Does anybody REALLY know, what these things do?

[Olham54]

Question to all, who REALLY know more about the technical side of the CFS3config - What do these things do:

- dual pass render
- high resolution Z buffer
- index buffer
- vertex buffer

-terrain texture ring blend
-shell casing effect
-environment mapping

I think, it could be helpful to know, so we can get to the best graphic card performances, by switching these on or off individually?

 

[sandbagger]

I think the shell casing effect is when you see spent cartridges being dumped from aircraft guns. If I can't remember if this effect is used in OFF - I think it may be on some aircraft.

 

[Polovski]

Shell casing effect is there, check out some of the lewis craft such as the Se5a external view when firing.

some off the top of my head..

- Z buffer is used by 3D game engines to calc and remove the need to render 3d objects or parts you cannot see, i.e. a waste of CPU/GPU power.
Bigger buffer (IF your card supports it) helps do it quicker.

-environment mapping usually wrapping a texture on something

-terrain texture ring blend is exactly that, terrain in drawn in rings of "quality"
and there's a blending used between the bands.. no blend =faster looks worse.

- vertex is in 3D models, a model is made up of dots (vertices) in 3D space joined by lines. Buffers generally are a good thing reserved memory to temporary store things in. Trade off is you have less memory for general use

 

[cpirrmann]

- Z buffer is used by 3D game engines to calc and remove the need to render 3d objects or parts you cannot see, i.e. a waste of CPU/GPU power.
Bigger buffer (IF your card supports it) helps do it quicker.

Hi Pol,
Do you know if the Z buffer size is settable and, if so, where? I didn't see anything in the config tool or ATI control panel.

 

[rabu]

Good question, Olham, for years I've wondered why no one has made a list of what many of the settings in the config paramaters panel actually do, especially those on the "Overrides" and "Texture Info" panels.

 

[Polovski]

It doesn't really matter to be honest what most of those actually do - they are really troubleshooting options to turn off features of DirectX or whatever.

Given the zillion setups out there, driver revisions and settings, OS's other dlls and programs running.

You try some on see if it helps with an issue, if not put it back on try something else.


Z buffer can be set look in other options. File Custom, Window, Zbias

However if your video card doesn't support it it will likely CRASH. So TBH I'd leave them alone!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-buffer
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci284005,00.html