Porajkl Posted November 24, 2002 Share Posted November 24, 2002 I have this picture for you to examine. It seems like it was downsampled, but that's strange because it was just 400 points meeting engagement battle (small map and small amount of units) and I have a GeForce2 with 64 Mb RAM!!! I think those textures should not be downsampled with such large amount of RAM. Hm?? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmatt Posted November 25, 2002 Share Posted November 25, 2002 I don't think thats downsampled, it is simply a texture that we used that is not to the same level of quality as others since it is still using a model un-upgraded from CMBO. Madmatt 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porajkl Posted November 25, 2002 Author Share Posted November 25, 2002 Thanks for fast reply, Madmatt. What about the skies? They also seem to me like the ones in CMBO quality. Am I right? Will you make them hi-res in next patch/update? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted November 26, 2002 Share Posted November 26, 2002 If you're using a mac, it's probably downsampled. I've never seen a GF card on a mac display CMBB without downsampling...even the 128mb GF4. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmatt Posted November 26, 2002 Share Posted November 26, 2002 Well, an overcast and rainy screenshot isnt a good example to indicate downsampling. I can't tell if the background is downsampled or not. There are also many settings you can adjust with a good tweaking program to improve image quality. Antistropic Filtering and Mipmaps can show marked improvement on graphics. Madmatt 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porajkl Posted November 26, 2002 Author Share Posted November 26, 2002 I have mipmap detail set to highest level, I also use anisotropic filter, my computer is PC. I don't use AA, but that will not the cause so pixelated sky. Anyone else with the same GFX card and such a sky? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
murpes Posted November 27, 2002 Share Posted November 27, 2002 Originally posted by Porajkl: I have mipmap detail set to highest level, I also use anisotropic filter, my computer is PC. I don't use AA, but that will not the cause so pixelated sky. Anyone else with the same GFX card and such a sky?I have a GF3 and have really noticed the pixelated sky. I was going to toy around with it this weekend - I don't know if it's the original bmp or if something is being down-sampled. Kinda distracting ... I'll try some of the CMBO mod skies to see if they help. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porajkl Posted November 27, 2002 Author Share Posted November 27, 2002 I checked the sky textures and they are pixelated like in the game. Definitely not on the quality level as other textures in the game. I think they are just in 256 colours. I hope some modder will make Hi-Res ones. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted November 28, 2002 Share Posted November 28, 2002 Originally posted by tecumseh: If you're using a mac, it's probably downsampled. I've never seen a GF card on a mac display CMBB without downsampling...even the 128mb GF4.Yep. Definitely. I'm the sucker with that card. Even though the graphics in BB are a lot better than BO, most of us Mac users are not getting the full benefits of our cards. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted November 28, 2002 Share Posted November 28, 2002 Originally posted by Michael emrys: I hope this bug is fixed one day - I thought BFC used macs? Maybe they're all radeon based. But who cares about us while - OMG - HMGs crawl when under fire?!?!?! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted November 29, 2002 Share Posted November 29, 2002 Tecumseh, do you still have those screenshots? I was wondering if sending them to nVidia with an explanation of the problem might get a little action out of them. If it is some kind of problem with their drivers, they might work on an update. But if they don't know about the problem, they aren't likely to solve it, except by accident. And since they don't do Mac updates all that often anyway, that could take forever. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted November 30, 2002 Share Posted November 30, 2002 I still have the screenshots, but I don't think the problem is with nvidia. The downsampling code is all written by BFC, and it appears faulty. My guess is CMBB does a check for what graphics card is installed (and how much VRAM it has) and downsamples accordingly. This check is failing on mac GeForce cards, so downsampling still occurs on 64 and 128mb cards. This is a CMBB bug. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Yeah, could be. That makes sense. I just didn't want to leave any stone unturned. Has BFC made any comment on this issue? If it's something that came in with BB, presumably it could be taken out as well. But what do I know...? Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Strontium Dog Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Originally posted by Michael emrys: Yeah, could be. That makes sense. I just didn't want to leave any stone unturned.Hi guys, just thought I'd add to this. I've just bought a new Mac (dual 867 G4 with 32Mb Nvidia Geforce 4MX) and I'm getting some really heavy downsampling in CMBO compared to the performance on my old G3 in which I'd installed a 32Mb ATI Radeon. This is a tad annoying to say the least! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Right. This seems to hit the nVidia cards a lot harder than the Radeons. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ales Dvorak Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Originally posted by tecumseh: This is a CMBB bug.And CMBB was made on mac? *not so happy mac user* 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Strontium Dog Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Originally posted by Michael emrys: Right. This seems to hit the nVidia cards a lot harder than the Radeons. MichaelDefinitely. I think tecumseh could be on the right track. I initially thought it might be just that the Geforce 4MX is a pretty crap video card but if its happening with the higher spec nvidia cards as well then it certainly seems that CMBO and CMBB are not using the cards efficiently. I wonder if there is any 3rd party software that could manually adjust the nvidia card settings? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 I even installed CMBB on 2 computers here at work one evening to confirm the effect. One was an old G4 with a 32mb Radeon, one was a new G4 with a 64mb nVidia. The Radeon was crisp, the nVidia was fuzzy. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 The issue is most likely with the video drivers. CM is dependent on what the drivers report to RAVE or DirectX. It seems in this case that some of the drivers aren't responding very well with the entire GeForce line and the latest Radeons on the Mac. It's possible for 'speed' reasons that the latest video drivers may be downsampling of themselves to perform better. Most games don't have the number of textures that CM does (at least on the screen at one time or in video memory for most of the game). There might be something that BTS/BFC can do, but as with most driver issues it wouldn't be worth the hassle and would most likely be a huge performance tradeoff if implemented. These downsampling issues may go away with another driver release (when and if this gets addressed is anyone's guess). On the PC side of things there are FSAA issues with the latest NVidia drivers. This was something that had been fixed with their previous drivers, but they have since re-broken with the latest set of drivers. Issues like this will probably crop up all of the time with the major video manufacturers who constantly tweak/fix their drivers. The problem ends up that often certain 'display qualities' will get sacrificed by default for more speed or some 'feature' will get broken in certain games (due to the sequence or combination of graphical API calls, etc.). Your best bet is to notify the customer support of either of these manufacturers (actually they'll point you to contacting the support for the specific manufacturer of your video card) and detail the problem you're having with a particular set of drivers. If enough complaints come through the developers will eventually get tasked with contacting BTS/BFC and looking into the issue. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted December 1, 2002 Share Posted December 1, 2002 Originally posted by Schrullenhaft: The issue is most likely with the video drivers.I'm pretty sure it is not. The downsampling is done by CMBB, not the card. It has nothing to do with the card being stressed, because it happens on a flat map with one unit. And - more telling - it doesn't happen in CMBO, even in the biggest scenario. Why? Because BFC introduced it's internal downsampling code in CMBB. It was added to make the game playable on old 32mb (and below) cards. Great idea, only BFC didn't include the ability to turn the option off, and didn't properly test it on nvidia cards. Doh. Now we have high spec 128mb cards being treated - by CMBB - like 16mb cards. That's a bug, and the bug is in the CMBB routine that determines what card the mac is running and hence how much downsampling to perform. Other computer games successfully determine my card (some even display it's name and vram in the options screen), so it can't be that hard. [ December 01, 2002, 04:50 PM: Message edited by: tecumseh ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 2, 2002 Share Posted December 2, 2002 CMBO also downsampled to my knowledge, just not as much or often because the default textures were significantly smaller than CMBB's. For a number of the video cards out there it didn't really need to downsample since a large number of players already had 32Mb and 64Mb cards. Admittedly CMBB's downsampling routines have been upgraded quite a bit from what CMBO possessed. I don't know the details about the beta testing on the Mac since I don't possess one. I believe some beta testers had NVidias in their Macs and the problem with downsampling was noted (among other more obvious graphical problems with the NVidia drivers). However the ATI cards on the Mac didn't have this problem. So it was assumed (to my knowledge) that the NVidia drivers on the Mac had issues. Despite being the largest designer of graphics chips in the world, they're still a bit new on the Mac and their highest priority on the Mac probably isn't the RAVE API. As far as I'm aware CM doesn't test for the presence of any particular card on either platform. It uses standard API queries to get the information it needs to set itself up (video memory, resolution, 3D hardware support, etc.). Outside of some Voodoo cards back in the days of CMBO, it didn't really look for any info about what video card it was running on. Thus it becomes something of an issue with drivers. I believe some Mac Radeon users have noted some problems with the newest Radeons, but some older Radeons with less memory aren't experiencing these problems. The skies have always had a 'downsampled' look to them to my knowledge since they have a limited color depth (256 colors that are palettized ?) and they're stretched (which produced some problems with earlier NVidia drivers on the Mac). I'm not sure why a small battle would see downsampling on a high VRAM video card, but I believe that Madmatt answered the question as to why the two sets of textures seemed 'downsampled' in the above pic (not all vehicles in the game have been redone to higher resolution textures). Admittedly the downsampling in CMBB may not be perfect, but I don't think that there is a bug in the routines. I believe the issue is with the NVidia drivers on the Mac for some posters in this thread. Adjusting your code (if it could be done) for a particular set of drivers or hardware (that is still current) is a foolhardy pursuit. People whined and complained that CMBO had problems with the NVidia drivers on the PC under Windows 2000 and XP with the 'transparent white'. It took quite awhile for NVidia to acknowledge the error and fix it with a new family of drivers (the drivers were not correctly implementing a certain sequence of DirectX calls). Now BTS/BFC could have fixed it themselves by redoing all 2D textures and text that were white and changed them to some other color that was significantly far enough from white (though one solution they experimented with didn't completely work, I believe). There were other issues with FSAA corruption too, that eventually got worked out. People just don't seem to realize just how much of a state of flux video driver development exists in. For NVidia and ATI it has often bounced back and forth between tweaking for performance and fixing bugs; one path often affecting the other negatively. As for what is specifically happening here (primarily on the Mac) it may need looking into since some of the newest Radeons are starting to suffer from this problem too (if I recall correctly). However there's a possibility that both manufacturers may be doing something similar (texture compression or downsampling) to their drivers in order to attain comparable benchmarks. [ December 01, 2002, 05:39 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted December 2, 2002 Share Posted December 2, 2002 Originally posted by Schrullenhaft: I'm not sure why a small battle would see downsampling on a high VRAM video card, but I believe that Madmatt answered the question as to why the two sets of textures seemed 'downsampled' in the above pic Yeah things have got a bit confused coz we hijacked this thread to moan about the mac bug. None of my comments relate to the first post because it's a PC and I know a number of the CMBB default textures are *relatively* lo-res. However the first part of your quote above is the crux of our mac problem: downsampling on a high VRAM video card. All I want is for CMBB to do this: 1) determine graphics card being used 2) is it 16mb or below? Downsampling=full 3) else, is it 32mb or below? Downsampling=partial 4) else, downsampling=none SIMPLE!! At the moment, mac geforce cards only make it to the first "else", even 128mb ones This has nothing to do with drivers! The variable "downsampling" is internal to CMBB. I have run a large thread on this in the main forum, including proof and screenshots. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Strontium Dog Posted December 2, 2002 Share Posted December 2, 2002 Originally posted by tecumseh: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Schrullenhaft: The issue is most likely with the video drivers.it doesn't happen in CMBO, even in the biggest scenario. .</font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecumseh Posted December 2, 2002 Share Posted December 2, 2002 Originally posted by Strontium Dog: Its definitely happening in CMBO on my dual 867 G4 with 32Mb Nvidia MX4. The graphics performance is considerably worse than on my G3 466 with a 32Mb Radeon card and its also acting a little weird in other respects.Worse, as in blurry or worse as in slower? This is weird because I have seen only perfectly crisp CMBO on some crap cards (2mx, rage pro etc...) As to your other problem, yes I have that too. And another you might see is the very slllooooowwww bug when the mouse and the sounds are very slow and the game runs at 1 fps. It's fixed by a restart too. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Strontium Dog Posted December 2, 2002 Share Posted December 2, 2002 Worse as in blurry. I should add that I'm also using a different monitor now i.e. Formac Gallery 17" LCD (I was using a CRT monitor before) but I don't see how this can be a problem. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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