Adam Seijuro on 16/12/2005 at 03:19

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I've got a bit of an old card, and the performance in Thief 3 ain't so grand, and I can't really afford an upgrade just yet. It's a Radeon 9200SE, 64mb. :erg:

I know bumpmapping can put quite a strain on things - anybody know how to turn it off? Or perhaps if there are other things anybody can suggest. My options are already at their lowest pretty much.

Thanks.

Skynet on 16/12/2005 at 06:08

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If I recall correctly, Thief 3 uses normal mapping not bumpmapping with the textures.

Simply deleting normal maps from textures should do the trick, in theory. Also, the visual appearance should increase, because normal maps makes the textures very blocky in close ranges.

Ziemanskye on 16/12/2005 at 10:01

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Deleting the normal maps from the textures'd be a nice trick, given you can't really get to them without John P's texture pack (which as higher resolution textures, would probably lower performance anyway).

Proprietary *.ibt format rears it's ugly head once again.:nono:

STiFU on 16/12/2005 at 13:03

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that gfx card is really bad... I had that one too, only with 128 mb. I've switched to an radeon 8500 and everything was fine. Really!! Perhaps you could disable dynamic lights in the default.ini in the [WinDrv.WindowsClient]-section which would save a lot of performance actually, but i dont know if that would work, because there are torchguards and so on. Or perhaps you could disable tweak the settings in the [D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]-section. Disabling high-detail-actors could save some fps, too. But i cant check any of these right now, because i am not at home. Basically you could set everything to false besides UseMipmapping, UseGammaCorrection and UsePrecache. It would rather hit than save performance disabling these(or of course look very dark).

BTW What CPU do you have?

Komag on 16/12/2005 at 15:29

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He just needs a new video card. The Radeon 9200SE is probably the crappiest card possible that will still run Thief 3. Even the lowly GeForce 5200 will run better.

You should spend $50 on eBay and get an old Radeon 8500 or GeForce 4 ti4600/4400, those are cheapo older cards that will still run Thief 3 a lot better than Radeon 9200SE.

Many people will say "NO, you gotta get a GeForce 6600GT!!!", but that's over $150, maybe a good deal but way out of price range for the casual gamer who just want Thief to run better.