference driver is going to be the latest version available and often they may be more stable than the customized drivers that the manufacturer's tweak for their cards. However you may lose certain control panels and features that may be specific to your version of the Voodoo2. The latest Voodoo2 driver can be downloaded from here: http://www.3dfxgamers.com/view.asp?PAGE=V2drivers Select the "Voodoo2 Windows 9x DirectX 7 Drivers v. 3.02.02" Even if you're not running DirectX 7 these will be the drivers you would want to download. Also downloading the lastest DirectX version or possibly something newer than what you currently have may help (or it may cause you endless grief, so be careful). To find out what version you of DirectX you are running go to C:\PROGRAM FILES\DIRECTX\... and from here there may be a SETUP directory or other files such as DXDIAG. Run the DXDIAG or SETUP and hopefully you should get some sort of run down on the version that you are running. The latest version of DirectX that is commonly available is version 7.0a. You can download if off of Microsoft's DirectX site, but it is about 7 or so Mb. http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads/default.asp Depending on what games you run you may want to be careful in upgrading your drivers & DirectX. Some games (especially older DirectX games) may show graphic anomalies that they haven't shown before or drop their frame rate performance quite a bit with newer versions of DirectX. Once you have installed the the latest driver for your Voodoo2 (and *maybe* a newer version of DirectX), you can post what options you have in your driver for DirectX (from Display Control panel - Settings - "Advanced" button and then select the 3Dfx "tabs" that may be available). From here we can give you suggestions on improving your display quality. After doing all of this, however, your graphics quality may still not improve to your liking. At that point you are looking at another video card. If you are looking to stick with your current machine you may want to look for a Voodoo3 2000 PCI 16Mb (usually less than US$100) which will act as your primary display adapter in addition to being a 3D accelerator or possibly a TNT PCI 16Mb (though I haven't seen one of these myself). These cards however may require faster CPU's in order to see much of a performance benefit over what you have currently. If you have any furthur questions please give us a few more details on your system (i.e. video card, problem that you're seeing, etc.). Good Luck, Young Skywalker.... [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 02-23-2000).]
Stef Posted February 23, 2000 Posted February 23, 2000 Hi Walt, I have the same system as you at home and the quality of the display is not so far away from the one I have at work (PIII, TNT2 64). But the colors and "lines" shows better on the TNT2 and it's more faster of course. I must precise that my main card at home is a Matrox Mystic 4Mo and it's perhaps that which makes the difference even if you have a Voodoo2. If you can't afford a new graphic card you perhaps can find an old one such my Matrox (must be very cheap) which works fine or try the tricks advised by Schrullenhaft . Soon on the front , Stephan [This message has been edited by Stef (edited 02-23-2000).]
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