Posted by Yuri Zhivago on March 13, 2000 at 19:20:40:
In reply to: Re: ATI cards posted by Eepē on March 13, 2000 at 18:03:57:
> Yes, I was using Scitech's GLDirect, but wouldn't the -s switch not use it?
> So, then, the crash when maximizing would be because of TRueView and not
> because of the OpenGL driver.
No, "-s" only does two things:
1) It turns off mipmapping. This is the single largest factor as relates
to speed, robustness, and visual quality (it's much better if you *can*
use mipmapping). This is also the only change that cannot be undone
using the keyboard/mouse.
2) It turns most everything OFF by default. When you're only getting 0.1
FPS, it's painful to wait 2-3 minutes to get a response to turning off
the meshes, etc, so "-s" just turns off the biggest resource hogs. You
can selectively turn them back on using the keyboard or mouse.
Whether you use "-s" or not, it's an OpenGL application. There is no "software
renderer" built-in; this would be horrendously slow, and this is why people
use OpenGL in the first place - it does a lot of things for you. Unfortunately,
the performance of that "lot of things" is heavily dependent upon the OpenGL
implementation, which is why Microsoft's sucks so badly (it's entirely
software), and why there is so much variation between the various video card
manufacturers. NVidia seems to employ a number of OpenGL advocates, and their
OpenGL support seems to be exceptional. ATI's enthusiasm for OpenGL is
lukewarm at best, and their implementation reflects that. GLDirect is a nice
solution for the low end, but it is not without its own limitations, since it
does not directly implement OpenGL for the hardware in question, but rather
attempts to map OpenGL calls to DirectX calls.
That was a rather long-winded way of saying, "No, the -s switch does not
mean that the problem was in TRueView and not in GLDirect." I'm not saying
that it's impossible for TRueView to have any bugs (I'm quite certain that
there are a few hiding in there somewhere - it's a rather complex piece of
software) - I'm saying that every display-related crash I've seen and
investigated has turned out to be an issue with the OpenGL implementation.
BTW, I'd suggest leaving it at 640x480, since the text does not scale
properly. That, and making the window larger will only slow it down.
What sort of frame rates are you seeing with your Rage 2 and GLDirect?
Yuri Zhivago