Can some please, in (very) simple terms, explain to me just what the texture MIP bias slider does, and where it should be set for best IQ?

Cheers

Dan,

2 by default

it blurs the textures (in a VERY basic sense) thats what you'll see, is the further the texture is away, the more it will blur

i however set mine at 1.5 not only for higher FPS, but its much more realistic imo (but.. its realistic for me because i dont use AA or AF)

the lower the more FPS, but you'll notice all the textures become much more blurry
going to high however will make all the textures sharpened and not very pretty

basically its a texture filter

I thought the MIP bias could only be set between -4 and 0 in LFS?

Quote from Bob Smith :

I thought the MIP bias could only be set between -4 and 0 in LFS?

You're correct.

Default is -2.

So which is the high setting? -4 or 0? Am I lead to believe that the 0 would be the higher quality setting? I think I saw Scawen wreite somewhere that on that screen all settings to the right would result in highest quality. But then I've also read that with mip bias the more negative you go the better it is.

IIRC lower is better. But I also remember NVIDIA having some problems with minus signed mip bias. Textures will start flickering or something like that.

Actually, I'm getting some flickering no matter what I set the mip bias to. Higher (0) is supposed to be better than lower (-4), though. But I really don't see much of a differnce, tbh. Shadows flicker a lot sometimes and so do signposts etc. Must be the gfx card, I guess (7600 GT).

Nope, it also happens on my ati x1900xt, so its not just an nvidia thing with the flickering of some shadows, and billboards.

Quote from nhancer.com :

The so called Level of Detail BIAS (LOD BIAS) controls which at which distance from the viewer the switch to lower resolution mip maps takes place (see here for more details about mip maps). The standard value of the LOD BIAS is 0.0 (zero). If you lower the LOD BIAS below zero, the mip map levels are moved farther away, resulting in seemingly sharper textures. But if the scene is moving, the textures start to shimmer.

Because of this, it's not a good idea to use a lower LOD BIAS to improve the sharpness of the image. It's better to use an Anisotropic Filter instead.

Some games force a negative LOD BIAS nevertheless. The result is heavy texture shimmering. To avoid this, the driver can clamp the LOD BIAS to zero. That means that the LOD BIAS can still be raised above zero, but it cannot set lower than zero.

Clamping the LOD BIAS to zero even when you select a negative valeu is a feature available with nvidia driver.

This page would be useful.

Bacause driving a car by the cockpit view let the point of view very near the track surface, a simmer would like to have sharper texture (the asphalt would be less "blurred" with negative values). But do not use too high negative values: this will cause texture shimmering.

As said in the article, I suggest to use anisotropic filtering to obtain a clearer image (with no more negative value of mip map bias than -1). Though this should have a certain impact on fps performance...

In my eyes the map bias just sharpens up the fences, trees, houses and all the little things that are placed outside of the track and gives the image a more sharper look then normal and also can give people the option of having more/less fps or better image quality.

Quote from rc10racer :

In my eyes the map bias just sharpens up the fences, trees, houses and all the little things that are placed outside of the track and gives the image a more sharper look then normal and also can give people the option of having more/less fps or better image quality.

Yeah, its those moire patterns you get with minus figures that I don't like, even with high AA and AF you still get them with the MIP BIAS set low (high )

Agreed. If the moire patterns bother you, use 0. If they don't, use whatever you like. However, I still recommend 0.