Beware the Catalyst Voodoo

BlitzMax Forums/MiniB3D Module/Beware the Catalyst Voodoo

GNS	(Posted 2010) [#1]

So the past few days I've been dealing with an issue where enabling mipmaps for textures would cause them to distort. In an effort to try and figure out what was causing it I created a simple test in both B3D and miniB3D. Here's the code for each:

B3D Code:

AppTitle "B3D Code"
Graphics3D(640, 480, 32, 2)

AmbientLight(255,255,255)

blah = LoadMesh("blah.b3d")

cam = CreateCamera()

PositionEntity(blah, 0, 0, 5)
RotateEntity(blah, 0, 45, 0)

While Not KeyHit(1)
	RenderWorld
	Flip
Wend

MiniB3D Code:

Framework sidesign.minib3d

AppTitle = "MiniB3D Code"
Graphics3D(640, 480, 32, 2)

AmbientLight(255,255,255)

Global blah:TMesh = LoadMesh("blah.b3d")
Global cam:TCamera = CreateCamera()

PositionEntity(blah, 0, 0, 5)
RotateEntity(blah, 0, 45, 0)

While Not KeyHit(KEY_ESCAPE)
	RenderWorld
	Flip
Wend

The 'blah' mesh is simply a default Blender cube textured with a random texture.

Here's a comparison shot of the results on my PC: Comparision

The MiniB3D code would appear perfectly as long as I used ClearTextureFilters() and did not use the mipmap flag any time after that. This wasn't much of a work around as it caused texture 'shimmering'.

Anyway, after several hours of tinkering I remembered installing the latest Catalyst drivers and thought perhaps that had something to do with it. Long story short, the distortion above is caused by setting the "Catalyst A.I." setting to 'Advanced'. Setting it to 'Standard' or disabling it entirely fixes things.

Just something to make a note of, I suppose. :]