From: David Lannan (david.lannan++at++sydac.com.au)
Date: 02/18/2004 22:10:01
Hi all,
I have been working with Performer (3.02 and 3.1) on Windows (XP) and IRIX
for a little while now, and after a fair amount of testing and checking I
believe there is a serious problem with Performers' texture management
scheme. The problem appears to be Performers' internal texture usage, and I
am pretty sure no matter how you set the internal texture format you will
always only get 16bit or 8bit indexed textures.
Even with the Perfly app, perfect 32bit textures are reduced to ugly colour
paletted textures. Is this because of the 'limited' windows support and the
IRIX systems are colormapped based (our Onyx3 does this also)? I would
really like an answer to this problem, since the visuals for the same models
in DirectX and OpenGL are far superior.
This can be checked in something like DeepExplorer which has a flt viewing
capability. The biggest issue is that subtle lighting queues used by our
artists cannot be used, because often they are fine gradient textures with
the colour loss result in being stripes of 3 or 4 colours.
Again, this has nothing to do with our engine, since perfly also exhibits
exactly the same behaviour. I am hoping there is a simple fix for this, like
a env variable that is supposed to be set on windows?
PF_RGBA_INTERNAL_TEXTURES??
Our model has been tested with flt (with rgb and rgba texture) and pfb
format, both with and without embedded textures. We have seen these issues
on the following hardware: Onyx3, Octane, Windows with Quadro FX1000 and
FX2000.
What is Performer doing internally to the textures? It would be helpful on
PC if we could use compressed textures (ala dds) since many video cards
support it, but I am guessing that only a move to DirectX would provide this
capability.
Also, as a side note (and has been posted previously) Performer 3.1 has
issues with is fragment and gprograms. Even though I get a valid
vertex_program extension on my video card, the examples to not run the
vertex program. Has anyone had success with the GProgram examples on
windows? If so, what was your video card? We have tried FX1000, GF 4200, and
ATI 9200.. again, these problems make DirectX seem well ahead of the game.
Any help on this problem would be greatly appreciated.
David Lannan
david.lannan++at++sydac.com.au
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