DescentBB

This may have been covered before but now a days you can crank down the vertex and pixel shaders, at least on geforce cards. I hear that doing this can eek out a bit of performance.

Since D3 is 6 YO, what level pixel and vertex shaders does it need?

I tried pixel (diabled) and vertex (1.1). I did notice one thing with this set. Lava textures where not moving at all.

As a side question, I always notice a certain amount of frameyness when I first enter a level untill Ive flown through the entire mine then everything is smooth. Its a bit annoying and Ild like to try and smooth it out.

Hardware:

Athlon xp 1700+
ASRock via A7VT4A mobo.
Geforce 6200 128Mb running at ( 8X +FW +SB )

Back when D3 came out 3D accelerators were almost brand new. There was no such thing as a programmable shader.

What you were probably noticing were texture uploads.

D3 was written on Dx7 or was it DX6? anyways.. shaders didn't exist then, so i don't think that it's going to make any improvements. Your best bet is getting faster hardware. CPU, Faster Ram, FAster MOBO etc.

I think what he's talking about, Dcrazy, is the different level of shaders you can assign with some games. in Halo, you can. It's a secondary line command used.

The GeForce cards were designed with shaders in mind and are more than capable of handling them (e.g. hardware acceleration). Turning them off will impact your performance very little if any. All it will effect is the great graphics ...

IIRC, Downgrading shader levels can actually hurt performance in some applications. Turning them off may help some however.

As others have noted, D3 doesn't use pixel shaders...IN fact, a little checking reveals that the minimum requirements published were Windows 95/DirectX 5.0. Pixel Shaders weren't implemented until DirectX 8.0. Anyhow, your hardware should be sufficient to run D3. Just one question, how much System RAM do you have? > 512MB is preferable, especially under WinXP.

I have exactly 512M under Windows 2K SP4

I'd bet from your statement that your playing with d3d instead of opengl. Dump the direct3d for playing d3, it's got a bug that causes pauses every few seconds till you get around the hole level. And even then it still plays 20% slower than opengl.

Teddy wrote:I'd bet from your statement that your playing with d3d instead of opengl. Dump the direct3d for playing d3, it's got a bug that causes pauses every few seconds till you get around the hole level. And even then it still plays 20% slower than opengl.

yup:

As a side question, I always notice a certain amount of frameyness when I first enter a level untill Ive flown through the entire mine then everything is smooth. Its a bit annoying and Ild like to try and smooth it out.

thats exactly the problem there. switch back to OGL and no more skippy frames



BTW: do you have the coolbits enabled? TweakNV or manual registry entries will enable some features.

Hmmm. I did not know that about d3d. Thx.

Who needs that shimmer on the menu sun anyway?

I dont have Coolbits enabled but I do have RivaTuner installed. I dont like overclocking anyway but if Coolbits enables other features I might just try it.

OK now its smooth to start out with but now I have other problems. Its acting as if my monitor is set at 60Hz but its not. Its 75. I have vsync set and the -framecap set at 200 but the game still gives me 60. I want 75 and I want it vsyncing because I absolutely despise screen tears.

you need to use RivaTuner and force it to use a certain frequency.


what screen resolution are you running D3 at? whatever that is, tell riva to force a vertical frequency of 75 @ that specific screen size.

OK did that. Still getting a refresh of 60.

If I cant get a vsync refresh of 75 to work correctly under OpenGL then Im going back to d3d.

BTW Im running 1280x960

I had to DL a little toy called ForceRefresh from Major Geeks. I virus checked it and it works. Now I have a stable vsync at 75Hz in opengl

turn off vsync

Heh... I've been through tuning d3 so many times that it's nearly automatic now. I forget that some of us don't know all the tricks. Speaking of all the tricks, Teddy taught me something with his post, I wasn't aware of that issue. I switched from Glide under my Voodoo-based (v2, v3 & v5) cards directly to OpenGL with my Geforce2.

Nos, you will now learn about the "white box reticle bug". It seems that when a new player joins a game that you're in, it can cause a white box to appear at your reticle. Switching resolutions, bit depth or (if you're playing at a resolution higher than 640x480) just going to automap and back to the game (hit 'tab' twice) should resolve this issue.

WarAdvocat wrote:Nos, you will now learn about the "white box reticle bug". It seems that when a new player joins a game that you're in, it can cause a white box to appear at your reticle. Switching resolutions, bit depth or (if you're playing at a resolution higher than 640x480) just going to automap and back to the game (hit 'tab' twice) should resolve this issue.

Yup. Been there already last night.

I've heard that putting the standard reticle files in your D3 directory will get rid of the reticle bug, although I've never tried it. They should be available from PD.

Oh ya I do remember that. Found them on PD. Thanks Top gun.

I use a modded reticle and I get the white square bug, despite the fact that the reticle files are in my D3 directory.

I think all that putting the reticles in your D3 directory does is fix the disappearing reticle bug.

Top Gun wrote:I've heard that putting the standard reticle files in your D3 directory will get rid of the reticle bug, although I've never tried it. They should be available from PD.

Heard wrong.

WarAdvocat wrote:I think all that putting the reticles in your D3 directory does is fix the disappearing reticle bug.

You're right; that was the one I was thinking of. I've never experienced that particular bug myself. Looks like we're pretty much stuck with what has to be one of the most annoying bugs of all time.

Nah, I've been hit by the disappearing reticle bug (only happens when you host a game), it is the most annoying bug in D3. But you would be amazed how quickly you get used to it. FYI you can turn the reticle off in settings, try it sometime for a long single player session.

Oh goody. Im still getting the occasional white box despite having put the reticle files in place. grrrrr.

It never goes away.

i got used to it, and ignored it.

Duper wrote:D3 was written on Dx7 or was it DX6?

DX6

WarAdvocat wrote:It never goes away.

Much like this thread!

I have used all the refresh rate tools out there at one time or another, and IMO by far the best is PowerStrip. It offers:

1) Refresh rate control at all resolutions
2) Overclocking
3) Screen geometry, including a LOCK
4) Custom resolutions
5) Icon control

Plus, It works on all video cards.