BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-11-28, 11:01:

Another game which probably uses Table fog is European Air War
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/ge … f5/?page=3#fd20

I had previously tested it here and that was my impression as well.

Wasn't sure though, since it's extremely difficult to line up proper comparison screenshots due to the random nature of that game. Seeing similar results in the thread that you linked made me more confident, so I will add it to the list.

That animated marquee in Driver Cross Town Checkpoint finally got something to click for me. For years I've seen this popup when starting SimCity 2000, alerting me to a degraded experience when using more than 256 colors, but I could never figure out what that difference was. Then I got it! The animated marquee!

There are probably other instances of color cycling in this game, but I couldn't find any.

Click on the gif to see it animate. There are four frames at 1 frame every 1/20th of a second. This animation doesn't play when the desktop is configured for more than 256 colors.

This may be a dumb question, but regarding the 8-bit pallet textures, does this apply to old id software games from the late 90s? I remember retexturing things for Q2 back in the day and the game definitely used 256 color .pcx files. I believe it also had semi-transparent glass window textures as well. Are the graphics in this game broken on everything except 3dfx and Geforce 256 through FX cards? If not, can someone explain what the difference is?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-05, 09:13:

This may be a dumb question, but regarding the 8-bit pallet textures, does this apply to old id software games from the late 90s? I remember retexturing things for Q2 back in the day and the game definitely used 256 color .pcx files. I believe it also had semi-transparent glass window textures as well. Are the graphics in this game broken on everything except 3dfx and Geforce 256 through FX cards? If not, can someone explain what the difference is?

Based on the information that we currently have, it is most likely that Quake, Quake 2 (and other games which use their engines) only utilize paletted textures for improving performance. There should be no difference in visual quality in those games if this feature is missing.

In contrast, there are other games like Driver and Final Fantasy 8 where the lack of paletted texture support results in noticeable visual differences. More info can be found on the relevant Vogons wiki page.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-05, 08:21:

There are probably other instances of color cycling in this game, but I couldn't find any.

Moving blue cars on roads, movie theaters, water. Palette cycling to animate was important as it'd save on so much slow writing (consider early 1994's mainstream PCs that weren't enough for this nor Doom)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-05, 09:13:

This may be a dumb question, but regarding the 8-bit pallet textures, does this apply to old id software games from the late 90s? I remember retexturing things for Q2 back in the day and the game definitely used 256 color .pcx files. I believe it also had semi-transparent glass window textures as well. Are the graphics in this game broken on everything except 3dfx and Geforce 256 through FX cards? If not, can someone explain what the difference is?

In Quake2, turning 8-bit textures off gives you a better looking skybox, but texture quality may drop if you're using 16-bit color (less color bits in a 16-bit texture than a palette entry). The same applies to Quake (which had no skyboxes anyway). Neither game has nonpoweroftwo textures supported (video cards didn't until the mid 2000s) and id didn't plan ahead for 3d hardware limits with old deluxe paint habits kept alive, so they're all screwed either way. Quake2's glass is just a whole texture getting alpha modulated, nothing special there. If this thread were to do the tradiiton of shot comparison with Q2, you'd just get "wow 3dfx bright" and the only obvious sign of 8-bit textures not working would be that the skybox looks good.
(there's also a LOT of stupid politics regarding modulate and intensity settings that players push around as "THE way to play". modulate and intensity modify textures at upload for the lightmaps and the textures respectively. modulate commonly abused to cheat shadows out, intensity commonly abused to brighten players. Originally these cvars were makeshift attempts at trying to imitate the software renderer's brightness levels at the expense of texture quality loss)

Q3A has no paletted texture support. I hacked it in once, I could only get a global palette that'd be noticeably uglier and only saw noticeable performance improvements on a 3dfx Voodoo2 as it thrashed less. Was a fun experimental diversion. Had issues with alpha indexed formats though and the V1 didn't quite get along with that idea. Stock Q3A does have support of loading 8-bit PCX files leftover from Q2, but it'll process as a 24-bit texture only.

also Q3A doesn't have either table fog nor vertex fog - it's all alpha blended effect trickery, and ironically the fog will look bad on Voodoo 😀

leileilol wrote on 2022-12-05, 10:48:

In Quake2, turning 8-bit textures off gives you a better looking skybox, but texture quality may drop if you're using 16-bit color (less color bits in a 16-bit texture than a palette entry).

Thanks for clarifying this! I just checked and made some comparison screenshots:

Both screenshots were taken on the same system with a GeForce FX 5900XT running at 1280x960 with 32-bit color depth using 45.23 drivers with AA and AF turned off. The only difference was whether the "8-bit textures" setting under "Video" was set to "yes" or "no". I'm also attaching a savegame in case someone else wants to reproduce this. Basically, it's the skybox of the first level in the game. For clarity, this is with the retail CD release of Quake 2 + latest official patch version 3.20.

BTW, I noticed some banding in the screenshot where 8-bit textures were turned off. It's not due to JPG compression as the effect shows up in the original TGA files and in the actual game as well. Not sure what's causing that.

EDIT - I checked the Quake 2 manual and on page 11, it explicitly states that turning on 8-bit textures will reduce visual quality:

Quake 2 manual wrote:

8-Bit Textures (OpenGL only): 8-bit texture support is available on some graphics chipsets such as the 3Dfx Voodoo. Enabling 8-bit textures reduces visual quality in exchange for better overall performance. IMPORTANT: We recommend you use this setting if you have the appropriate hardware and want to increase the performance of Quake II.

In summary, if you want the best graphics that this game can produce, set 8-bit textures to "no".

I thought that people were aware of this considering that the visual difference with the skybox in Quake 2 was easy to tell when toggling the "8-bit textures" setting, but it seems that it isn't the case. 😐

Regardless, those screenshots from the first level clearly displays the difference.

The differences in Quake 2 made me curious, so I checked a few other games which use the same engine (ID Tech 2).

Games tested:

• SiN - retail CD release + latest official patch version 1.11

Graphics cards tested:

• Nvidia GeForce FX 5900XT using Nvidia reference drivers version 53.04

SiN Options menu and Console output

Toggling the texture mode to 8-bit enables the use of paletted textures. This is confirmed by the console output which states that GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette is detected and used by the game.

SiN Mission 2 - Freeport City Bank

Just like in Quake 2, the skybox quality is degraded when 8-bit paletted textures are used. This is actually confirmed by the game's manual which states:

SiN Manual wrote:

Texture Mode: The texture mode determines color depth of the textures. Better quality often results in lower performance. 8-bit texture support is available on some graphics chipsets such as the 3Dfx Voodoo. Enabling 8-bit textures reduces visual quality in exchange for better overall performance.

In summary, SiN supports the use of paletted textures as a means to improve performance, but this comes at the expense of visual quality.

Another game which also uses the ID Tech 2 engine is Kingpin. It behaves similarly to Quake 2 and SiN.

Games tested:

• Kingpin: Life of Crime - retail CD release + latest official patch version 1.21

Graphics cards tested:

• Nvidia GeForce FX 5900XT using Nvidia reference drivers version 53.04

Kingpin Options menu and Console output

Setting 8-bit textures to "yes" enables the the use of paletted textures. This is confirmed by the console output which states that GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette is detected and used by the game.

Kingpin Mission 1 - Skidrow

As expected, the skybox quality is degraded when 8-bit paletted textures are used. This is once again confirmed by the game's manual which states:

Kingpin Manual wrote:

8-bit Textures: 8-bit texture support is available on some graphics chipsets. Enabling 8-bit textures reduces visual quality while improving performance.

Therefore, we can conclude Kingpin also supports the use of paletted textures as a means to improve performance, but this comes at the expense of visual quality.

Since Heretic 2 is based on ID Tech 2 as well, I wanted to check if paletted textures had an effect on its skybox too. Doesn't seem like it. I can see no perceptible difference on the skybox (or otherwise) when paletted textures are toggled on/off.

Does anyone know if Heretic 2 has any visible changes from paletted textures, or if it's simply a performance boost in this case?

I've re-tested Tomb Raider 3, and the use of paletted textures reduces visual quality in order to improve performance there as well.

Notice how the bed sheet looks. It's much rougher with 8-bit textures turned on. Both screenshots were taken on the same system with a GeForce FX 5900XT running at 1280x1024 with 32-bit color depth using 53.04 drivers and without forcing any AA or AF.

The retail CD version of Tomb Raider III was used, without any patches applied. The reason being, the official 1.01 patch causes the game to crash when 8-bit textures are turned on. Just to be safe, I also tested this on my Voodoo3, and got the same crash there too.

I've updated the Vogons wiki page to reflect the recent findings.

Basically, I wanted to clarify that how paletted textures are used in games depends entirely on what the developers intended. In some cases like Driver, paletted textures are used to enhance the game visuals. But in other cases like Quake 2, they are used as a performance improvement measure which actually reduces visual quality. It should be a bit easier to tell what games falls into which category now.

So, going back to my original question, for games like early Quake 1/2 engine games that just use a standard 256 color .pcx file for character skins (no pallet based transparencies or pallet switching animation), the lack of 8bit palletized texture support on a GPU just means that all of these textures are up-sampled to 24bit, right? In other words, it would have no negative visible effect most likely? Because if the GPU simply had no support for them at all then none of these games would ever display any of their 256 color textures and all of characters (and scenery?) would be blank.

This is seemingly unrelated to the 8bit textures setting, since only 8bit versions of character texture/scenery exist in the first place. I would assume that setting is only intended to affect the few textures that were made in 16bit or 24bit color, like the sky/clouds.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-06, 13:56:

This is seemingly unrelated to the 8bit textures setting, since only 8bit versions of character texture/scenery exist in the first place. I would assume that setting is only intended to affect the few textures that were made in 16bit or 24bit color, like the sky/clouds.

From what I understand, Quake 2 won't use paletted textures at all if "8-bit textures" is set to "no". With that set, even if your graphics card supports paletted textures, you will get this output from the console:

1...ignoring GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette

I think @leileilol is familiar with the Quake 2 source code, so she might be able to tell you more.

When there's no paletted texture support, then the games will work like they don't have 8-bit textures enabled. This means you'll *never* see the 256-color PCX skyboxes in Quake2 on like a TNT and Radeon or so.

Some of the Quake2 (id tech2) licensees implemented 24-bit textures like SiN, Soldier of Fortune and Kingpin. I think SOF completely ripped 8-bit texturing out. SiN's a weird case of having lots of differently generated palettes (including palette switching within the software renderer that also have their own colored lighting lookup tables - one of the many technical art sins of...... SiN. Generating these on demand had to do with the initial retail's infamous loading times)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-06, 13:56:

(no pallet based transparencies or pallet switching animation)

IIRC all the transparent textures in Q2 are processed as RGBA images anyway because it only uses them for menu/hud/sprite (bfg ball), and early paletted texturing extensions doesn't support index alpha on Voodoo1. (Voodoo2 could, but that wasn't around GLQuake/Quake2's dev time)

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-12-06, 14:15:

From what I understand, Quake 2 won't use paletted textures at all if "8-bit textures" is set to "no". With that set, even if your graphics card supports paletted textures, you will get this output from the console:

I don't know if that's the case though. I remember editing player skins in Q2 way back in the day. They're just PCX files, which are inherently 8bit-only with a set pallet. There aren't any high color or full color versions of these textures for the game to use. In fact, I would guess that Quake 1 and 2 use lots of 256 color textures other than for very specific things (skybox... maybe water? I have no idea).

I think the 8bit textures option was only there to improve performance and compatibility for the skybox (and maybe some other specific things) with very early and slow graphics cards with limited video RAM and possibly no support for high color textures. There were probably lots of people trying to play this on 4MB cards like the Matrox Mystique, Rendition Verite, Voodoo Graphics, as well as other less common ones.

I guess what I'm saying is, the game used lots of 8-bit paletted textures, so disabling them would make the game have lots of untextured models. Quake 1 is probably the same way being that it's even older. I was just trying reconcile this knowledge with the idea that later cards could not use 8bit paletted textures at all. And I think the 8bit textures option is otherwise unrelated and only applies to the skybox and any other very specific textures that are something other than pcx files.

Okay, I downloaded the old Q2 Test from 1997, opened pak0.pak with PakExplorer (haven't done that in 23 years probably) and every object and character in the game uses .pcx files for textures, which makes them all 8-bit with a pallet. The scenery textures seem to be .wal files, which may or may not be 256 color, but I'm inclined to think that they would be, because full color textures would have been a waste of video memory back when cards had so little memory and bandwidth to spare. The only textures that have different versions are the skyboxes which very plainly have .tga and .pcx versions. All of the pieces of the .pcx skyboxes come out to 551KB in file size, where as the .tga ones are a whopping 1.12MB.

One interesting thing to note is that all of the skybox pcx files seem to be using the same pallet, and it is a generic one that has many colors that are not used in the skybox at all, so apparently it had to use some kind of universal palette. This is why the 8bit version looks SO bad... because it is really only utilizing between 22 and 129 colors (PSP 7 can count them for me) out of a 256 color pallet. The sky-only ones (straight up) are only using 22 shades of red\black\white, leading to lots of banding. Even the monster and object models in the game mostly use the same palette as the sky boxes.

One more thing I see is that there are lots of sprites and they are all paletted .pcx files as well, with a single color background for transparency. I don't recall if the game ever even uses these though since basically every effect is either a tiny (terrible looking) 3D model, or a simple dot particle effect. Presumably, if it did use these, then anything that attempted to upsample the 8bit textures to 24bit would break these transparencies and every sprite would be a square... correct?

EDIT: This is only somewhat related, but I also stumbled upon this...https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette

Sorry if this is all starting ramble, but my point is that it seems like either I am not understanding what the lack of "8bit paletted texture" support truly does, since Riva 128, TNT and TNT2 cards could happily run Quake II or GLQuake, despite the games using almost exclusively 8bit textures... or the problem is far more specific than a video card absolutely having zero support for textures that had palettes. In the latter case, I think some of the information on the wiki should be updated because it makes it seem like 8bit textures are some kind of oddity that certain video cards have problems with... when it was actually far more common for textures to be in 8bit formats throughout the '90s. 3D acceleration didn't end this trend because 24bit textures would be unnecessarily large for such early hardware to handle... so presumably, any video card that could run contemporary games in the late 90s had some kind of support for 8bit textures... and 8bit textures all have palettes.

... does anyone see what I'm getting at? 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-07, 05:27:

so presumably, any video card that could run contemporary games in the late 90s had some kind of support for 8bit textures... and 8bit textures all have palettes.

I don't think anyone is questioning that mid-late '90s games (including Quake and its derivatives) used mostly 256 color (8-bit) textures, since that's what the hardware of the time could reasonably handle. Obviously, any graphic card can load those textures and use them for rendering.

The paletted texture support that we're talking about in this thread is something different. Have you taken a look at this and also this? Those required specific support in hardware, and could only work on graphics cards which had that functionality.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-12-07, 06:55:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-07, 05:27:

so presumably, any video card that could run contemporary games in the late 90s had some kind of support for 8bit textures... and 8bit textures all have palettes.

I don't think anyone is questioning that mid-late '90s games (including Quake and its derivatives) used mostly 256 color (8-bit) textures, since that's what the hardware of the time could reasonably handle. Obviously, any graphic card can load those textures and use them for rendering.

The paletted texture support that we're talking about in this thread is something different. Have you taken a look at this and also this? Those required specific support in hardware, and could only work on graphics cards which had that functionality.

EDIT: Reworded this because I totally missed some points mentioned a few posts back. 🤣

Okay, I think I'm seeing where this is going now. Thank you for those links!

I guess my confusion stems from the fact that it's been simply called "8-bit Paletted Textures", because any 256 color image has a palette, which obviously any of these graphics cards support. Sorry for not getting the difference earlier.

So, it is specific to games that use the extension "GL_EXT_paletted_texture" (or "GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette") in OpenGL? And that specific extension is used in specific games to perform a specific task. Only Geforce 256 through FX were made to support "GL_EXT_texture_palette", so games that use that extension will not operate properly on graphics cards that do not support that extension. If a game simply uses an 8bit .pcx file (again, with a palette), that is an entirely different thing.

If that's the case, it seems odd that the sky boxes in Quake 2 would require this feature because the 8bit files are simply a PCX file, just like all of the other 8bit textures in the game that work fine. Or is it a matter of the "8bit textures" option using "GL_EXT_paletted_texture" to convert the smoother looking .tga textures to 8bit (with a full 256 color palette) so that they look better, where as all of the cards that don't support that feature are just stuck with the nasty looking .pcx versions?

Is there also a Direct3D equivalent feature that isn't supported on these cards?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-07, 08:05:

If that's the case, it seems odd that the sky boxes in Quake 2 would require this feature because the 8bit files are simply a PCX file, just like all of the other 8bit textures in the game that work fine. Or is it a matter of the "8bit textures" option using "GL_EXT_paletted_texture" to convert the smoother looking .tga textures to 8bit (with a full 256 color palette) so that they look better, where as all of the cards that don't support that feature are just stuck with the nasty looking .pcx versions?

Quake 2 doesn't require this feature to render skyboxes. What happens is that if you have "8-bit textures" set to "yes", then the game will use the hardware support for paletted textures of the graphics card to improve performance. This comes at the cost of reduced visual quality, as stated by the game's manual, which is why skyboxes look worse in that case.

As I've said before, setting "8-bit textures" to "yes" in Quake 2 makes the engine use GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette which, in term, calls GL_EXT_paletted_texture. This can be easily verified by pulling down the console and checking the output on a graphics card which supports paletted textures in hardware. See below.

Is there also a Direct3D equivalent feature that isn't supported on these cards?

There is, but it isn't documented as well as the OpenGL extension. It is known that games like Driver and Final Fantasy 8 use paletted textures in Direct3D. This is evident from their documentation and/or config files. See below.

Also, it appears that Microsoft's dxview.exe detects the capability of graphics cards to support paletted textures in hardware as 8bit RBG PAL8.