mips in FS2002/2004

Anyone care to discuss the use of mips in Flight Simulator textures?
the use of.. and the practice of mip-stripping? what about only 2 or
3 levels of mips.. like a 1024x1024, a 512x512, and maybe a 256x256
but all the smaller ones omitted.. then let the Sim scale it smaller.

Also.. where can one set/adjust the mips threshold or `gain' in the
driver when, for instance, no such control is present in the Sim
DISPLAY properties menu.


-G

Gregory Abbey wrote:

Anyone care to discuss the use of mips in Flight Simulator textures?
the use of.. and the practice of mip-stripping? what about only 2 or
3 levels of mips.. like a 1024x1024, a 512x512, and maybe a 256x256
but all the smaller ones omitted.. then let the Sim scale it smaller.

Also.. where can one set/adjust the mips threshold or `gain' in the
driver when, for instance, no such control is present in the Sim
DISPLAY properties menu.


-G


To the best of my knowledge, most games don't use prerendered mipmaps
anymore. Autogen mipmaps are easily implemented on all cards since the
original Riva TNT.

Currently if you want to tweak LOD, download a simple tweaker program
like aTuner (http://www.3dcenter.org/atuner) and go under the Direct3D
More tab to set the lod slider.

A negative number makes it sharper. -1.0 should look good, set it
around -2.5 max. Also I'm not certain if FS has a setting for this, but
make certain Trilinear filtering is on, then in the NVidia control
panel, set the Performance mode to High Quality. That will disable all
trilinear and anisotropic optimizations.

High levels of anisotropic filtering can also help with high LOD biases.
4x is a good starting point.

On Tue, 03 Aug 2004 15:50:51 -0500, deimos
brought the following to our attention:

Gregory Abbey wrote:

Anyone care to discuss the use of mips in Flight Simulator textures?
the use of.. and the practice of mip-stripping? what about only 2 or
3 levels of mips.. like a 1024x1024, a 512x512, and maybe a 256x256
but all the smaller ones omitted.. then let the Sim scale it smaller.

Also.. where can one set/adjust the mips threshold or `gain' in the
driver when, for instance, no such control is present in the Sim
DISPLAY properties menu.


-G


To the best of my knowledge, most games don't use prerendered mipmaps
anymore. Autogen mipmaps are easily implemented on all cards since the
original Riva TNT.

Currently if you want to tweak LOD, download a simple tweaker program
like aTuner (http://www.3dcenter.org/atuner) and go under the Direct3D
More tab to set the lod slider.

A negative number makes it sharper. -1.0 should look good, set it
around -2.5 max. Also I'm not certain if FS has a setting for this, but
make certain Trilinear filtering is on, then in the NVidia control
panel, set the Performance mode to High Quality. That will disable all
trilinear and anisotropic optimizations.

High levels of anisotropic filtering can also help with high LOD biases.
4x is a good starting point.

Thanks.. care to expand on this topic some more? Am running nVidia
Riva TNT2 32MB AGP video card. Have set quality to HIGH.


Texture Anisotropic Filtering rage is 0 - 2x.. it's set at 2x.


What about Texel Alignment? Range is Upper Left.. Center 7 - 0


-G