FSAA & Image Quality Comparison - 3dfx vs ATI vs NVIDIA

S3TC = Nasty Looking Sky?

As you've probably noticed in previous screenshots from the GeForce2 GTS as well as the GeForce and the GeForce2 MX, the sky definitely looks pretty bad. But on all competing cards, including the Voodoo5 5500 and the ATI Radeon the sky looks perfectly fine.

Let's take a quick look at how bad the sky looks first:

Pretty bad, no? But watch what happens when we disable S3TC, the GeForce2's Texture Compression algorithm that has been enabled in all 5.xx drivers:

Much better now. To disable S3TC all you need to do is set 'r_ext_compress_textures' to 0 in the Quake III console, but this will hinder your performance considerably in situations where there are a lot of textures.

So what kind of performance drop do you see when you disable S3TC? On a 32MB card, the performance hit can be up to 50% depending on the situation (Quaver is the perfect benchmark for this); 64MB owners will be happy to know that they can disable S3TC without losing much performance because of all of the extra memory.

Is it worth it? It's not as noticeable as it would be if the walls or floors looked really bad, but for some gamers it is a big problem, so you can try experimenting with turning r_ext_compress_textures off to see if the game is still playable by your standards.

The problem that we had was that both 3dfx and ATI are using texture compression as well, and neither of their solutions have the degraded sky quality. Let's hope this isn't something NVIDIA can't get around in future driver releases; we've been with S3TC for so long now (ever since the first 5.xx drivers were leaked) and for us to have to play without S3TC in order to get decent looking sky textures would probably annoy more than a handful of gamers.