[OpenMaw]

Particularly in older games. Oh sure in modern games it has a place, but goddamn I will never understand why texture filtering ever took off. Looking at Half-Life, or the Quake games, or Doom or Duke with texture filtering turned on it just makes everything look like a blurry, barfy, mess. In Half-Life it has the nasty side effect of blurring things like the transparent railins and creating texture panning issues. It's hideous! Why was this ever a thing?

[PikaCommando]

Yes, I agree! If I had to guess, I'd say it took off because most people are more tolerant of blurriness over pixelation for some reason. Probably because it looks "smoother".

[TerminX]

Agreed.

[Zaxx]

So basically "early examples of texture filtering are dogshit because of the low resolution assets". Okay.

[Gambini]

I believe by the time texture filtering entered the gaming scene, developers were aiming for "high resolution" and filtering pixels seemed like a cheap way of faking it. I remember being amazed by all the new features my 3dfx voodoo came with, but at the same time i missed the image sharpness of sofware based engines. Luckily now lot of people worship pixels!

[MusicallyInspired]

Texture filtering on low resolution textures in high resolution game rendering looks bad. But back then max resolutions started at 640x480 to 800x600. MAYBE 1024x768 if you had a top of the line card. I personally think texture filtering in 640x480 did wonders for cleaning up the garbled pixeled mess of the game world rather than unfiltered in the same resolution. I hated playing in software mode for that reason. I was overjoyed when I got my first 3Dfx card. Especially with its dithered shading look. But yes, in high resolutions it doesn't look great. We're beyond it and need better textures.

[Zaxx]

@MusicallyInspired: Exactly, thanks for pointing these things out. In those low resolutions 3D games easily looked better with texture filtering, it did wonders to smooth out the image (also: stuff like anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering wasn't really a thing for a while so really apart from the filtered textures the games still looked "messy enough"). Developers also found certain solutions to ease up on the blurriness pretty quickly, features like detail textures appeared around 2000 to make stuff seem more detailed from up close.

I would never turn on texture filtering for a 2.5D sprite-based game but it's pretty obvious that those titles were never designed with the feature in mind (and personally I view things like Blood's never finished 3Dfx implementation as desperate attempts to "keep up with the times" instead of them being artistic decisions). Half-Life however is kind of a mixed bag: nowadays I turn texture filtering off when I play HL1 because I prefer the overall sharper looking textures but basically everything transparent looks worse because of those visible individual pixels. Explosions? Horrible without filtering.

Half-Life is also a pretty bad example because the OpenGL renderer resizes certain textures and with that it makes the game blurrier by default even when you turn filtering off. Look at this and tell me with a straight face that the texture filtering is at fault here:

Of course you can fix this nowadays by inputting a simple console command but back in the day none of the GPUs on the market could handle that and those shitty looking textures were the ones the game filtered for ya.

Edit: Just putting this here so that I can share my joy. I remembered that Valve released some updates for the Half-Life games last year, I looked at the notes and it turns out they FINALLY fixed the rexture resize issue so if you play the game nowadays you no longer have to worry about it:
https://steamcommuni...880891220596672

Quote

Fixed unnecessary texture rescaling with NPOT textures

[Fauch]

Most modern retro shooters seem to use pixelated rather than blurry textures, so unless they are all copying the same game (not unlikely at all), that may also mean player prefer the pixelated look. or at least those who play that kind of games.

[DisgustedGrunt]

Texture filtering in 2.5D fps is the "i need to get glasses" experience. no thanks

[Danukem]

Exactly -- I can get instant texture filtering just by taking my glasses off. Don't see the point.

[High Treason]

Ah. We call it 'Vaseline mode' and it sucks, it always did and it always well - don't tell the 3DFX brigade that though, they can get quite rabid.

As someone who had an N64 in the 90s I've had enough texture filtering for a lifetime, but it's worse there because the N64's video output itself is always blurry so you get this extra layer on top and washed out colors, worse if you were stuck with the RF box as was the de-facto out of box experience at that time. The N64 is otherwise one of the few cases where it makes sense though, because the average texture size had to be tiny and this arguably compensates somewhat. Strangely unusually small textures versus its contemporaries is a feature it seems to share with certain video cards I may have mentioned.
I've never gotten GLQuake to work, but given how ugly the game is already I dread to think what it looks like with any form of filtering over it.

Terminal Velocity is kinda funny with filtering on though, that mushy wobbly look, also those wonky lasers. Ugly.
https://youtu.be/0TtC7vZJWm4

[MusicallyInspired]

For 2.5D sprite-based games, yeah no texture filtering please. But give me bilinear filtering on 640x480 true 3D graphics any day.

[Jimmy]

Texture filtering is dog shit.

[Zaxx]

Ready for some torture?



Look if you dare:
https://i.imgur.com/OZPTywE.png

[HulkNukem]

I'll dogpile on the texture filtering hate.

Let me cut my finger on the 90 degree square pixels

[NightFright]

When texture size is below a certain limit, no filtering should be applied at all. Anyway, I am turning it off in Doom, Duke3D and Quake. Always.

[ReaperAA]

For sprite based games, I prefer Texture Filtering OFF because in such games, the resolution of sprites and textures is too low that they look like a blurry mess with it ON. This includes Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Duke3D, Ion Fury, Blood, Shadow Warrior etc etc.

Even for early polygonal games like Descent and Quake 1, I prefer Texture Filter OFF.

For post 1998 games, I prefer Texture Filtering ON. Unreal 1 is oldest game where I vastly prefer the filtering. Unreal 1's textures (while low res for today) were really high res for the time and it also was the first game to introduce Detail Textures (where detail is added to the textures up close). UT99 and Quake 3 also look vastly better with the texture filtering for the same reasons. In Half Life's case, if the fix for the "round down of non-power-of-2 textures" didn't exist, I probably would have preferred Texture Filtering OFF. But since this is easy to fix and is a non-issue now, so I prefer the filtering.

Quake 2 is the oddball. I am torn whether Texture Filtering should be ON or OFF. On one hand, I prefer the pixels as they make environments look more gritty. But on the other hand, some of the weapons look like ass (with huge pixels) without filtering.

[MusicallyInspired]

Pretty much agree with Reaper.

Quake 2 is interesting because it has more moody lighting in 3D accelerated mode and I do generally think the textures look better with filtering, but software mode has that cool visual warping effect underwater that OpenGL doesn't have. At least I don't think it does.

Love the N64 graphics, hate PSX and Saturn.

[ReaperAA]

MusicallyInspired, on 07 February 2020 - 02:27 AM, said:

Love the N64 graphics, hate PSX and Saturn.

This reminded me of mentioning my slightly controversial opinion. I even prefer Texture Filtering OFF for Doom 64. I had never played D64 on N64 and only played it recently via Doom64 EX and Doom 64: Retribution mod. When I saw the original game on N64 (after playing it via EX with filtering OFF), I didn't like the filtered visuals at all (heresy I know).

[Outtagum]

Zaxx, on 06 February 2020 - 08:56 PM, said:

Ready for some torture?
https://i.imgur.com/khUxaPZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/Hsq0FcW.png

Look if you dare:
https://i.imgur.com/OZPTywE.png

[Zaxx]

Honestly I think the pics are a bit misleading: Ion Fury instantly starts to look terrible when you turn palette emulation off, texture filtering is kind of just an extra piece of shite.

[AlektorophobiA]

Yes and no, for low-res assets it does suck, anything high res otherwise needs texture filtering to look good, unfiltered hi-res textures make games/mods that do it look cheap as fuck.

[Player Lin]

Don't like Texture Filtering at all(forgot say, for low res textures, sorry), no, it's not only piece of dogshit, it's fucking fucked dogshit.

But, at least give me a DAMN option to disable that then I'm fine.

[OpenMaw]

Right. When you have high res textures it's a different story. A little filtering softens things enough and that can add some benefit. When you're dealing with Quake level, 64x64/128x128 resolution textures and you slap that blur on there you basically cover up all the artistry that went into the textures in the first place.

[Striker]

Texture filtering is good if you want to make gradients, otherwise, if you're running textures lower res than 256x256, filtering should be disabled, or at the very least nearest neighbour with trilinear mipmapping (16x anisotropic) to stop "pixel shimmering" on distant objects.

[Jim]

So Pretty much all projects in the future that uses a custom version of eduke32 will not have custom filtering? I still feel the choice should be given to the player.

[necroslut]

I think it looks nice in UT'99, but that's largely because the heavy use of detail textures to "re-sharpen" the textures. In anything older it tends to look terrible, though I think the N64 is generally an exception. Especially in high resolutions – then the blurred textures make the low-poly geometry looks even worse.

[TerminX]

Jim, on 08 February 2020 - 08:07 PM, said:

So Pretty much all projects in the future that uses a custom version of eduke32 will not have custom filtering? I still feel the choice should be given to the player.

We plan on adding it back in at some point, but it will require a custom shader to implement it.

[Phredreeke]

Maybe I should just throw together a quick texture upscale pack for all the pixelhaters out there... lol

[NightFright]

I remember back in the days when Hexen 2 came out, it was praised for its native 3D accelerator support, but in my gaming magazine they recommended to play with the software renderer. The game looked darker and textures crispier, improving atmosphere considerably. Jedi Knight which was released about the same time also is a blurry mess with texture filtering.