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Texture Quality

We will begin this look at the open-beta Quake Wars engine settings with the texture qualities.

We have four sliders here. One for the level of Diffuse, Bump, and Specular texture qualities. Additionally, there is a slider for Anisotropic Filtering.

We began testing this setting by change each slider individually. However, the change in appearance was so slight, and the effect on performance was so small, that we decided to alter our test. We decided lock each setting to one another, and tested the four sliders at 'Full', 'Middle', and 'Off', to see what effect it had on performance.

Diffuse, Bump, Specular and AF sliders set at Full

Diffuse, Bump, Specular and AF sliders set at Middle

Diffuse, Bump, Specular and AF at Full set to Off

What are these settings?

Diffuse and Specular settings should both determine the processing power applied to the rendering of light striking a game-world object. Whereas diffuse lighting applies to rendered light striking an object with a uneven surface, specular lighting is more focused on calculating how the reflection of light off of surfaces is rendered.

The Bump setting should determine how detailed textures look: on lower Bump settings, textures will (presumably) appear 'flat'. A higher Bump setting should give textures a more three dimensional appearance, by rendering dips and protrusion more realistically.

As probably many of you are familiar with, Anisotropic Filtering is process which helps sharpen the appearance of objects that are further away.

Affect on Performance

After studying the effect of the Texture Quality settings for a few hours, it seems that it best to leave them all on 'Full'. Reducing the Specular, Bump, and Diffuse settings did not seem to greatly change the appearance of surfaces, nor did effect performance by more than 8%. The performance hit for Anistropic Filtering is very dependent on the quality of your video card -- but if you have anything as fast or faster than, say, a 7600 GT, we recommend you set AF to 16. For our BFG 8800 GTS OC2, the performance hit going from 0 AF to 16 AF was negligible, but the appearance of distant textures greatly improved.