How To Run Ns At Highest Grapical Quality?
Zaggy
NullPointerExceptionThe Netherlands Join Date: 2003-12-10 Member: 24214Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Onos, Subnautica Playtester
NullPointerExceptionThe Netherlands Join Date: 2003-12-10 Member: 24214Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Onos, Subnautica Playtester
Comments
fps_max "200" // I have v-sync on at 100hz however.
fps_modem "0"
gamma "3.000000"
brightness "3.000000"
viewsize "120"
ati_subdiv "2"
ati_npatch "1.0"
topcolor "30"
bottomcolor "6"
mp_decals "100"
r_bmodelhighfrac "5"
r_mmx "1"
r_shadows "0"
r_novis "1"
r_mirroralpha "1"
r_detailtextures "1"
r_detailtexturessupported "1"
gl_cull "0"
gl_clear "1"
gl_keeptjunctions "1"
gl_texsort "1"
gl_overbright "1"
gl_polyoffset "0.1"
gl_flipmatrix "0"
gl_wateramp "0"
gl_ztrick "0"
gl_dither "0"
gl_smoothmodels "0"
gl_spriteblend "1"
gl_lightholes "1"
gl_monolights "0"
gl_round_down "0"
gl_picmip "0"
gl_playermip "0"
gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR
gl_max_size "1024"
gl_palette_tex "1"
precache "1"
hpk_maxsize "1.0"
fastsprites "0"
d_spriteskip "0"
================================
These are commands which i use in all HL mods to give me good gfx quality.
You might want to do gl_smoothmodels "1" I don't because of personal preference.
You will probably notice a small difference after all these commands. I also suggest running the game in 1024 x 768 and having 2xAA and 2xAF.
C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\richens@gotadsl.co.uk\half-life\nsp\userconfig.cfg
before I dash home to alter my config?
You can try using the detail textures linked in my sig if you like, assuming you have a somewhat new card(e.g. something like a geforce 3 or radeon 7000). They might make it look better or just be annoying depending on taste, it is a work in progress and could need much improvement.
A very big difference, if you have the GPU power, can be achieved by forcing your graphics card to use anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering(display properties-> advanced -> openGL/3d or something similar). Anti-aliasing is slightly broken in HL as most other games that use lightmaps, you get these faint bright lines from time to time at the junction where polygons meet but it does look better than the jaggies you get with no AA.
Anisotropic filtering reduces blur on textures allmost perpendicular to the screen and it makes a BIG difference.
edit
Guess what, ill just try it myself and make a before and after screenie
<a href='http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/19537/screenie%201.JPG' target='_blank'>Before</a>
<a href='http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/19537/screenie%202.JPG' target='_blank'>After</a>
Having AA and AF enabled gives a slight delay to your mouse-movement, so they will affect to your accuracy. I wouldn't enable them because of that. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo-->
No. Simply no they don't unless there is some weird problem I have never heard of with some graphics cards. They do make you lag if they cause poor performance but that's not mouse lag that's just a poor framerate.
Triple buffering and increasing the pre-render limit will increase mouse lag however.
Here's the difference between 16x AF, 6x AA, gl_texturemode gl_linear_mipmap_linear and defaults(which is entirely playable and very smooth and what I use normaly as I'm very much CPU limited anyway in half-life at the resolution I use(800x600, I can't crank the refresh rate as high as I want to in 1024x768 and there simply isn't very much more detail to display when using a higher resolution in half-life)).
Right, I treated both shots identically in photoshop(blow up to twice the res with nearest filtering which means take each pixel and make it 2x2 pixel square of the same colour), and levels to achieve the approximate brightness in NS.
You can see the lines from using bilinear in the default texture filtering mode, these move when I move and are very annoying. You can also see the significant bluring on walls, ceilings and floors which are allmost perpendicular to the screen. Anisotropic filtering removes this in the higher quality screen shot. You can see jaggies at the edges of polygons such as the player in the defaults shot, in the shot using anti-aliasing the player looks much more blended into the environment.
(p.s. try gl_texturemode gl_nearest just for giggles. Best used in conjunction with gl_max_size 64 or something before you load the map, now that's just craptacular <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->).
gl_texturemode gl_nearest and gl_max_size 512 :o)
No. Simply no they don't unless there is some weird problem I have never heard of with some graphics cards. They do make you lag if they cause poor performance but that's not mouse lag that's just a poor framerate.
Triple buffering and increasing the pre-render limit will increase mouse lag however. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
No problem here; got enough hardware and software to make sure that it's a rock-hard 100 FPS. Dunno what causes it, 100% it's not the drivers, but for some reason the mouse feels sluggish even when the mouse-speed is maxed. Which is not far off from what I currently use. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Had the same problem with Unreal 2, but then I guessed it had to be the maxed graphics. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Also be sure to turn of smooth mouse or mouse filter in the games options if you want to reduce mouse lag further(as mouse smoothing is an averaging process of some sort over the last few frames)
If you turn on AA and reduce the prerender limit as much as you can(1?)/make sure mouse smoothing is off do you still get mouse lag?
To see aliasing at it's worst try setting gl_texturemode gl_linear and you will get no mipmapping at all, only bilinear filter.
The reason for aliasing is easy to understand with an example. If you draw a single 256x256 texture to a square polygon that takes up 256x256 pixels on your screen each pixel on the screen corresponds roughly to a texel("texture-pixel") so little filtering is nessecary. Since each pixel does not exactly correspond to a texel but lie some where inbetween texels a filtering method called bilinear is commonly used, it looks at the four closest texels and blend them in a linear fashion to create the final colour.
Move further away so that the polygon occupies 1 pixel on the screen, now you need to average all those pixels for it to look good, if you don't who knows what you get? It could be a bilinear sample out of anywhere in your texture and it would just flicker and change coulour as you move, this is how this form of aliasing arises, you need to take many more samples but for performance you cannot feasibly do this.
This is what mip-maping is usefull for. If create a series of averages of the original texture, such as a 128x128 texture where each texel corresponds to 4 texels in the original texture, and a 64x64 texture etc you have allready done most of the nessecary filtering if you choose the correct mipmap to use at run time.
Mipmap banding arises when using bilinear filtering, it's those lines where things turn from blurry to sharp when using gl_texturemode gl_linear_mipmap_nearest.
You don't have an infinite series of mipmaps, you have to choose the one/s you want to work with. If you choose the a mipmap that is too large you get aliasing but it looks sharp, if you choose a small one you get bluriness but no aliasing. Mipmap banding occurs where it changes from using one mipmap which is too large to one which is too small(since there is no perfect mipmap to choose).
Trilinear deals with this by taking a mipmap which is slightly too large and a mipmap that is slightly too small, doing a bilinear sample from each and then doing a weighted sum of these samples in a linear fashion, if one of the mipmaps is closer to being the perfect one it gets a higher weight in the sum and is more prominent in the resulting pixel. gl_texturemode gl_linear_mipmap_linear is trilinear filtering.
The reason why a smaller mipmap has to be used on faces that are allmost perpendicular to the screen is that one pixel might correspond to only one texel in height, it would correspond to many texels in depth. There is no mipmap that is unevenly downfiltered in one direction so it has to choose one and it chooses one which is too small in one direction in order to avoid aliasing in the other. Anisotropic filtering solves this by taking additional texture samples from the mipmap in the "depth direction" and using a bigger mipmap, it thus avoids aliasing and bluriness all at once.