Is that resolution the native display mode for your monitor ?

I run my 22 inch widescreen in it's native mode of 1680 x 1050 and didn't note what you are referring to, I will have another look however.

You are referring to the cut-scenes I take it.

Videos will obviously look pixelated. They're at 640x480 and on a widescreen monitor. It's not a game thing, it's just the monitor and age of the videos themselves.

Yes I am referring to the cut scenes.

I'm not using a widescreen monitor, it's a 4:3 crt hence using 1600x1200 on the hd4850.

I didn't realise the cutscenes were 640x480 so I guess it could just be blowing that up; somehow I imagined that sort of thing was just like DVD footage. [Or is that also going to be affected? Not sure I ever watched a dvd on this screen.]

I had thought the videos looked better on another computer using the same monitor but that's since decided to crash every time I call the game up. Sod's law.

Edit: Ok, now I tried it on my voodoo 5 box, same monitor. Some graininess but it looks a lot better to me, there is pixelation but it doesn't seem to last as long and/or there is less of it. Quite hard to tell but there isn't the intrusive "this is shit" feeling when playing the video cutscenes on the v5 . Pity the v5 can't handle the maximum resolutions for the game. I notice with both cards that when the scene changes in a cutscene, it starts blocky and then it gets smoothed. The voodoo has better colours so maybe that's part of it. But it looks like the hd4850 is not smoothing things as fast. Weird. Maybe it's just my imagination, heh.

Hmm now I see these catalyst drivers have all sorts on useful looking options under video, all of which seem to be impossible to save so they might as well not be there. De-blocking, mosquito noise reduction, and so on.

I take it the game doesn't directly support Glide then ???

If it did then I was going to suggest using a Glide wrapper and test again.

Also, try going down to say 1024 x 768 resolution mode and see what it looks like.

My guess is that the cutscenes get stretched to fit the desktop resolution.

Yeah I tried lower resolutions but I couldn't see any difference in the cutscenes, I'll try again later this week. It doesn't support glide but you can use opengl instead of directx. Though the opengl version was supposed to be not as good iirc.

You're running the Voodoo 5 at the same monitor I presume?
Well, then it must be some kind of incompatibility with the newer graphics cards, those blocks you speak of tend to happen in a lot of games, I've never exactly found out what the cause of that really is. Perhaps some option in Ati Catalyst Center?

I don't suppose you've got a picture of this?
To be honest it just sounds like compression artifacts, they get much more noticable at high res.
This is pure speculation, but maybe the difference between the Voodoo and the Radeon might be because the Voodoo has a higher quality RAMDAC? I'm assuming the Radeon has dual DVI outputs, while the Voodoo would have VGA. ATI might have cheaped out a bit on the Radeon's RAMDAC since it was intended to be primarily used with a digital monitor.

I remember in Warcraft 2 animations were plenty pixelated.
Maybe your Warcraft 3 is simply being nostalgic 🤣

yeah, remember it had to fit a cdrom. in 2002.

Also, you can use OpenGL for a renderer in WC3, try that and see if anything else happens.