graphics help

[shez]

I've looked at the pictures of CM:BB on battlefront.com and they look lush. However, they don't ever look like that on my G4 700MHz imac with a Geforce2MX 32mb. Now I know that this machine isn't a power house, and that a GF2MX isn't the best card in the world... but I should be getting something like those pictures.
The sky textures are horribly smeared, and the tarrain textures aren't great. The tanks and infantry look fairly good, but it sometimes goes blured. If I remove the CM:BB preferences from the OS9 preferences folder, then the graphics get better, but I have to remove it again every time I run the game.
If i could set the graphics settings myself, I could force it to render at higher detail, and it would blatently run fine... but because the game decides what settings to use I cant force it.

My OS9 graphics drivers havn't been changed since i installed 9.2.2 (enless the OSX updates changes them)...

Any suggestions?

[ July 12, 2003, 10:59 AM: Message edited by: shez ]

[Schrullenhaft]

Most of the problems with the GeForce display on the Mac are due to the drivers as far as I'm aware. I don't believe that there are any newer extensions for OS 9.x beyond what is already included in 9.2.2. Looking through the AppleCare Knowledgebase it only came up with 2.1.1 for OS 9.1 (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120038).

What resolution do you run your desktop at and do you change it often ? What specifically changes graphically when you remove the CMBB Prefs file ? I assume that the sky textures don't improve, but what does ? Does it revert back to being 'crappy' when you start CMBB for a second time ?

Do you have OS X installed on another partition or hard drive in this Mac ? If you do, which version ?

[ July 12, 2003, 02:43 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[shez]

Its the texture detail thats crappy. And it reverts to being crappy after running the game a few times.
I run my desktop at 1024x768, and yes I do have OS X installed at version 10.2.6.
Performance is always good, enless their are loads of units.

[Pzman]

CM seems to present AGP and PCI cards differently on the Mac. My old ATI Radeon (AGP) with 32MBs VRAM shows CMBB at least as good as the picts, as long as I don't have tons of units on the map.

[shez]

Since mine is flat panel iMac. it's a built in AGP geforce. It has 32mb VRAM.

It just down samples the graphics when it really doesn't have to.

[Schrullenhaft]

32Mb pre-9000 series Radeons are the best display adapters on the Mac when it comes to CM. In fact maybe the 8000 series may not work as well either.

I believe this is still an issue of drivers. The 700MHz G4 iMac utilizes AGP for its GeForce2 MX. It's possible that there may be some bugs in Apple's AGP related code (at least regarding RAVE), that may cause problems for most AGP cards on the Mac. AGP generally should help with large textures since it can store them in system memory and swap them out with the video card. It's possible that the GeForce drivers are either downsampling or compressing/decompressing the textures improperly (the compression being very 'lossy') in an attempt to save on video memory. This would be somewhat strange with an AGP interface since video memory really isn't at a 'premium'. However it is possible that compression of textures was implemented for 'performance reasons' (attempting to maintain as many textures in the video card's memory without relying on the AGP bus to transfer them from system memory which is much slower).

Does the texture detail decrease when you reload CMBB without rebooting between sessions of CMBB (i.e. - you exit out of CMBB and then load it again before shutting down or rebooting) or does this happen regardless of whether you've rebooted between sessions of CM ? Have you tried a lower desktop resolution (800 x 600) for CMBB (delete your Prefs file, set the desktop to that resolution and then load CMBB) ? I don't know if a lower resolution will help or not (I don't think it has made a difference for anyone else that has had problems with CM and the GeForce series on the Mac).

[ July 12, 2003, 04:57 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[shez]

I always restart my OS before running the game again, if i've deleated the prefs file.
Apple hasn't updated their RAVE driver in ages since they don't really support it anymore.