Intel GFX and older cards: Reason for some issues with DRI and RO

[Prometheus]

I finally found out why RO looks so bad when using one of the open source DRI drivers.

Regnum uses te S3TC feature to make the grafik look better, but only the closed source GFX drivers provide a S3TC decompressor by default. That's why the open source DRI drivers sometimes don't work with an error "Your graphics card is too old, etc." and why the textures look like garbage when you can enter the game!

In another thread here someone found the solution, which is to install the S3TC library, but this library has legal problems, see here:

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/dri_experimental/s3tc_index.html

I just tried this lib with my brand new G45 chipset and regnum indeed looks better than on my older GM965 cipset without this library.

Sadly the G45 gfx driver is not stable enough yet to play regnum, it crashes my whole X and modesetting so I don't even get back to a virtual terminal.

It would be nice if Regnum had an option to turn S3TC off completly, if thats possible.

Some information from the DRI Wiki on the same topic:

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC

And another link is here:

http://www.burghardt.pl/2008/01/adding-s3tc-support-to-mesadri-in-debian/

Will now try the lib on my older GMA 965 system :).

[Mikan]

A good idea would be for NGD to include alternative texture compression methods in the game. For example, even with pure OpenGL, you still have GL_RGB4 which can double the number of textures you can use.

The texture compression method used (if any) should be selectable from the loader.

Regards,

[Prometheus]

Regnum now works on my X4500HD card, but it is slow (1o fps). The same hardware under Windows is very fast (60 fps).

I'm using Debian Lenny + Linux kernel 2.8.28-rc2 + Intel driver from Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex + S3TC lib from OP.

See screenshot.

[ArcticWolf]

Try with this lib: http://debian-multimedia.org/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/package/libtxc-dxtn0.php

[Prometheus]

Try with this lib: http://debian-multimedia.org/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/package/libtxc-dxtn0.php

Thanks for the tip, didn't know there was a prepackaged version of it available. I already installed the lib from source though (see my first post).