secondary question: would a voodoo card give me a performance boost with the textures I want to see? I'm not in a rush to spend that kind of money but it would be good to know if that is a solution.

jmej_jmej wrote on 2025-03-22, 00:45:

I have a p3 800 with a geforce 2 mx in it (and sometimes a geforce 4 mx 440). […]
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I have a p3 800 with a geforce 2 mx in it (and sometimes a geforce 4 mx 440).

It runs quake 2 extremely well when using the gl renderer, but I much prefer the look of the textures the software render uses.

My machine can't quite keep up a good framerate in software mode, so I'm wondering if there's a way to force the use of the software textures but still take advantage of the geforce 2 acceleration.

Anyone know of any tricks?

They are not separate textures. The GL and Software renderers use the same textures.
It's only how the renederer is displaying the textures.

You can change how the textures are displayed using the gl_texturemode CVAR

These are the texture modes:
GL_NEAREST Point sampled (software-like). Lowest quality, highest performance.
GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST GL_NEAREST but with a bit more quality for far objects.
GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR GL_NEAREST but with even more quality for far objects.
GL_LINEAR No blending.
GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST Bilinear interpolation.
GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR Trilinear interpolation. Highest quality, lowest performance.

So if you want the software look under the GL renderer you would use:

gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR

The GL renderer won't keep those textures as-is as it does an 'intensity' shift to every loaded texture, so lighter colors will be washed out and the lightmap won't be any brighter.

Also keep in mind the software renderer also has overbrights on the lightmap blending - which the GL renderer does not, so even if you mono'd in GL you won't get the same lighting range as software.

A Voodoo card won't boost any performance, but it'll give you a working gamma ramp, because handling display color was a mess in the early GL days.

Thanks! This is just what I need to start digging in.

Matchstick wrote on 2025-03-22, 02:34:

So if you want the software look under the GL renderer you would use:

gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR

Thanks! That got me much of the way there! Is there a way to switch the round particles to the original square shaped particles?

I have not used those command yet. With ATi Rage Pro / XL i usually disable OpenGL bilinear filtering for better peformance, it changes the look of the Quake2 as well.Also you can turn on 8bit palleted textures @ Video settings for more Retro look for you Quake2.

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