Quake3World

Ok here is the background:

I have Ati Radeon 9000 Pro WONDER graphic card (64MB).
Yeah, I know it is old but it served well with all FPS I played recently including Doom3. (Farcry, Boiling Point, HalfLife2 and several more)
Have 1GB of RAM and Athlon 2600XP.

I do see that Q4 hardware req. lists has no DirectX8 cards on it.
(which I didn't know before I bought the game)


Personally, I just think the real reason for that it is that developers didn't want to bother making it 100% compatible with it, although it should make game work fine, with some lower frame rate (it's doom3 engine after all). And it actually works fine exepct some problems I'll list here.


So I had several problems, two of which I solved.

100% dark shadows:
Solved by disabling them. Same worked with Doom3 that had same problem. Don't know other solutions. Not that it's needed, since switching shadows on halfs my framerate (plus looks ugly).

Completly watered down textures:
Solved by changing image_downSizeLimit and image_downSizeBumpLimit values to "512". Game for some reason set those to 128!, making textures completly blurry.


Everythin is green, like nightvision!
Solved by changing renderer to ARP.

Unfortunately this one introduced half light/half dark faces bug, and I don't know how to solve it.

Basicly one part of the face, body or somthing else is bright, while other is very dark. Similar anomalies happen to wall textures in some places when there is big difference in shading of two wall blocks.

I do remember having same problem in Doom3, but only when using High graphic settings, low and medium worked fine.


Any ideas?



P.S.
Anyway exept this, game works in managable frame rate (for SP).
15-30fps with 640x480 (medium textures).
And yes, I won't touch MP with this config.

The reason the Radeon 9000 isn't listed is because the game uses DirectX9 features that your card does not support. The only way to avoid your problems is to buy a new video card.

While you could tweak the shit out of your config to avoid these problems, you'll lose out on the SP experience.

6600GT's are $150 and 9600XT's are $80 bucks.

I would save the hassle and just upgrade.

The Radeon 9000 is really old now. I'd say it's time to upgrade.

Well, I'm not rich US/WEurope citizen to buy new cards all the time.
(live in Serbia and Montenegro)

I'm not even primary FPS player.
Mostly I play Civ4/RTW and other strategies.

FPS I mostly borrow from friends to relax the brain.
And this is first FPS my card can't handle.


Anyway, it did seemed strange that same Doom3 engine requres better video card. It just seems kinda odd that there are no substitute DX8 features were necessary (more lazyness of programmers then real reason).

And maybe I do upgrade in few months/half year, to let's say Radeon 9800 WONDER (I really need those wonders more then anything, no PCI express slot), but I'll probably forget about Q4 at that time.

Already finished game with dark/light faces, and exempt that it's not bad game.

But as everybody is awarde, SP FPS are pretty much 2 weeks/one month exeprience. You play and forget them.

Still good experience. I liked action difference compared to Doom3 (although I liked HL2 and Farcry more; first for flavour and second for difficulty and realism).



Anyway, I somebody knows how to "tweak the shit" out of game to lose this "polarized" faces problem, let me know.

I would like Q4 to work properly, and maybe finish is once more in such state.

The D3 engine is OGL, so which DX version your card supports should be irrelevant.

I had the half dark/half light face problem with D3 running on my AIW Radeon 8500 as well, and I don't recall it being a high-graphics-settings-only problem. It's been a while since I touched D3, so I don't remember how I fixed it. I think it was a cvar that had to be set correctly. The fix worked for D3, so I imagine it should work for Q4, too. Btw, the problem never really went away completely; it just became much less noticeable.

Last but not least, make sure your CATALYST is up-to-date.