Which textures load faster in DP?

[hgdagon]

Hi. I have a very slow pc, 800Mhz PIII 256mb RAM + GeForce FX 5200 128mb. Also a laptop Celeron 1,6 Ghz 1gb RAM + ATI mobility Radeon x200 (128 mb shared). I want to know which textures (tga, png, jpg) load faster in DarkPlaces?? I've found a post (by MH, if I'm noy mistaken) that said DDS textures load faster. Is it reasonable to convert all the textures to I have to DDS??? Is there a batch converter for that?? If no, what's the texture format that loads faster in DP? Thank you.

[golden_boy]

XnView Software - Free graphic and photo viewer, converter, organizer

This supposedly does batch conversion of TGA to DDS. You should probably set it to DXT1 compression.

But I do think that your machine should be able to run DP with replacement textures at a reasonable frame rate - try running it windowed in 640x480 and without realtime shadows. Should work.

And yes, I do think it is worth it to convert your hi-res textures to DDS. It saves TONS of video RAM. Decompression of DDS images is also very fast because it is being done directly on your graphics hardware. TBH everyone should do that.

Just use DXT1 compression for everything except stuff with transparency - do the few transparent textures (if there are any at all) manually and use DXT5 for that. Batch convert the rest.

[nahuel]

also remeber to put the dds textures in id1/dds/textures not in id1/textures and enable the dds texture support for darkplaces

[hgdagon]

@nahuel
Thanks, I would blow my head on that!!!)))

@golden_boy
Thanks I'll try it out)))

[_Smith_]

Add to autoexec.cfg:

“gl_texturecompression””1” // enable textures compression
“r_texture_dds_save””1” // save compressed textures
“r_texture_dds_load””1” // load compressed textures

Darkplaces will compress and save textures on level load. The next time it will need them, it'll load already available compressed ones.

Optionally with these cvars you can choose which textures exactly should be compressed, '2d' and 'normal' are not compressed by default, if you don't add these cvars.
If you want your _luma textures to be compressed you have to rename them to _glow.

“gl_texturecompression_color””1”
“gl_texturecompression_gloss””1”
“gl_texturecompression_glow””1”

“gl_texturecompression_2d””1”
“gl_texturecompression_normal””1”

DXT compression offers better quality compared to memory used, it's a lot less quality loss to use compressed textures than to use smaller size.
But it is not a lossless format and in case of normal maps quality loss is noticeable.

It takes me like 5-10s to load a level with all the mods and it was 3-4s when I've tried to use DDS.
It's the only gain, if you have enough video memory to fit them uncompressed ( 512MB – 1GB depending on how many replacements packs you are using ).

Edit:
Also keep in mind that DDS textures will have priority, so if you change something, old already compressed textures will be used anyway.
So better at first use “r_texture_dds_save””0” and once you'll be sure you are not going to change anything switch it to “1”.
Otherwise, you'll have to first find and delete DDS textures, that you'll want to update.

[hgdagon]

@ _Smith_
Did I get you right? DP itself Converts everything to DDS and loads them???
Thanks a lot I'll try it out today!!