Jack Carr Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 I was wondering if anyone out there knows anything about the mipmaps setting on a video card. The possible settings for this feature are none - Do not force mipmaps bilinear - Force bilinear mipmaps which reult in slightly better image quality with a smaller impact on performance. trilinear - much better image quality with an impact on performance. My card is a Chaintech Nvidia GeForce Ti4600 128MB 4XAGP What exactly does this do? Thanks for your knowledge in advance. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Murray Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 I was wondering about the same thing. My card is a BFG Geforce FX 5500 OC 256 MB 4XAGP. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
junk2drive Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 Rob, I have the same card 4x/8x. Just got it. Now when I am in the map editor I cannot arrow side to side and up down without it pausing and jumping. Same for you? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Murray Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 I had to format my HD last week & I don't have any CM games on my computer at the moment (waiting for CMMODS to come back up). I don't seem to recall any problems with the map editor though in either BB or AK. Didn't mean to hijack the original thread BTW. What does this setting do anyway? [ April 14, 2005, 10:07 AM: Message edited by: Rob Murray ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Carr Posted April 14, 2005 Author Share Posted April 14, 2005 I did a search on "mipmap" in the tech forum and most of what I read suggested that having this set to the highest detail level would improve the visual aspect of CM. I certainly found this to be the case as my mipmapping was turned off and after I turned it on, everything looked a bit better, especially things that were distant. This may just be me, but it also seemed that the turns seemed to calculate much quicker. The initial blue bar went really fast. Anyway, barring nobody posting any details about this, I'm leaving mipmapping set to trilinear. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liddell-Hart Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 Essentially a mipmap is a series of 2d texture maps filtered and sized to improve appearance at different draw distances, bilinear and trilinear are just different levels, crudely speaking giving 2 or 3 levels of texture redrawing. The performance hit would be dependent on the complexity of the original texture. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wally's World Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 When I get home, I'm going to try this trilinear setting on my Ti4200-8X. Excellent thread! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 Forcing mipmaps and the filters on them are two different concepts. My understanding is that CM always uses maxed out mipmaps anyway so the option to force them if not doesn't apply. Trilinear filtering looks better than bilinear and is slower. Since pretty much all modern cards are way overkill for CMx1 you should always have that on. These filters improve the look of textures that are pasted one after the other, are at an angle to the viewer but run through the field of view for a substancial amount of space. Tincical example is the walls and floors in a corridor in a FPS. I practice I haven't been able to see a difference between bilinear and trilinear filtering filtering in CM, and for tanks it doesn't apply because the same texture is never repeated. In theory the best place to see it is if you look at an angle at a long line of "pavement" terrain tiles. But since CM draws such a street by just using the primary texture multiple times and doesn't use the card's mechanism to draw the same texture multiple times automatically I assume this disables mipmapping and hence bilinear and trilinear filtering don't apply. However, since CM apparently breaks anisotropic filtering on newer cards (both NVidia and ATI) that looks horrible anyway, even before bilinear or trilinear mipmap filtering can apply. I would be curious to see screenshots if you guys see any difference. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liddell-Hart Posted April 14, 2005 Share Posted April 14, 2005 Forgive me but isn't anisotropic different again? in that rather than sampling textures on a linear plane along line of sight it samples zones at various angles to the view and filters that way. Basically all of them are designed to reduce an effect you used to get in FPS's when you'd move in a box of perfectly drawn textures with a visible line where the textures became less defined, in CM terms they're largely redundant, and in fact in some recent FPS's they can turn into a slide show on max settings on even the biggest and bestest cards. As redwolf says though, despite the fact that most recent cards can max out filter settings on the CM engine, the effect can be unpredictable, ranging from unnoticable to unplayable. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted April 15, 2005 Share Posted April 15, 2005 Anisotropic texture filtering is a different concept from bilinear or trilinear texture filtering. Bilinear and trilinear filtering are improving the look of mipmapped textures painted into distances, in particular where one mipmap level meets the next, and to prevent far way textures from just looking like pixel mess. Anisotropic filtering also improves the looks of single textures, with no mimapping, when drawn at an angle to the viewer, in particular it prevents lines on the texture from washing out or from looking like interrupted lines. I am not sure but the mipmapping filters might not do much to CM. And if you look up a recent thread where a lot of people posted screenshots, newer cards from both NVidia and ATI seem to outright disable anisotropic filtering for CM. Anyone has a link to the screenshot thread ready? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Carr Posted April 15, 2005 Author Share Posted April 15, 2005 I will try to get some images up with and without the mipmapping this weekend. I'm having a busy week. Hang in there. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Carr Posted April 18, 2005 Author Share Posted April 18, 2005 FYI for anyone still interested. I e-mailed two screenshots to RedWolf. One with mipmapping set to trilinear and the other with mipmapping shut off. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted April 19, 2005 Share Posted April 19, 2005 Argh! No mailing of uncompressed BMPs, please. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Carr Posted April 20, 2005 Author Share Posted April 20, 2005 Originally posted by Redwolf: Argh! No mailing of uncompressed BMPs, please. Whoops! Sorry... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted April 20, 2005 Share Posted April 20, 2005 I couldn't see a difference anyway, but the screenshots are not from the same position. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Carr Posted April 20, 2005 Author Share Posted April 20, 2005 Originally posted by Redwolf: I couldn't see a difference anyway, but the screenshots are not from the same position. I'd have to agree with you with these particular screenshots. There wasn't much of a difference. I'll continue to look swap the settings to see if I can get a view that appears markedly better with mipmapping set to trilinear. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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