punkUser wrote:
Right, but I would highly suggest checking them out once you get the 1.7.2 public beta. On most systems they now incur very little if any overhead. If you're already getting >60fps on 1.7.[0|1] then I would imagine you'll be easily getting that *with* detail textures on 1.7.2. There were a ton of improvements made to rendering speed in 1.7.2.
To my eyes the gamma looks better in OpenGL as well... it's washed out in the D3D image. Note that gamma != brightness! If your image is too dark, you don't turn up the gamma... turn up the brightness on your monitor. Gamma is for adjusting the relatively relationship of dark and light areas and really for calibrating a monitor to display a proper gradient of lightness. Laptop monitors are notoriously bad so your ability to do this may be limited but do your best to adjust everything on the actual monitor first... ideally you shouldn't have to adjust the ingame gamma in this day and age. (Note that windows power saving settings may adjust the brightness of your panel when on battery since the backlight is quite a power hog. You can change this behavior in power options in the control panel though.)
More importantly, once you get detail textures (go get the Magma ones for the Bungie levels at the very least from the Tain) OpenGL will look *much* better due to improved detail in the landscape. I think you'll like the result.
I have Jon God's Bungie Map Textures B5 and the detail textures with his plugin are really fantastic. But on my laptop, even with 1.7.2 369b, my fps go down significantly with DT on. With DT + vsync, I get 30 fps, and without vsync, I get about 30-35 fps.
I had already set the brightness to maximum on my laptop, but the screen was still dark and it strained my eyes. So I set the gamma higher and find that it helps. I rarely use this laptop on battery now; it is plugged in 99% of the time.
I have to note that performance on OpenGL is far better on my laptop now with 1.7.2 than it was with 1.7.0. Aside from the lower fps and graininess back then, the other main reason I did not use OpenGL was because of the partial screen bug--when advancing from one level to the next, the map on the next level would only show a portion of the full screen and I could not change it. I had the same ATI video drivers back then as I do now, but I did not experience this bug when I cycled through all 25 single player maps last night on OpenGL. So, it looks like you guys have been doing alot of work on optimizing on OpenGL--thanks for all your work.
I am planning to upgrade my notebook soon, and with my new system, I look forward to playing with detail textures on.
