The mipmapping fallacy!

[Hornit 3]

Ok I will caveat this post with the fact that I am running the press beta copy of 2k4 and YMMV. I have been experimenting with mipmapping and the "shimmering" that folks experience. I dont care what card you own or how fast your system is, If you like crisp textures and little or no mips, than you are going to get shimmering. Its just the way video cards do business. I have used several different cards on 2K4 and 2K2 and it doesn't matter much what you use. Its simple, if you use mipmaps you will see little or no shimmer. Usually its the buildings and trees which are the worst culprits, but depending on your drivers and settings sometimes it can be the terrain also. If you dont use mipmapping you are going to get nice crisp texturing and see some shimmer. Its like this in 2002 and 2004. In 2004 the visual quality of the terrain will suffer if you set your mipmap level to anything less than 5. 4 will give almost no shimmer at all, but on my system with several different cards, it creates a blurry mess out past about 10-15 miles. Not very realistic.Even at high resolutions you still see this, also notice that any aircraft which has mips in its textures will look crappy from spot view unless you do the "zoom in/out" trick frequently. I have to set my mip slider to at least 5 for quality textures on aircraft in spotview. Either that or get rid of the mips for the airplane textures altogether. Could someone call the guys who desigend the 3DFX Voodoo 5500? If you get them tell'em to get a hold of Nvidia or ATI and let them see how real AA is done. No one can touch the AA this card did years ago!!! Just my observations, theres no real way around it until we get much better AA out of these card manufacturers. Just my two cents :) Oh and yes I know how to use Rivatuner.Hornit

[nudata 10]

Running at very high resolutions reduces (does not eliminate) shimmering. I run 1920x1200on a 19" monitor. Since the shillering is slight with this resolution I just acept it. For me it is much better than the blurry mess mip-mapping gives.Dick KLBE

[John_Cillis 2,406]

".....Oh and yes I know how to use Rivatuner...."Hornit--What card and driver version do you have? If it's an Nvidia card, have you applied Rivatuner's negative LOD patch?I'm running with a LOD of -.5, aniso set to 2x, AA set to 2X, and FS2004's mipmap level at 4. There's slight shimmering if I look straight down, but looking to the horizon, the textures are as clear or clearer as FS2002's were. But I had the same results you did until I applied the negative LOD patch. It was only because I had some vague memory of someone going through the same that I dug into Rivatuner's docs and found out how to fix the issue.Of course, if you have a Radeon, then I'm clueless :)

[Guest]

simple reason is that you're getting the best of both worlds.You're getting the highest mip when you turn off mipmapping which is what you'd get at a very high resolution (or in real closeup) with mipmapping turned on.

[Hornit 3]

Ive got a GF4Ti4200 128mb card, 44.03 drivers, rivatuner settings identical to yours except -.6 LOD. What does this -lod patch do and where is it? I run win 98 by the way. I dont mind a bit of shimmering, what I cant stand is how things look at less than 5 on the sims mip setting. John, Also what does your terrain cfg section look like?Hornit

[John_Cillis 2,406]

My Terrain cfg section is the default...If you have the 44.03 drivers, by default they do not support negative LOD's, even if you've set it via Riva Tuner. Riva Tuner has a patch program which modifies one of the dll's, the name of which I can't recall, but you'll know it when you see it. Once you identify it, you copy it to a "work" folder, then use the patch util on it. You then boot in safe mode, and replace the default dll with the "patched" dll, then reboot again. And voila--the negative LOD is supported.As to where the patch proggie is, check Rivatuner's folder structure--I know it's in one of the subfolders. Also, you may have to update Rivatuner in order to find the program. I know I did.I believe many of the Omega drivers have the patch applied to support the negative LOD's, as well as some default reg entries. No doubt this may be why Nvidia is rumored to have issues with the Omega drivers. Quite often, that's why you hear Omega driver users raving about the results. I prefer the Rivatuner method, and I have had awesome results with FS2004...-John

[Hornit 3]

Ok in the latest version of Rivatuner it has the patch files, you run an exe for each and it has a log that tells you the fix has been applied! I will go check it out. Also no booting in safe mode etc, it replaces the .dll for you, very nice!!!! I just got the latest version of RT very recently. Hornit