no palettized textures with ATI

[magnulus]

Radeon 9700 and above doesn't support palettized textures. This is why
several older games have problems with ATI's newer hardware (Final Fantasy
VII, Die by the Sword, Rally Masters, etc.). It turns out NVidia doesn't
have this problem. Why can't ATI fix this? How hard would it be to add
palettized texture emulation to their drivers? I realize these are old
games (mostly from before 1999), but if NVidia can do it, ATI should be
doing it too.

 

[First of One]

This is with D3D I assume? Quake II uses 8-bit palettized textures. I think
it plays fine on the Radeon?

 

[magnulus]

This is with D3D I assume? Quake II uses 8-bit palettized textures. I think
it plays fine on the Radeon?

I don't know. I haven't played Quake III in a while. When I ran it with
the Radeon 9700 Pro, I believe it ran fine.

For a year I have been wondering off and on why Rally Masters would
display graphical anomalies with the ATI card, namely, no headlight effects
(night driving sucks without this one), no smoke or skidmarks, no drawing of
damage on the car. It's because these effects are done with 8-bit
palettized textures and the game will crash if you try and enable them. I
finally figured it out by checking out Rage3D.com and looking up a weblink
to a french website.

As I said before, it also affects several other older games. Probably no
AAA game will ever use them again, but IMO it should be a basic feature to
support (just like emboss bump mapping, even though that's on its way out
too). It shouldn't be too hard to write the driver stuff to emulate it,
either.

 

[First of One]

Er, no, not Quake III, Quake *II*. Q3A doesn't use 8-bit palettized
textures.