NEED Help...

[TheJamsh]

some may have seen my posts about buying a lappy recently...

basically, and GSH or one of you people educated about BZII and its latest texture format and stuff will be able to help me.

can someone provide a list of some laptop graphics chips that WILL support bumpmapping AND DXT textures for a laptop? i have a fairly limited budget but i guess it depends on what i find...

please help! i wanna buy this thing before i pay keep this month

i want the most BZII optimized card please. i wont be using it for all the latest games. yes itll have a dual core and loads of memory and stuff, but its mostly the card im interested in...

everything is dual-core nowadays anyway so i guess processor aint a problem, just need a card that will support with UBER graphics in BZII

[Steeveeo]

For the graphics card, I'd say getting something around the nVidia 6 or 7 era to avoid the skydome memory leak thing...wait..does nVidia have laptop graphics?.

[TheJamsh]

well the laptop comes with an 8400M chip from nVidia. so i assume so...

im after an nVidia one purely because ive got one at the moment. im using a 7500 LE on my desktop but it doesnt support DXT or bumpmapping

[GSH]

7500 ought to support DXT fine. Probably bumpmaps too, but I'm less certain there.

-- GSH

[TheJamsh]

didnt do either...

bumpmapping made the textures go very strange... and DXT textures end up with loads of transparent parts in the textures. the scions go particularly ugly...

driver version is 7.15.11.6925

if thats any help.

[VSMIT]

I think that your card is funky.  I'm using a 5500FX and it works fine, even without the noDXT switch.

VSMIT.

[Steeveeo]

bumpmapping made the textures go very strange... and DXT textures end up with loads of transparent parts in the textures. the scions go particularly ugly...

Normal and Normal on newer cards, the DXT thing likes to take full black and turn it into a transparent index, thats why I tend to keep /noDXT enabled.

Bumpmapping, IIRC, has never worked like it should, not on my 8800GT, not on my old 6600, or even my reeally old 5200FX.

[TheJamsh]

yeh its the black bits that go transparent with DXT's so i turn them off.

is bumpmapping what makes the models really shinyt and reflective? when i first installed and played PB4a with all the original settings everything looked like it had just be hand-polished for centuries!

[Steeveeo]

is bumpmapping what makes the models really shinyt and reflective? when i first installed and played PB4a with all the original settings everything looked like it had just be hand-polished for centuries!

No, they just upped the reflectivity on the models, the bumpmapping is supposed to make the lowpoly models of bz2 look like they have a high poly count, but the thing has never worked correctly IIRC...

[TheJamsh]

oh... so how come they all look the same now? as soon as i turned it off and restarted BZII it was all gone =[

[mrtwosheds]

The transparent black with dtx is actually very useful for modders, all they have to do to stop it is adjust their texture so there are no 0,0,0 colours.
As far as I know the bump maps were put into bz2 originally with only Matrox video cards in mind, I have never seen them work as I have never had a matrox video card. This may have changed, but I still can't see them on my pc.

[VSMIT]

When I had my matrox card, it wouldn't even run BZ...

VSMIT.

[TheJamsh]

so apparently they dont work then...

what are they designed to do? and the question remains, why have my models in BZII all lost their 'shinyness'?

[Steeveeo]

There is a setting in the XSI for reflectivity IIRC.

[TheJamsh]

yeh i know, but i didnt change them... strange.

ive rolled back my driver from the nVIdia one to the standard MS one. now i can achieve 75 fps usually instead of 25-40

MUCH better. also supports bumpmapping and DXT. so DXT problem is a driver issue with black spots and things.