Texture Compression

[Marz]

Hi
I am wondering if “Texture Compression” should be enabled or disabled to improve FPS performance. It’s disabled in Powerstrip for both D3D and GL by default.
I have noticed that some games give you the choice of using 16bit or 32bit Texture.
How do these features, “Texture Compression” and “16/32bit Texture,” relate to one another? Do I want Texture Compression on or off with a Radeon 9000 Pro?
And, what would be the best choices regarding these settings that I could make within Powerstrip and/or a game to get smoother game play? I prefer frame speed over graphical quality. I normally run games at 800x600 or 1024x768 with 16bit color.

Thanks

 

[Nights_L]

I think R200 cards and above are designed in such way to play games in 32 bits color, you will not get extra performance with 16 bits. maybe a little bit, but from my experience, it will not, I have a R8500LE, which is in same family as your R9000 Pro
for Texture Compression, you shouldn't disable, even you do so, it will not gain any more performance, it is only a feature which save your hard disk space, instead of full textures
To improve FPS, you could use the ATI control panel to make your video card to "High Performance" in both texture preference and mip mapping level, also disable "wait for vertical sync", "Smooth Vision", "Anisotropic Filtering", and of course, install the most update to date ATI Catalyst Driver, and the last thing you could do, is Overclock it, by software or Flashing its Bios, but required more knowledge.
All of this are from what I know and my experience, they might be wrong, if anyone know better, feel free to correct me~

 

[Willamette_sucks]

leave texture compression ON, it uses less video memory, 16 bit textures will perform better than 32bit, its not the same as 16bit color, 16 bit color will perform slightly better and use less video memory, but leave it on 32 as the drop isnt much and 16 bit color is GAY! if you play games with any kind of fog effects 16bit color is just horrible, even 32 isnt that great which is why 64 or 128 bit floating point color will kick ass.
i use riva tuner not power strip but i assume it has most of the same options. u can do this from within your bios usually, or in ps/rt, but u should have "fast writes" and "sideband addressing" on.
if you have an option of what kind of texture compression you want to use, DXT5 is the best, then DXT3 or STC3 or whatever (old skool UT style).


Long live ATI.

 

[GeneticWeapon]

R200 based cards were shown to run alot faster in 16bit color. Before I got a fast processor, and faster memory, I had to play UT2K3 in 16bit color because of the big framerate hit in 32bit. I dont have to worry about that anymore thank goodness.

My Score..<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104" target="_new">http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104</A>

 

[cheekybeast]

when your playing ut2k3 or some other game, and really concentrating, you probably wont notice AA/AF...but you WILL notice the difference between 32 and 16 bit color.

 

[Twitch]

Yeah...try playing Battlefield 1942 in 16-bit color. You will have a LOT of trouble telling if the dude off in the distance is friend or foe. I suppose if you like to challenge yourself, 16-bit color is the way to go.


<-----Insert witty sig line here.

 

[GeneticWeapon]

Agree'd...it wasnt so much a difference in the color, but the colors not properly blending, I was getting visual anomolies in the distance that was caused by Z buffer fighting. But as my character ran towards the anomaly, it would disapear, and look normal...strange stuff. I went to the Beyond 3D forums for help with the problem, and a girl programmer named Tagrineth explained it all to me(I think I fell in love)...switching to 32bit color fixed everything. [edit]..The anomoly I'm describing was horrible jagged textures being rendered on maps where textures that were metal colored were drawn directly next to a brightly colored objects(usually red)..16bit couldnt make the color transition fluidly.

My Score..<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104" target="_new">http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6258104</A><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by GeneticWeapon on 04/11/03 09:22 PM.</EM></FONT></P>