Tweak3D.net

Posted: June 17, 2000
Written By: Keith "Farrel" McClellan

General Video Settings Continued

Texture quality is another thing you can set before you enter the game. There are four texture quality levels for MDK 2 - extra low, low, medium, and high. I personally use high with almost no speed penalty, but if you are on a lower end system or need a few fps to bump you up to a higher resolution, both the medium and low settings are reasonably good. You should only use extra low if you are on some old, archaic system but insist on playing the game anyway.

Color Depth is pretty much a no-brainer - set it to 16 for optimal performance and to 32 for optimum visuals. If you are using a 3dfx Voodoo3 card, however, for some reason if you set this to 32 you will gain some visual acuity without losing but maybe half a frame per second. If that kind of thing agrees with you, try it out. If you can't see the difference (remember the purported 22-bit color...heh) though, you might as well leave it set to 16-bit color.

You also have the option of choosing the filtering you use for the game - be it none, bilinear, and trilinear. Unless you are going to turn the feature off entirely, the Omen engine is optimized for trilinear filtering and it even out-performs bilinear in the timedemo on my system - so that is definitely the recommended setting.

Mipmapping, as you may know, is the process of interpolating pixels in far off textures that there aren't enough on-screen pixels to accurately represent. If mipmapping is disabled within a game you will frequently notice flickering in far away textures as well as other visual artifacts. Enabling mipmapping also can slightly increase in game performance so I can't think of a reason to not enable the setting.

Making sure the game is running in Full Screen mode as opposed to a window is important because the game can only access the system's 3D accelerator if it is in full screen mode. If the game is run out of a window it is running in a glorified software mode that is less than speedy. Full screen all the way.

The hardware T&L setting isn't necessarily what it seems to be. By enabling this setting you are actually choosing to use the native OpenGL T&L engine over the Omen T&L engine. The difference between the two T&L engines is this: the Omen T&L engine doesn't support hardware acceleration but is optimized to run on the CPU, while the OpenGL T&L engine supports hardware acceleration but is not optimized to run on the CPU. This means that the Omen T&L engine is actually faster and better optimized than the OpenGL one, and should be used if you don't have a T&L accelerating card (such as the GeForce 256), but if you do have such a card, the OpenGL T&L engine will be faster simply because it can be accelerated in hardware.

Next Page