Graphics

From the first menu, select SETUP, then SYSTEM. The first option on the left is GRAPHICS. You'll see:

These are the default settings. To speed things up, you can change some of them.

The first one is GRAPHICS SETTINGS. This adjusts a lot of the other options and is used to make general changes. You don't have to touch this one. It will change to CUSTOM when you change any of the other settings.

The next two specify the OpenGL driver you are using and whether to use extended capabilities of the library. Don't touch these unless otherwise instructed by Tech Support. If you have a Voodoo card and the main driver doesn't work, you can use the Voodoo driver instead, but it isn't guaranteed to work as well (or look as good). The extensions should stay on, since it lets QIII use the hardware better.

This specifies how big you screen is. Smaller = faster. Don't go to 320x240 or 400x300 unless you absolutely have to. 512x384 is OK and is supported at speed by most OpenGL drivers. You'll have a smaller screen, but it doesn't make that much of a difference.

This specifies how many colors the output is rendered with. 32-BIT looks better, but 16-BIT is faster.

Note: on some cards, the game speed is governed by fill-rate or the number of pixels that can be colored at a time and changing to 16-BIT doesn't affect speed very much. Make sure to test in both modes and see whether the trade-off is worth it.

QIII can render into a window on your desktop if you want. Generally, this will be MUCH slower since the system can't shut off as many services as in full-screen mode. Leave it on.

This controls how QIII lights the maps. A game like QIII builds your view out of polygons, then decides how they will be filled in. In general, there are a few passes over each polygon to render it to its final state. Less passes = more speed. LIGHTMAP lighting entails another pass for each polygon since, in addition to the basic texture it applies to a polygon, it also applies a lightmap texture. QIII can also apply other texture to do environment mapping (where you see reflections) and other effects. VERTEX lighting is a much brighter view (no shadowy corners), which generally doesn't look as good, but is much faster because it only uses one pass per polygon (at least, it does in the final demo and game...there's a bug in the DemoTest, but it is still faster).

This controls the level of detail in the map and in the models (characters). They look great on HIGH, but make the game slower. Go with LOW (I'll show more options to adjust this later).

This controls the detail of the map and characters. If it's all the way up, everything is really sharp and has a LOT of detail. You don't need this detail to play the game, though. So, turn it all the way down, or down as far as you can stand (it gets kind of blurry the farther down you go).

Again, change original textures to 16-BIT for a speed increase. These textures take less memory, but don't look as nice (ranges of color aren't as good).

Note: on some cards, the game speed is governed by fill-rate or the number of pixels that can be colored at a time and changing to 16-BIT doesn't affect speed very much. Make sure to test in both modes and see whether the trade-off is worth it.

This controls the degree of smoothing to do on a texture after it has been applied to a model. Some shearing occurs within the texture and detail can appear jagged and artificial if it's not smoothed. BILINEAR filtering compare adjacent pixels and uses a color in-between to make it look smoother. TRILINEAR uses 4 adjacent pixels (I think) and smooths more. The tradeoff here isn't immediately obvious. Some people don't like the overfiltered look. Most cards do this all in hardware, so there is no speed loss for extra filtering. Leave it at BILINEAR to guarantee fastest operation.