Alright, so now I have an Nvidia 7800 GT, a Sempron 3000+, and 1 GB of RAM. When I fired up LFS after the upgrade, I saw that the image quality had become worse!

The main problem is that as the road texture goes off into the distance, it becomes blurry very fast. I thought it might be my Anisotropic Flitering settings, but I cranked it all the way up to 16x with no difference.

All my LFS settings are the same as when the image was better, no half texture sizes, full LOD and all the goodies. I'm running 1280 x 960 (32 bit) in-game, and my video card settings seem to be fine. Lastly, LFS is the only game that this happened to, so I'm sure it's a localized issue, maybe it has a problem with this card or something.

Anyway, does anyone have anything I can try to try to solve this annoying texture issue?

MIP Bias in LFS?

Quote from tristancliffe :

MIP Bias in LFS?

Unfortunately, that was not the problem. In fact, the slider did nothing as far as visual changes go.

I attached a picture I took just to illustrate what I am talking about. Notice how low-res the road looks compared to the rest of the game as the depth increases. Nasty!

Mip bias setting to the far left should fix that. If it does nothing then I can only assume that it's a driver problem.

I don't have an Nvidia and therefore I dont know if there's any quality settings in the driver options panel that could cause it.

which graphics card did you have before the upgrade ?

Yeah, mip bias in the options->graphics menu is what causes that. All the way to the right will make everything really blurry like that. All the way to the left will make everything really sharp.

Mip Bias AFAIK Mip bias doesn't affect distant textures only. Close textures in the screenshoot are clear. Looks more like Mip mapping forced by the vga driver.

In your Nforce driver. Try set 'Negative LOD bias' to 'Clamp' , this way LFS can't change the Mip bias anymore (the mip bias slider in LFS has no affect). Giving you best Mip bias always. And make sure you don't have 'force mipmaps' enabled.

AFAIK the driver settings below are for best image quality.

You should get the best possible grafik quality with a 7800gtx. I've just tested a x1800xt today and ATi still looks worse then Nvidia (have to admit that i don't had the time to go through all Ati options). AAx6(Ati) vs AAx8s(Nvidia) is realy a good difference.

Turn your AF/AA up to maximum, and make sure you have allk the textures and draw distances in LFS set to maximum.

Quote from M.Mos :

In your Nforce driver. Try set 'Negative LOD bias' to 'Clamp' , this way LFS can't change the Mip bias anymore (the mip bias slider in LFS has no affect). Giving you best Mip bias always.

Thank you guys for your help! The above quote turned out to be the problem, although the weird thing is it was REVERSE!

Apparently, LFS does not work well with the Clamp settings, because it seems to default to the worst MIP level rather than the best. I unclamped (or "allowed") Negative MIP bias, and the slider now functions correctly in LFS. The most negative setting, of course, giving me the best image.

Thanks again!

What do you expect to happen when you clamp negative mipmaps except non-negative mipmap levels?
LFS cant just override the driver settings :P

Quote from ORION :

What do you expect to happen when you clamp negative mipmaps except non-negative mipmap levels?
LFS cant just override the driver settings :P

Well, according to Nvidia's explanation, this clamp is supposed to lock the program's MIP settings, but also give me the best quality, which it didn't. I'M SUING!!

this kind of texture blurring is usually due to lack of anisotropic filtering..... maybe you were using it before and didn't even noticed.


I recommend strongly to use anisotropic filtering, since your pc will unlikely be affected on performance, but you will get a nice boost in image quality

Quote from TaiFong :

Well, according to Nvidia's explanation, this clamp is supposed to lock the program's MIP settings, but also give me the best quality, which it didn't.

The problem with roads is that the texture is viewed lying down. So each pixel in the texture map is wide but not high, when it is drawn on the screen.

When NVidia said that clamp will give you the best quality, they are talking about a texture that's viewed flat, facing the screen so each pixel in the texture map is square. They forgot that in any actual application, textures are likely to be viewed lying down as well as facing you.

The negative mip bias is required in LFS, to avoid the excessive use of mip maps, that video cards will do by default, if the texture is lying down.

Hope that made sense, it's hard to explain in a few words.

Quote from Scawen :

The problem with roads is that the texture is viewed lying down. So each pixel in the texture map is wide but not high, when it is drawn on the screen.

When NVidia said that clamp will give you the best quality, they are talking about a texture that's viewed flat, facing the screen so each pixel in the texture map is square. They forgot that in any actual application, textures are likely to be viewed lying down as well as facing you.

The negative mip bias is required in LFS, to avoid the excessive use of mip maps, that video cards will do by default, if the texture is lying down.

Hope that made sense, it's hard to explain in a few words.

Thanks for your reply! I must say it's very cool to have a developer respond to you.

Quote from Mogar :

this kind of texture blurring is usually due to lack of anisotropic filtering..... maybe you were using it before and didn't even noticed.


I recommend strongly to use anisotropic filtering, since your pc will unlikely be affected on performance, but you will get a nice boost in image quality

You must read again, I was using anisotropic filtering, and I always like to keep it at about 4x. However, the problem was the MIP mapping, but all is solved now!