I'll see if I can replciate this again -- it worked for me fine yesterday!

All of us have used adaptive 8-bit palettes in our textures, so it can't be just that I looked at the data chunks of the 8 bit PNGs and JCs include a few extra unnecessary chunks, in particular a GAMA chunk -- I have a feeling this may be causing problems, but not entirely sure.

I hope you'll find what's causing this, Gambit. Or we'll see it fixed in next version of Glidos/psvoodoo.

I can live with what we have at the moment 😉 It looks very impressive anyway.

@Kaminari
I tried forcing mipmapping in Forceware drivers but it doesn't have any effect on this game 🙁
I never realized how much this technic can improve quality of graphics until today 😀 With low res textures I haven't seen any improvement using mipmapping.

Today I installed new 92.91 beta drivers from NVidia and unfortunately the problem increased - there are more grey fields and now artifacts appear in all texture packs 🙁

But I thought turning off AA fixed it for you. Can you remind me what are the conditions under which it happens?

These artifacts appear in psvoodoo with AA and mipmapping on. Graphics quality is the best then, but artifacts spoil it.

In OpenGL mode this problem doesn't exist but some items (medipacks, doors etc.) are visible through walls (w-buffer problem?) so psvoodoo seems to be a better solution for me.

Maybe it is just incompatibility with latest NVidia drivers?

I'm just reporting it to help you find a reason of it. I could play with AA off, it's not a problem. I completed TR1 for so many times (software mode, with Voodoo 2 and 3dfx patch, dgvoodoo) and I don't intend to go through entire game until everything is retextured and all glitches fixed.
But I really enjoy testing high-res texture packs. 😉

Oh ok, thanks. I have some idea what the cause is, just haven't had the time to look into it.

Hi again 😀

I did more intensive testing today and here are the results:

Nvidia cards have four levels of antialiasing: 2x, 2xQ, 4x, 8xS. I tested all of them with psvoodoo, mipmapping on, resolution 1024x768x32.

- 8xS - numerous artifacts in all high-res packs
- 4x - many artifacts in JC's and Antonijadis' packs (but much less than with 8xS)
- 2xQ - artifacts only in Antonijadis' pack.
- 2x - artifacts only in Antonijadis' pack.
With Antonijadis' pack (2xQ or 2x) artifacts appear only in places where high-res textures are missing (I mean they are not yet included in the pack as it is a beta stage) - you can see sample screenshot in my first post in this thread.

So now 2xQ method is my favourite one because only one pack causes problems with it and graphics is very good in all aspects. It looks to me that beta Forceware drivers which I installed today have changed nothing compared to official 91.47, I just set 8xS in the afternoon and that's why I reported artifacts in all high-res packs.

I hope this will clarify the situation and will help to fix it somehow.

EDIT: Tomorrow I will make some tests on my laptop with ATI X200M integrated graphics and I'll see if there is any difference.

EDIT2: I made some tests on my laptop but it seems that I can't force ATI drivers to use antialiasing in the game - there is no change in graphics quality with AA on and off. So I can't confirm if artifacts would be here if AA would work.

Is this version of psVoodoo any better?

Just drop it in C:\Program Files\Glidos\psVoodoo as a replecement for the existing version.

Unfortunately it didn't improve anything both with Glidos 1.33 and 1.34. 🙁
Currently I'm using the latest official Forceware drivers 93.71 (Windows XP). I attached psvoodoo.log, but it seems that errors are the same as before.

Not quite the same: the error concerning offscreen surfaces has gone, but I guess that wasn't the main problem.

So is it still ok with AA off, but not otherwise?

Glidos wrote:

So is it still ok with AA off, but not otherwise?

That's right, the artifacts appear only with AA on and mipmapping on. It's a pity, because image quality is the best then.

Increasing AA level causes increasing number of artifacts, I wrote about it in my previous posts.

After some more random code changes 😁 , how about this one?

Sorry, no change, though error messages in psvoodoo are a little different.

Hmmm, I wonder: could we be running the card out of memory. What about if you enable AA but bring the resolution down.

This isn't usually a problem you run into with a Glide Wrapper, but the texture packs use loads of memory.

It seems you are right, I've just made some tests with psvoodoo on XP:

4xAA, 1024x768x32
- JC's pack Vilcabamba level - many artifacts
- Antonijadis' Cistern level - many artifacts

4xAA, 800x600x32
- JC's pack Vilcabamba level - almost no artifacts, only muzzle flashes from Lara's guns are white
- Antonijadis' Cistern level - many artifacts

4xAA, 640x480
- JC's pack Vilcabamba level - no artifacts
- Antonijadis' Cistern level - no artifacts

So, is 128MB of video memory not enough? Is there any way to improve graphics memory usage without remaking texture packs? I can play modern games in 1024x768 with AA on without problems.

I have wondered about available memory quite a bit while developing textures. I've certainly noticed that later versions of Glidos take much longer to load textures.

Around version 1.29 it was fairly instant, now I get a white screen for several seconds each time a new level loads or after reloading a save game.

I assumed this was related to all the extra work parsing the mappings/equivs but maybe something else is going on and depleting memory?

Incidentally, would it be possible to make the white screen black instead -- it's pretty jarring.

Interesting. I'll investigate.

Gambit, you sure about that. Might it not be that your pack is bigger now. I just tried beta-title and beta-caves on both 1.29 and 1.34. Couldn't see much difference

Actually, forget that. I expect its slow only when the equiv file is present. I think I can see a way to speed it up though.

If I've understood the DirectX 9 documentation correctly, this version has no choice but to work, although performance is uncertain.