Yes the Voodoo 3 doesn’t support 32 bit colour and is limited to smaller textures.

mwdmeyer wrote:

Yes the Voodoo 3 doesn’t support 32 bit colour and is limited to smaller textures.

I know this, my question was mostly related to the amount of dithering in the transparent textures, it looks just wrong and not the way I remember the Voodoo 3 render these things.

Choose a different filter in the driver settings.

Screenshots (framebuffer grabs) miss the RAMDAC filters so there's that too here.

Choosing Texture Filtering Quality as High and Alpha Blending as Sharper seems to have helped immensely at the expense of around 5% performance loss.

The overbrights in Quake3 requires the whole scene to be generally made darker (128 or 0.5 at best for many textures) for a higher lighting volume, pretty much halving color precision (on any hardware) with the brightness automatically cranked up. This will also make the dithering (as well as the screen filter) more obvious. Ignorance to this overbright-related loss has fueled many fanboy arguments in the day...

Setting r_overbrightBits to 0 will cause the textures to appear less banded, less dithergrainy at the expense of brighter lighting.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Quake3 uses the lossy JPEG image format for the majority of their 24-bit textures. Installing and playing Team Arena will alleviate some of this as that ships lossless TGA replacements for many of them.

Thanks for the detailed explanation leileilol

leileilol wrote:

The overbrights in Quake3 requires the whole scene to be generally made darker (128 or 0.5 at best for many textures) for a higher lighting volume, pretty much halving color precision (on any hardware) with the brightness automatically cranked up. This will also make the dithering (as well as the screen filter) more obvious. Ignorance to this overbright-related loss has fueled many fanboy arguments in the day...

What are the costs of achieving similar results using combine operations instead?

r_overbrightBits 0 and lowering brightness/gamma should be a nice trade off.

Fusion wrote:

r_overbrightBits 0 and lowering brightness/gamma should be a nice trade off.

I tried this, and it didn't end up looking particularly good.

I ended up going back to a GeForce 2 GTS. 🙁