GFX capability of different cards
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/GFX capability of different cards
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| I'm having a bit of trouble on my game. Currently, when four texture layers is selected in the options, alpha effects basically switch off on older cards, such as a GeForce2MX. Two texture layers seems to fix the problem, but the game looks better with four. Also gives a slightly more impressive first impression, 'cos I get to use my funky water effect. What I would like to do is auto select four layers if the user's card is capable of it. This will be before the option screen is accessible, and I want to give the user the best possible first look at the game. If they're card has to emulate four textures, I'd rather just give them two, and then they have the option of increasing the number of layers if they think their machine will in fact handle it. So, in short, is there any way, via Blitz or some funky third party thing, to find out how many hardware texture layers are available to the game on a given system? |
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| Drivers / DX could tell you this among other info like for example "max supported texture size" but Blitz has been always bit weak when it comes to getting a debug type of info... sadly so. I'm sure that someone COULD write a .dll to do this "DX caps" info peeking, and hopefully someone does. |
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| There are commands in blitz to detect the card capabilities (100 or 110), resolutions and the number of texture units. |
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| The card capabilities command isn't exactly awe inspiring ("everything" and "everything + cube mapping"). Ah well, I'll deal with it. |
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| there is a command for maximum texture layers ( introduced with 1.86 ) the GPU support. btw: GF2 MX would have a max of 4 but only if no Modulate X2 is used as it creates some problems with them ( had a GF4 MX and the same problem ) |
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| Well, that's odd, because I'm not using modulate x2. Although I have had the same problem on a GF4MX. And what's the command for maximum texture layers? I've not been able to find it. |
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| HWTexUnits |
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| Ah, number of texture units = number of hardware accelerated layers? That makes sense, I guess. Dreamora, that command gives a 2 for the GeForce2 MX I use for low-end testing, by the way. Would anyone be interested in a lil' executable that spat out a text file of the DX caps of a given graphics card? |
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