Targa on 6/9/2005 at 23:20
Been testing and playing around with all the tweaks, and still have lousy framerate. Was wondering if anyone knows how to disable DDS "bump mapping"? If you look thru the textures for the game, each texture has a "blue gradient bump map" thingy that the game is using to make clothes appear wrinkled, etc. Practically everything in the game uses this, so I figure if there's a way to disable it, even though the graphic quality won't be as "cool", it would almost certainly speed up framerates. Anyone have any ideas?
Jadon on 7/9/2005 at 05:09
would you then not have lighting either?
OrbWeaver on 7/9/2005 at 08:53
Unless the renderer is particularly lousy in its implementation, it is unlikely that disabling bump mapping would make a substantial difference to framerates. The cost in reduced quality would be very noticeable however.
Crispy on 7/9/2005 at 09:03
Hmm... well, the bump effect is achieved using normal maps, and most normal maps are called something like blahblah_N.dds, and have an accompanying blahblah_D.dds (which is the diffuse, or colour, texture). You could try renaming all the blahblah_N.dds files (to, say, blahblah_N.bak) - but you'd probably have to re-generate all the IBT files for every single level to get the changes to take effect, as the textures are stored in the IBT files. More trouble than it's worth if you ask me.
I have no idea what effect this would have on performance, if any. I do know that 3ds max takes quite a bit longer to render a bump-mapped object than to render the same object without the bump map, but that's probably just 3ds max. It's probably doing it in software, whereas Thief 3 would be doing it in hardware.
Ziemanskye on 7/9/2005 at 10:42
The normalmaps could still be crippling performance - it means each textures could be multi-pass, so it has to render it and light it, then bump it.
Play with multi-pass shaders in another engine and you find that having a whole screen full is mostly bad.
How to remove/reduce the effect though, I have no idea, especially since a lot of the textures in the game don't seem to have mip-maps either, so the entirity of the texture is being computed (normal maps included) even when it's really far away.
str8g8 on 7/9/2005 at 12:16
You can always just import the _D files into the texture browser and use them as straight textures ... the disadvantage is that the texture would have none of the attributes associated with it in the matlib, ie sound and so on.
jermi on 7/9/2005 at 20:53
Quote Posted by Ziemanskye
a lot of the textures in the game don't seem to have mip-maps either, so the entirity of the texture is being computed (normal maps included) even when it's really far away.
Mipmaps are probably generated on the fly when the texture is loaded.
Komag on 7/9/2005 at 22:20
Doom 3 has a super low graphics setting which doesn't use normal maps. It looks freakin nasty, but apparantly it helps performance enough to warrant the setting.
Targa on 8/9/2005 at 03:04
Well, it appears that the fact that the textures are all stored in the IBT files prevents turning off bumpmapping. I'm certain that it would help framerates if there weren't any "normal maps" being used. Yes, it would look worse, but no worse than Thief2 or many other games do. That bumping/wrinkling of clothes and stuff has to be eating up graphics card and CPU capability. I've gone into the ini files and turned pretty much everything off, and framerates still suck. Ah well, thanks anyway.
242 on 8/9/2005 at 08:49
I guess it would look so bad that you wouldn't want to play it like that. Much like Doom3 without bumpmapping. D3 looks horrible with bumpmaps turned off, worse than Thief2 I think.
