Is there an illustration of that "fog-table" issue? I remember my R7000 PCI can be tweaks via "rage-tweaker" to support several fog-options,
but I never checked if "sote" reports them correctly. My onboard i815e reports a failure on this test.

Does anyone have a suggestion for the 8bit paletted texture problem on the v1 in D3D on a Machine above 400Mhz ?

vlask wrote:

I remember that X-Wing Alliance been working fine till my FX5900XT. Once i replaced it with 6600GT i got scrambled mostly unreadable text in missions. Later Nvidia cards had same issues. Not sure it source of problem is the same....

I think that's the "pixel center" problem. Some NV drivers have the option to use "alternate pixel center". There are also replacement font packs for XWA but they are ugly. I am pretty sure early Radeon cards work fine. And of course 3dfx cards are fine.

leileilol wrote:

Tests like: […]
Show full quote

W Gruffydd wrote:

It would hard be to overstate the utility for retro gamers of a visual feature list for games, accompanied by a hardware list of visual capabilities for applicable APIs.

Tests like:

- a single 16 gray texel scaled up and modulated up, to expose filter precision
- a basic room with colored mip levels to show the standard lod calculation and bias
- some really additive-blended overdraw of a dark texel to bring out the 16-bit color dithering matrix
- Some 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 8x8 and 16x16 textures for testing the minimum texture sizes allowed
- Some rectangle texture tests to see if those are allowed
- Texture clamping modes
- a reminder that no 3d card is perfect in any of these results and they are purely subjective tastes

Some of those are a deep dive for me. I'd rather start with whether a given card can run 3D feature X in game X with official drivers and no tweaking. I'd be after objective results. E.g., the Matrox Mystique cannot do bilinear texture filtering for any game or API.

It may be helpful to identify, if at all possible, the 3D features developers considered ideal. So, while someone may prefer the look of emulated table fog to actual table fog, the fact that it's trying to be something else shows that something else is ideal.

I think there was a similar thread somewhat recently in which people tried to find games that required paletted texture support.

Any chance to point me on this thread? I just bought Toshiba Tecra S3 laptop with 6600Go and was "surprised" by crappy sky color in Thief II. As I read that's because paletted textures aren't supported on hardware level anymore on GeForce 6. And my goal with this old laptop was to create an ultimate retro gaming machine. Now I want to understand how many games used this thing, how many of them are important to me and what I can do to have them look properly on this machine.

Fairly certain Thief 2 doesn't make use of paletted textures. Your issue could be one of drivers and perhaps 16bit rendering on the 6600 Go. This is usually an issue with later cards such as the 8800 series, however they might have caused issues on older cards with newer drivers. Care to take a screenshot and show us the issue?

Fairly certain Thief 2 doesn't make use of paletted textures.

It does. From multiple palettes, which complicates things.

I'm gonna have a look at the readme to see if this is true, but I find it a little odd that they did this. Did other Dark Engine games such as the original Thief or SS2 use this as well?

That's how it should look like

And in attachment you can see how it look now. Only sky is affected.

Did other Dark Engine games such as the original Thief or SS2 use this as well?

Yes. System Shock 2 and original Thief also use paletted textures.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … texture_support

This list looks kinda empty. I just wanna know how many games are lost for me on this GF 6600 card.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-01-30, 18:53:

Did other Dark Engine games such as the original Thief or SS2 use this as well?

Yes. System Shock 2 and original Thief also use paletted textures.

I see no mention of this on the readme for either Thief games and this is the first time I've ever heard of this being the case, but if you insist I do believe you, although if you had some proof of this we could verify.
I was under the impression that paletted textures were not used that often on PC and cases such as the infamous requirement for Final Fantasy VII were few and far between (the fact that FF7 was a PS1 game certainly didn't help).

vorob wrote on 2020-01-30, 18:33:

That's how it should look like
And in attachment you can see how it look now. Only sky is affected.

Care to try something? Open up cam.cfg and edit the line:

game_screen_depth 16

to

game_screen_depth 32

or vice versa if it's configured the other way. Probably won't fix your issue, but worth a try.

I see no mention of this on the readme for either Thief games and this is the first time I've ever heard of this being the case

It's a common knowledge that Dark Engine games were designed with texture palette in mind. And it's not really that uncommon too: Quake 2, Homeworld, Incoming, probably early NFS games and many more.

Garrett W wrote on 2020-01-31, 00:14:

Nope
https://sun9-46.userapi.com/c855336/v85533635 … gvN5wMW5N88.jpg

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-01-31, 02:39:

I see no mention of this on the readme for either Thief games and this is the first time I've ever heard of this being the case

It's a common knowledge that Dark Engine games were designed with texture palette in mind. And it's not really that uncommon too: Quake 2, Homeworld, Incoming, probably early NFS games and many more.

Can anyone give an example of bad visuals in homeworld? I've installed it, tried ogl on gf 6600 go, but it didn't work. d3d works fine.

I don't know, tried different games and only Thief II is crippled on skies. I need some examples of games that suffer from broken paletted textures on gf 6

There was one discussion about GeForce 2 and Matrox G400 image quality, which mentioned Homeworld. Apparently the colors are off on a hardware without palettized texture support. Unfortunately the video is down.

I don't get the extra features of nvidia cards in win98. I've had issues with screensavers like 3D flying objects which throws an error using mx cards onwards. Or Anno 1602 max design intro scene not showing. Never had an issue with ATi cards.

Can someone clarify at what point Radeon cards lost Fog Table support (through their registry tweak). And did they ever support 8-bit palletized textures? Does missing 8-bit palletized textures ever cause a feature to fail or some graphic to be missing or is it just a performance benefit for when it was once applicable?

One guess about 8-bit palettized textures is that not having it enabled might cause black borders on a texture in 16-bit colors. I have no idea how to test this feature.

some early 3d accelerators even ones by ati used pixel fog to render fog. As that was a feature of direct3d. So some older games that used those features. later on in later direct x standards they just rendered fog with vertex shaders. There are a lot of older games that used pixel fog. It's more of a feature than 8-bit pallets.

8-bit paletted textures, isn't as big of a deal, everytime I've asked for a list of games that need this, the response is always less than 5 games at least 1 of them can be patched out. It's probably more games than this but most of them are probably glide games anyways, there are a few games that are written to run on 3dfx hardware but dont use glide, they direct3d but using 3dfx features. those and obscure console and arcade ports, some very early 3d API games might want this ones that don't even use direct3d to render.

We should make a list what cards support table-fog and 8bit pal-tex.