Image Quality

These are full-sized comparisons of the image quality of each chipset in FS98.  All scenes are as identical as we can make them, under the same visual settings. Warning: these images are about 1 MB each! If this is too big, you can stop this page and download the images as the image.zip file (currently 2.4 MB).

2D (Pentium MMX 200 MHz):

Voodoo2 (Creative Labs 3D Blaster 12 MB, Pentium MMX 200 MHz):

PowerVR/PCX2 (Matrox m3D, on a P166 64MB, by Hans-Guenther Schnell)

Permedia2 (Leadtek 8MB L2300 Permedia2 on 4.10.01.2105.349 WHQL drivers, CPU is P2 266MHz non AGP under Win95 OSR2 and DX5.2, sent in by Tim Parr).  As you can see this card makes different decisions regarding texture handling.  Notice that the distant parts of the city have considerably more detail than your Voodoo2 image: the Voodoo2 is apparently significantly down sampling the far textures to save memory.  I find this extremely annoying... I paid for textures (in say the San Diego add on) and I want to see them, not fuzzy pixelated down sampled versions.  On the other hand, notice that the Voodoo2 board does not down sample the NEAR city texture while my Permedia2 card almost ALWAYS down samples ALL textures by at least 2X.  Even MORE annoying. I would be very interested in seeing what an AGP card would do: supposedly it would have access to essentially infinite texture memory and wouldn't have to so seriously down sample the textures.  Probably too much to hope for isn't it?  The most dramatic way to show this texture handling effect is to show a wide range map in windowed mode and to click inside the FS window and outside it to rapidly switch between 3D mode (which you will see drastically down samples the textures) to 2D mode (which shows textures at full resolution).  And yes, it IS weird that FS uses 3D to show the 2D map mode :)

Rush: (P200MMX 64MB, Hercules Stingray 128/3D 6 MB)

Riva128 (Diamond Viper V330, Pentium 200MMX, from Ron Harmon)

V2200 (4 MB Hercules Thriller 3D (PCI) on a P133, from Udo Corban)

For comparison, here is the same image at 800x600.  Note the sharpness of the textures now.

G200 Submitted by Mard Saric on a PII.  

i740 Submitted by Terry Turner on a PII/300.  

nVidia Riva TNT, P225MMX.