More DirectX downloads
http://falconfly.de/directx.htm
I'm really not sure if you should need to stay with an older DirectX like this, but if it works it works.
6.1a is hard to find because it wasn't really offered separately. It's just what came with 98SE.
Hmm Quake II crash to desktop. Sure about OpenGL? GLQuake also complains.
And 99Max complaints about no DX6 graphics cards. Ok I will try your driver now.
Are you sure these are the right drivers?
The smaller ones just seem to be 2D drivers.
The Diamond drivers basically killed my machine. Windows doesn't load anymore.
Aren't there any proper Savage 4 S3 reference drivers?
Killed your machine! Yikes! The S3 ones I uploaded are the latest reference drivers and the Diamond ones are the latest Savage 4 Diamond drivers. Both work fine on my pc except for the fact that I'm having DirectX issues.
What model Savage 4 are you using?
EDIT: Here is a photo of the reference S3 drivers I uploaded working fine on my pc.
wrote:Killed your machine! Yikes! The S3 ones I uploaded are the latest reference drivers and the Diamond ones are the latest Savage 4 Diamond drivers. Both work fine on my pc except for the fact that I'm having DirectX issues.
What model Savage 4 are you using?
It's weird...
In the driver the only things I can chance are colours and there is a meny wher, had the card got TV-Out, I could select that.
In dxdiag it passes all the tests. But 3DMax says it can't find a DX6 card. And Quake II CTD 🙁
Here images of the card. No idea what brand:
DOH
Forgot to install DirectX. I check dxdiag and it reported dversion 6 so I assumed it was installed. But I believe it was just the bare bones dx files W98 comes with.
Installed 7a and that did the trick. Here just a few quick tests:
OpenGL doesn't want to work however. No luck in Quake II and MDK II.
Might have to find a newer driver.
Here some VGA captures of the Direct 3D games I tried. All 800 x 600
Hmmm, so the Savage 4 drivers you used were the reference drivers I uploaded and you even had it working under DX7. What motherboard are you using?
Maybe it is the VIA chipset. Just about to install the 4in1 drivers to see if that makes a difference.
Ok reinstalled DX7a then installed the Via 4in1 4.35 drivers and BAM! DXDIAG all tests passed including DirectSound and DirectMusic. Ran 3DMark 2000 and that runs beautifully as well!
So it obviously has to do with the VIA chipset as the 4in1 drivers fixed the issues I was having.
Will have to install Quake II and run some further testing though considering you were having trouble with OpenGL.
That would be awesome. MDK 2 demo and Quake II demo should do the trick.
Quake II demo you can download from my website now 😀
Another DOH for me. I have to get more sleep it seems 😊
I actually never re-installed the S3 drivers after installing the DirectX drivers. So I installed them again and now OpenGL game work 😀
I'll upload the driver to my site for future reference.
Funny how this budget card can do 32 bit colours but the V3 couldn't.
Now, how the heck do I turn this S3 texture compression technology S3TC on?
GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
What do I need to do with this? A command line?
To be honest, I'm quite new to S3 cards so have never used S3TC before. I would've thought there would've been something in the display options just as there is for 3DFX cards.
I'm glad you mentioned it though as briefly reading up on S3TC, it definitely improves the graphics. Will have a look into it! 😀
Btw, what motherboard/cpu are you using with your Savage 4?
wrote:
Great site by the way Phil. Coming along nicely 😀
wrote:wrote:Great site by the way Phil. Coming along nicely 😀
Thanks!
So much more work to do. But it's also my hobby so I don't want it to finish too fast 😊
At least a good reason to be antisocial *sorry I got to work on my website* 🤣
wrote:Funny how this budget card can do 32 bit colours but the V3 couldn't. […]
Funny how this budget card can do 32 bit colours but the V3 couldn't.
Now, how the heck do I turn this S3 texture compression technology S3TC on?
GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
What do I need to do with this? A command line?
About 32 bit colours: I think that's more of a design decision, and some cards take a big speed hit when doing truecolor in 3D, others not. 3dfx cards started supporting that only with Voodoo4/5, nVidia with TNT, ATI with Rage 128. OTOH even S3 ViRGE could do 32 bit rendering (limited by small memory, besides of that it didn't really slow down any further) so it would have been a step backwards if Savage couldn't do that any more. And Rendition cards also could do that, although mainly in OpenGL, and they took a big speed hit. See Putas' site vintage3d.org for details.
S3TC has to be supported by the application, I think the textures already come compressed with the game. There are different compression methods and the developer or artist will choose an appropriate one. I think Q3A supports S3TC though you might have to get additional maps. Unreal can do S3TC via MeTaL, there you also have to get additional maps. And Direct3D also supports S3TC (starting with Direct 6), no idea which games support that.
You don't even need a Savage card for S3TC (asides from MeTaL obviously), nVidia cards starting from Geforce 1 also support it. Other brands probably do too, but I'd have to research that.
NV's support of S3TC is rather low quality until Geforce 4/4MX. See the popular DXT1 16-bit banding issue with Quake3. NV added dithering to 16-bit DXT1 with GF4. You will see some games allow DXT5 to be chosen instead to remedy this.
I suppose this is good advertisement for Radeon which can do S3TC fine in addition to EMBM. Geforce 3 finally supports EMBM.
GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc is an extension, it's not a command and it can't be just switched on everything.
Q3 has a cvar to use it though, which overrides r_textureBits - r_ext_texture_compresssion 1. Doing this will cause much longer loading times but should be faster for cards with limited memory and support for S3TC (like low memory variants of Savage4/2000). The game should automatically turn this setting upon the detection of the Savage card. Check the edges of the machinegun for compression artifacts.
It is not an 'automatic improvement feature'- it will only look 'improved' if the game provides special compressed textures for use with it, like UT's second disc.
Thank you for the detailed information!
I have the Unreal Anthology DVD. Will check if it has the S3 stuff on there 😀
I must also get myself the full version of Q3A. I thought I did but turns out I bough Team Arena 😒
Expendable supports it as well:
USE HARDWARE TEXTURE COMPRESSION If your card supports S3TC or DXTC, this lets it use compressed textures which use the memory o […]
USE HARDWARE TEXTURE COMPRESSION
If your card supports S3TC or DXTC, this lets it use compressed textures which use the
memory on your graphics card more efficiently. Set this option for the Savage 3D chipset
from S3.
