DDS texture- My opinions.

[Ahriman]

Direct Draw Surface Texture.

Okay, I don't know much about this, but from the name, I am assuming that the application draws the surface at the spot. Correct me if I'm wrong  .

Well, I have also noticed the change when you changed from the regular texturte to DDS, that farther away textures are MUCH more blurry. As said in this topic: http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=24386.0 I thought that maybe it is because it draws the surface on the spot. Correct me on these If I'm wrong too, these are just my opinions.... So maybe if you changed back to the format that was in 0.3.014b and before, maybe the blurry stuff would go away? Thanks for reading

[Karyuu]

It would go away, but DDS is much more efficient and smaller. There are too many obvious benefits - that's why we switched in the first place. Many games use the DDS format, so maybe we will just have to adjust our exporting some for better final results. But switching back would be devolution at this point.

[willelmo]

For DDS there is different compressions too, Dxt1, Dxt3 and Dxt5, where dxt1 is not compression at all, for race sims we use Dxt3 for car body and Dxt5 for windows as that is what is recommend by devs on that.

DDS can also hold information of mip mapping levels and such, it is very good format for game use.

I remember reading from here forum that some graphics settings could have some affect about this issue and with default setting textures are blurry but with other settings it would be not so bad, but as my memory is what it is I really can't remember where this discussion was

[Xordan]

DXT1 is compression. To be more specific, it's DXT1c that we use for non-alpha textures. The difference between the DXT's are:

DXT1c is colour only (no alpha), compressed to 4bits/pixel.
DXT1a has 1bit alpha.
DXT3 adds support for a four-bit explicit alpha channel, on top of DXT1's color compression. Four-bit explicit alpha allows for sixteen distinct alpha values, making it good for textures with sharply contrasting translucent/opaque areas. Compressed to 8bits/pixel.
DXT5 supports a four-bit interpolated alpha channel. Three bits are used to determine explicit alpha values, and two eight-bit values are used to interpolate gradually between them. This makes the format especially suited for soft gradients and other textures where the alpha areas vary less wildly. Compressed to 8bits/pixel.

DXT5 compresses the alpha channels better than DXT3, so it gives better quality for the same filesize. DDS is very close to the format that's stored in the graphics card, and as it supports the generation of mipmaps before loading, it means that there's less for your computer to generate when it loads the textures. As for the blurry texture at a distance, it can be fixed using some LOD I would think (such as changing the texture when you move closer/further away from the point), which is on the todo.

[Wired_Crawler]

This is setting in data/config/r3dopengl.cfg taken from linux installer:

Code: [Select]

; Whether precomputed (e.g. like in DDS) mipmaps should still be sharpened.
; Usually "no".
Video.OpenGL.TextureClass.default.SharpenPrecomputedMipmaps = no

Maybe it should be set to yes ? I can't check the result atm.

[Xordan]

hmm, interesting I will take a look when I get home if someone doesn't beat me to it.

As Jorrit mentioned to me, some people like the blurring, so if that option does fix it then it should be a option in pssetup.

[Ahriman]

I hate it, makes the game look..... Old. I mean, its not like when you look at a car in real life and it gets VERY blurry when you get far away, you still see the lights and everything else separately, instead of being mushed into one big blob....

[hook]

Well ...considering PS is planned to run on both older HW and look awesome on new ...I think the blurring could be done (if it isn't already, looking from that quote!) as an option.

[Bereror]

Video.OpenGL.TextureClass.default.SharpenPrecomputedMipmaps = yes seems to make no difference, but the Anisotropy filtering option in the setup does.

Anisotropy filtering = 1.0 :



Anisotropy filtering = 2.0 :

[Wired_Crawler]

Yes, it was already mentioned in thread "Blurry textures?". After setting AF to 8x textures are very sharp and I don't even see real change in fps rate (the difference is like 77/75 in above scene). And what about people with older hardware ?

[Ahriman]

Like me :O Thank god Im getting a new GPU now, but it seems annoying ~_~

[willelmo]

Thanks to Xordan for really good explanation of different dxt levels, helps my stuff

I do use anisotropy filtering at 2.0 too so I had not noticed much of blur thing at all.

[Ambiguous-Existence]

im a bit sceptical about the use of DDS since morrowind and morrowind:oblivion uses that texture format which a lot of mod creatres redid in bmp to remove the bluriness and gain higher clearer textures which of course looked tons better.

[ThomPhoenix]

They redid them in .bmp? That's must've been a huge mod
That's part of the reason they chose for .dds, the size/quality ratio is better.

[Xordan]

im a bit sceptical about the use of DDS since morrowind and morrowind:oblivion uses that texture format which a lot of mod creatres redid in bmp to remove the bluriness and gain higher clearer textures which of course looked tons better.

DDS isn't supposed to give you amazing quality, it's supposed to optimize for speed and size which is why it's used by nearly every commercial game now. Game companies rely on technologies such as Anisotropy filtering to improve the quality of the textures once they're loaded. I've tried that mod and the difference between bmp, and dds with forced anistropy filtering (via graphics card settings) is nothing, except that the bmp textures lower fps and take longer to load.