Blurry Texture with New 3D Engine

[crtJoe]

I tried to force 16x anisotropic filtering and high-quality texture in the Nvidia graphics setting but it makes no difference. Please view the screenshots in fullscreen for comparison. This happens with all recent builds including the latest git revision 9a07f08. In other games it might not be that obvious but still notable. In VF3 TB it's like day and night.

New 3D Engine

Legacy

[dukeeeey]

please compare against the original h/w and report back

[gm-matthew]

493c5aa introduced a new implementation of mipmapping that pretty much matches the original hardware. I actually made a conscious decision not to compensate for higher resolutions for two reasons: most textures would look excessively aliased, and microtextures would start to appear too early.

I did consider adding the option to increase texture detail at higher resolutions, and I certainly still could if desired.

Trying to force anisotropic filtering in the NVIDIA Control Panel only works in the legacy 3D engine because it tries to render graphics like an ordinary PC game, but there are multiple inaccuracies compared to real hardware that realistically cannot be corrected. The new 3D engine is a different implementation which is much more accurate, but the cost is that trying to force settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel doesn't work any more.

[toxieainc]

I would like to see this as an option, so that by default it matches the HW, but then one could also dial in crispier textures, especially in combination with super sampling this could look pretty great.

[dukeeeey]

It would probably pay to add an option for normal mipmapping. Mipmapping on the model3 was hilariously ugly

[dukeeeey]

Actual h/w

[crtJoe]

Thanks for confirming that this is intended. Original HW means it's 496x384 on a low-res CRT, which definitely looks sharp and nice. However, the lack of texture details becomes obvious when we scale the resolution to 2k or 4k on a modern display. I believe the current rendering method might look a bit off (just my personal preference) in scenes where fine details are supposed to be coming from near and far away and from multiple angles. In this case, the discrepancy of the level of details in the same scene can be very noticeable. Like sharp walls here and blurry blocks there, etc.

I do hope to see an option to allow sharper textures, if this makes any sense to the developers.