The solution: Virtual Texturing (page2)

Is VT really the solution? Well for now yes. As we look at NVidia's Geforce II card, we can see that it has huge bandwidth problems. Why, when running Quake III Arena, is the default setting for textures: Texture Compression Enabled? Don't get me wrong; Guillemot has built one hell of a 3D card with the GeForce II GTS. I wouldn't trade my Guillemot 3D Prophet GTS 32MB for anything in the world right now. Running Quake at 100FPS is really awesome. But look at this graph;

HQ are the high quality settings in Quake III Arena (1.17), with TC enabled, texture slider to full, textures in 32bit
and color also in 32bit, geometric detail: 2/3
HQU setting: I disabled TC, set the display settings to 32bit color, 32bit textures at full size, geometric detail: high.

I did these tests on an over clocked P3 600, running at 720Mhz. This is the fastest CPU I have. At these settings the system is rock stable: no crashes during 8 hours of benchmarking. Room temperature was about 25 degrees Celsius. It was a hot day.






We can see that at 640*480 it doesn't matter how fast the ram is running, framterate is almost the same at all settings, ranging from 95 - 102FPS. So a difference of 7FPS between the slowest setting (default 200/333Mhz) and the fastest (210/180). At 800*600 the same image, but when hitting 1024*768 suddenly the gap between HQ and UHQ setting begins to show. The stress on the videocard's ram is showing off. If you look at your default settings, not only the perfomance is lower, but also is the gap between HQ and UHQ larger as when you look at the 210/380 setting. When hitting 1280 framerate begins to drop like a stone. And the gap between HQ and UHQ is becoming bigger and bigger.

But if we look at the increase in memory width and performance gain, the results are not that impressive. An increase of 47Mhz in ramspeed delivers only 5FPS at UHQ 1280. With the HQ setting the increase in speed is much higher, this was to be expected, as TC is doing it's job.

We can see that putting faster ram on the card does help, but not very much. VT would get the stress of the bandwidth, thus enabling higher frame rates. When going to bigger textures than are used in Q3A and with more color precision, we can see that the frame rate will drop like a stone.