Question about MipMapping

[yabay]

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[pango]

Mmmh mipmapping is aways on when retro rendering is off.
And it should tend to remove flickering, because pixels from distant objects should be the average color of (part of) textures instead of the color of one sampled pixel (that would change seemingly randomly as you move around). Actually, that's exactly why I enable mipmapping in retro mode, because I dislike all those busy pixels in the background.

The only artefacts mipmaps introduce that I can think of, and since you mention it's an effect "when you approach", is that textures look a bit different when they change of mipmap level (something that can be hidden by trilinear filtering in "normal mode"); But it doesn't look like "flickering" to me.

[yabay]

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[pango]

Mipmapping tends to smooth things out a bit in the distance
https://twitter.com/p_etchemaite/status ... 5588294657
It's considered a mild performance optimization, as it can reduce memory bandwidth usage by 20~30%.

Retro-rendering involves some post-processing, so there's an extra cost but it's now very small (both posterization and palettization). I've seen 300 fps on my now average hardware (GTX 960). It forces scene rendering in 320x200 or 640x400 pixels, so it usually increases the performance, if screen has a native resolution larger than that.

That's the first time somebody reported some link between retro rendering and falling thru the ground. Physics happen 25 times/s no matter the fps, and again the impact on performance is null or an improvement, so that's surprizing...

[yabay]

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[pango]

Yes, there's currently no protection against outrunnning terrain generation.
Okay, so retro rendering must use some extra resources in your setup. With the lack of dedicated GPU, maybe any graphic intensive program also immediately becomes a CPU intensive program? I don't know

If you're looking for ways to make retro rendering cheaper:

• Posterization is cheaper than Palettization (pure computation, no memory lookup);
• If you stay with Palettization, slightly increasing PalettizationLUTShift in the [Video] section of settings.ini should make it use less memory and cache, and in turn improve performance. Just increasing it from 1 to 2 will reduce LUT size from 8MB to 1MB, and the loss of quality seems barely noticeable; Starting with 3 I noticed some quality loss (tree colors started to suffer, for example)

[yabay]

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[pango]

Oh, so they're using mipmaps for downscaling textures, effectively. But that's not what mipmaps are used for, in general. Daggerfall Unity currently has nothing like that.

And if you're not using a textures pack mod, only classic textures, don't even think about downscaling those, they're very low resolution already (1996's textures designed for i486 with 8MB RAM, after all).