FSAA problem with the Voodoo 5 5500

[AdamK47]

I recently purchased the Voodoo 5 5500 with it's new price of $199, so I now own a Voodoo 5, Radeon DDR, and a GeForce 2 GTS. heh

I just tried out a few OpenGL games and almost all of them (especially Quake engine games) have a line across the top and left edges of the screen when FSAA is enabled. I've tried just about everything to get rid of them, but haven't found a solution. The FSAA looks much better than what I've used with the GeForce 2 and the Radeon. I just wish I could get the dang thing to quit displaying that garbage on the top and left of the screen. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[DaveB3D]

Can you send me a screenshot of this? I really have no idea what you are talking about. I've never seen such a problem before.

dbarron@3dfx.com


thnx

 

[AdamK47]

I'd rather post the pic for others to see too.
Quake 3 Screenshot
I created the page with the background black so you could see the edges of the screenshot better. The screenshot shows white along those sides, but in other OpenGL games there is usually multiple colors and other strange things along the side.

I also found another visual error in the pic too (decided to kill two birds with one stone). Those pipes in the background are covered in lines. The lines disappear when I get close to them. Whats up with that? Is there a way to fix that too? I'm using the latest drivers. I didn't bother installing anything off of the CD that came with it and instead went straight for the latest drivers on the net. Was that a good idea?

BTW- I thought it was funny when Crash corrected me on my poor console typing ability. LOL

 

[MrChicken]

I've had this too. I think it has to do refresh rates, i may be wrong. In the past I have gone through the registry and cleaned out all the 3dfx entries, and also cleaned up all driver files installed on the system, then reloaded the drivers.
But lately it seems that the problem may be related to a "screen shift" like you get when the refresh rate is new or different or perhaps not supported by the monitor.
So first I'd make sure I have the right driver file for the monitor. The I'd try different refresh rates, then I'd go through registry and file cleanup.

 

[DaveB3D]

yikes. never seen either of those. I'll talk with one of the Napalm GL guys about it tomorrow. My first suggestion though would be to wipe the current V5 stuff and clean out the reg. Make sure you don't have any stuff from other graphics cards either. That might do it (and for some reason I've noted that if you had a NVIDIA graphics card in your system, when you put a V5 back in it runs slower.. ). So make sure everything is cleaned out.

 

[AdamK47]

I did the driver reinstall thing. Still had the distortion. Then, I installed the drivers off of the CD and everything cleared up. I thought that by installing the drivers off of the CD that it may haved cleaned up the registry, so I installed the latest drivers again and the distortion came back. Now I'm almost positive it's a driver issue.

I also found out that if I ran Quake 3 in 32-bit color, those vents (I found out those were vents not pipes) could be seen clearly in the distance. Those lines on the edges of the screen were still there though. I added the pic to the page I created.

Updated page with 32-bit color enabled

Whatever 3dfx did to speed up the drivers had a negative affect on the image quality.

 

[DaveB3D]

I'll look into it tomorrow.

 

[MrChicken]

I should've said that this didnt show up until about two or three betas ago. So it has only been on the latest couple or three releases that happens for me.

 

[RoboTECH]

that is kinda weird. I seem to recall reading about that in the 3dfx.products.voodoo5 newsgroup, however.

have you tried moving your screen over using your monitor settings?

 

[madthumbs]

You may need to set a standard screen resolution like 800x600 or 1024x768. You may also be able to hide it with your monitor adjustments if you can shift your picture to the upper left just a notch, or just increase the picture size on the monitor.

Anyways, this problem is common as I have run across it a few times before. Unfortuneatly, I haven't kept track of it to find a definite fix, but I'm sure there is one out there.

 

[snow patrol]

I know this isn't really a solution, but why not stretch your screen using the monitor controls so that the white line is hidden?

 

[AdamK47]

I don't want to hide the problem, I want to get rid of it.

I downloaded all the references drivers from 3dfxgamers and so far the only ones that don't do this are version 1.00 and version 1.01. Everything after version 1.01 gives me the screen garbage in OpenGL. Those drivers after 1.01 are also the drivers that include the OpenGL driver speed optimizations. I'm pretty sure whatever those speed optimizations are, they have a negative affect on the visual quality. So for now, I'm going to stick with version 1.01 until 3dfx releases drivers that fix the problems, or give users the ability to change whatever speed optimizations were implemented.

I really like the FSAA, I just wish that crappy bilinear only filtering wasn't there. Being use to trilinear (or anisotropic) on my nVidia and Radeon boards for so long has made me unaware of how horrible bilinear filtering really is.

 

[bluemax]

What IS the filtering difference? Can you describe it? Screenshots?
I've never really checked into this before, and quality IS super-important to me... that's why I want going to move to the 5500- the best FSAA out there!

 

[DaveB3D]

I'm not sure why that problem is there. I looked and 32 color for now (24-bit Z fixes it). It is obviously a Z issue, but I've never seen the issue anywhere else in the game but that one spot (speaking of the poles in the distance).

As for filtering, try enabling mip-map dithering and go to a lower LOD bias. It will help the quality.


And finally, for the white lines. I'm still not sure on that one yet. My temp fix suggestion would be to adjust your monitor so that those lines are at the edge of the screen (well just outside the edge) and then you won't see them.


Just some temp stuff. More later.

 

[LiekOMG]

I have a few strange problems with my voodoo5 5500 too. I have the same problem (that line on the edge of the screen), except mines shows on the bottom and the right side (yours are just the oppsite). Another strange problem I have is the image quality - its terrible (16 bit that is). I had a banshee before my voodoo5, and i must say, 3dfx's 16 bit quality really amazed me. 22bit or not 22bit, it easily rivaled my friends Geforces's 32bit. I was hoping for the same quality is the voodoo5. But the 16 bit is terrible. I get these horrible "lines" (i can't explain it better) across the image. If i set the image to 32 however, it goes away.

Another problem, and this is unrelated to the 16bit image quality, is that there now seems to be something wrong with my monitor since i got my voodoo5. No matter where I am (desktop, or in a 3d or 2d game), there is a terrible pattern across my screen. its very subtle, and you can't really see it on solid colors. However, you can easily see it on a complex image with many colors, like my background image, or in the game. I don't know what it is, but i did not have this problem with my banshee. I wish i could send you a screenshot of how this looked, but it seems to be a problem with a filter in the 3dfx card or something, not the internal rendering, so i can't capture a shot of this problem. It might be an .inf file for my monitor (which is a Syncmaster 900P), but i'm using the correct one, as far as i can tell)

 

[DaveB3D]

For the post filter problem, adjust the settings in the advanced tools. That should help that.


Not a clue on the 2D problem. The post filter has nothing to do with 2D.

 

[LiekOMG]

That filter doesn't seem to have any effect. I guess the main reason i'm complaining is because both the 16 bit is worse, AND overlaying that terrible 16 bit is that monitor problem, which really makes games look terrible. I've learned to live with it, but paying $250 for a vid card, i don't think i should just 'settle'.

 

[madthumbs]

Did you try disabling depth precision in the tool box for the newer drivers?

 

[Volenti]

Regarding the edge lines with FSAA on, I've noticed that it tends to be "activated" as soon as you go through a portal (Q3)

For some reason the 22bit post filter doesn't want to work in fastest performance(despite setting the filter to "high" in tools), it works fine in 2x and 4xFSAA as well as single chip mode, can you get the driver guys to look at this dave? this applies to both glide and open GL, D3D works fine.

I've also found an issue with "depth precision fastest" in a custom Q3 map "ANCIENT ARCHIPELAGO" lloydmdm2, the sky suffers from an effect similar to a "hall of mirrors", hard to describe but very noticable, go to "fast" or "disable" and the effect goes away.

I was taking some screenshots of this level with some extreme quality settings (the map looks really nice) 1024x768x32, 4xFSAA, texture compression off, lod bias -1.5, pic_mip 0, r_subdivisions 1 ect, I was averageing around 5 fps lol, got some great wall paper though...

 

[AdamK47]

Well, I'm glad that somebody at 3dfx is now on the ball with this issue.

Link to 3dfxgamers Voodoo 5 support thread.

 

[AdamK47]

I found a better fix for the FSAA distortion. After trying out various driver mixes, I found out that the problem is in the Glide3x driver version 3.10.0.657 and above. Version 2.10.0.656 doesn't have this problem. What the .657+ drivers do is shift the FSAA to the bottom right. Version .656 doesn't do any shifting to create the FSAA.

What I did was take the Glide3x driver version .656 out of the 1.01 driver set and placed it in my Windows system folder. I also had to take the nearest compatible 3dfx self made OpenGL wrapper (3dfxogl.dll) out of the 1.03 driver set and viola, it works perfectly.

I uploaded both files into a zip and placed them on my temp site

Get the files here.

All you have to do is unzip them to the Windows system folder and overwrite the existing files.

After you get done with that you will notice that when you press the FSAA demo key nothing shifts to the bottom right anymore. Everything is still in the correct place.

PS. On an odd note, I noticed that the driver 1.03 set have a higher Glide3x build version (.659) than the 1.04 driver set (.658).