DXT3 textures running faster than BMP

[Guest Fabio Miguez]

Howdy all.Robert Williamson posted earlier that he downloaded some DXT3 textures for the Flight1 C421 Golden Eagle, and that he was amazed at how much faster the sim ran.I have almost no knowledge of DXT3 textures, since I am just starting at all of this, but is this statement true in general? And if so, apparently not all MDLs can use DXT3. Is there a way to choose options in gmax so that the mdl will accept DXT3 formats?

[Guest]

As far as I know you don't need to do anything special. Just get DXTBmp or Imagetool, open the original textures and save them with the same name over your old ones and they should work.Have funFinn

[Guest Milton]

Fabio,I have a lowly 350mhz AMD with 384meg ram and a Radeon PCI 32 meg video card. Not something I would recommend these days LOL.On the Dash 7, we have experimented with 8-bit, 16-bit/565, 32-bit extended with alpha, and DXT3 with alpha.Guess which one performs best on this low-end computer.WRONG! Not 8-bit/256 colors .... actually DXT3 with alpha for reflections. Go figure!The 8-bit and compressed DXT3 is about the same size in megabytes, but for some reason, DXT3 performs better for me. The rest of the team has no problems with either format and the detail is awesome.This will vary I'm sure by computer/video card setup.As a result, we will make all sets available for optional download and the DXT3 will be the standard package set. This should help everyone find the best format for their setup.RegardsMiltonThe Dash 7 Projectwww.flightsimonline.com/dash7

[Guest]

Actually it's no suprise that DXT1 (=DXT3 when you don't need an alpha channel) and DXT3 are faster as these are native DirectX formats that can be stored compressed in your video card's memory. I doubt many people have graphics cards these days that don't support them (even my old Matrox G400 could display them with no problems). Virtually all the stock CFS2 textures were DXT ones. It depends on your textures how much detail you lose when compressing them though, some look fine and others will have their detail blurred quite a bit.Have funFinn