Graphics Banding in Doom 3...

It's nothing to do with FSAA, it's related to bloom... it appears like it is just a crap implementation of bloom, because both HL2 and FarCry's bloom looks just fine.

 

To be honest I'm not that bothered about that happening.

 

Somehow, I'm not surprised...

 

The sig's changed though Maybe I'm still in a transitional period and have to become more demanding

 

I find that when games start to look 'the dogs dangly bits', you notice the glitches even more so.

 

Whatever it is i agree with Malf as i have also seen this on hundreds of games ive played on totally random cards. In fact, thinking about it i'm sure ive also seen this on Rouge Agent on the PS2.

Death

 

Yah, but a PS2 whole system thingy costs about the same as a 6800 card So I guess Tim has a point in complaining

 

Yeah, but isn't a GeForce 6800 GT a little bit more advanced than a PS2, much like the game engine behind Doom 3? The graphics engine is the most advanced graphics engine out there at the moment - as a comparison, I think Half-Life 2's engine is quite not as advanced, but it's physics engine is far far superior.

 

I get where your coming from and it isnt always noticable on the ps2, but i dont think it is a hardware problem rather a problem with textures/gradients/shading whatever. To blend all those shades into each other to actually make the corridor look like its going from light to dark (as in real life where there must be thousands of shades as to not be able to pick out where its changing shade) must be damn hard. You have a much better understanding on this than me, but thats how i see it .

Death

 

But in HL2's favor, Doom3 is so dark that it doesn't matter, and a lot of the textures absolutely SUCK (the walls right at the beginning stick out in my mind, but I didn't play it much since I hated the gameplay as well so I'm sure it's not just one occurance). And everyone has pointy heads, something that's not (as much of) a problem in HL2.

 

Pointy heads? Even with my Radeon 9550 I haven't noticed that...

 

gotta agree with firehed on darkness and texture suckage also gameplay. i assume pointy heads means the models are low poly. and they do look pretty poor. esp if you turn off all the effects you can really see it.

 

I don't see how the gameplay differs much from any FPS game, the only big difference is that you fight demons instead of humans/combine/whatever carrying guns... And I still haven't noticed any pointy heads or sucky textures. Maybe you should try lowering your res and setting the detail to 'high'

 

I saw the same thing when I played it through. This was shortly after I got the GeForce 6800GT, so I was using some of the now older driver sets. I notice this kind of banding in many situations, fog and other nice graidents like that just don't seem to render all that well, even though the monitor is perfectly capable of creating a smooth color gradient.

 

It's a engine problem! All GPU's have the same problem. What you see is a light that produces fog and from the center point to the outer edges is blends the fog into a gradient (IE: Bright to Dark) and to keep r_speeds up the engine splits the fog in to sections, that is what you are seeing when you see the "Banding"

 

the difference is that in d3 you walk around in a pitch black corredor, with no scene changes throughout the game till hell (when you get to a buncha pitch black caverns). my detail is on high, and i run in 1280x960 frame rate floates around 50. the poly count is low, the lighting and textures tries to hide it (you can see it if you turn evaything off and low). the textures arent very nice at all. i was severly dissapointed at d3 it was supposed to be some sorta graphics marvel, it wasnt. i was not dissapointed in the game play though, they managed to recreate the repetitive pointless boringness of doom 1 and 2 perfectly.

anyway..

as for the banding, i have to agree with the people who say they see it in all games. i see it all the time in games (though some games do a better job than others). but i would be more interested in seeing someone with a screenshot of their copy of doom3 not doing that. as mine does it too. i fail to see why it would be so hard to program a smooth lighting transition like that though.. must be harder to do because its 3d and you can move all around and that changes the way the transition looks... i dont know...

 

Not like a conehead or anything, but people's heads are a lot rounder in HL2 than D3. Doom 3 is kinda more like a poorly rounded polygon

 

You pose a good point, but I still enjoy playing doom immensely. Graphics aren't the only thing that make a good game, for me, atmosphere is very important and for me doom does a pretty good job at that. But oh well, opinions will differ.

And I had another look at those heads, they are pointy from certain angles, I noticed it when you get back from Hell and find Swann badly beat up on the floor. Strange I didn't notice that before

 

I agree, the game is good. I've not noticed the "pointy heads" factor yet though...


grr, my system can't even play it now I load up the game, set it to 640x480 and everything either off or on low and I'm still getting like 10-20fps!! My system is not that slow! It was a lot better before my last reinstall...

 

This section is quite light though, when you take in to account the enhanced gamma that Doom 3 uses...