Firefreak on 27/1/2007 at 09:05
I have a more general question about this mipmapping topic;
Many years ago, it was amazing when graphic cards could do such things as 'anti-aliasing' (the removal of 'clunky' edges) - every card needed to support it, every game wanted to use it. Now, mipmapping seems to be the anti-aliasing for textures, right?
I'm trying to make sense of the these features - for me, most of those terms appear to me as techno-babble the more 'modern' they are ("Sir, by enabling the secondary shader pipeline we can boost the trilinear bump-mapping offset to be in vertical sync of the second interlaced frame!" - "Yeah, whatever, Data, just make sure the tea is hot.").
What I've understood about all those features is to make the rendered images look more real - I remeber the announcement of 3dfx about their T-Buffer (Avault had a big article about that) - I guess the pixel shaders nowadays can handle what was imagined (pun intended) back then.
Now, my question is: One wants to turn it off? I realize it's a matter of taste, but I always thought for image quality, everything should be turned on (apart from a small group of professional first-person-shooter players who want to see a FPS count beyond the refresh rate of the monitor..)
Hemebond on 27/1/2007 at 13:43
Heh. I didn't even realise this thread was about disabling mipmapping.
ZylonBane on 27/1/2007 at 13:57
Quote Posted by Firefreak
Now, mipmapping seems to be the anti-aliasing for textures, right?
MIP mapping is nothing more than a technologically necessitated hack to compensate for the fact that video cards have neither the speed nor the memory bandwidth to do proper interpolated downscaling of texture data in realtime. So instead, games (or the video card drivers) pre-generate a set of properly scaled textures at various sizes for each actual texture.
In the absence of MIP maps, what you get is nearest-neighbor scaling, which anyone who knows anything about graphics will tell you is the worst way to scale images, and looks like ass. Bizarrely, some people actually think this looks better!
And once again, RocketMan reminds us why he should stay the hell out of technical threads.
Bjossi on 27/1/2007 at 16:47
In my opinion, no mipmapping looks ok on walls, but floors look weird. I'm playing Unreal with it disabled and it does look pretty good.
icemann on 27/1/2007 at 19:00
Ok so now that we know what mipmapping is. Whats Bump mapping do exactly?
Just like firefreak when people start talking in all the graphical technobabble I usually just think "ok whatever" and scroll to the next paragraph, but as this a thread devoted to the whole topic of SS2 features that are currently enabled/disabled I`m curious.
Displacer on 27/1/2007 at 19:26
Bump mapping is taking a surface and giving it the illusion of having texture. Such as taking a sphere, and applying a bump map to it and having a surface that looks like a orange. Basically it takes a flat surface and makes it look like it has raised, and sunken areas, making things look more real.
RocketMan on 27/1/2007 at 20:08
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
In the absence of MIP maps, what you get it nearest-neighbor scaling, which anyone who knows anything about graphics will tell you is the worst way to scale images, and looks like ass. Bizarrely, some people actually think this looks better!
Mipmaps use trilinear (or anisotropic) filtering right? Compared to nearest neighbour scaling they would be superior but you can still see the borders of the textures as you look further and further away so I guess that's what I don't like about it. Without mipmapping enabled can you use anything other than nearest neighbour? Also, since downscaling textures with nearest neighbour often leaves the reduced texture with missing pixels where they ought to be you get that discontinuous, jagged effect. Can anti-aliasing sort of compensate for this and keep the texture looking at least comparable to a trilinearly filtered mipmap of the same size?
Vigil on 27/1/2007 at 20:24
good christ the amount of incorrect information in this thread is staggering
