I guess you are using a voodoo 3000 (or similar)? If this is the case, you are out of luck for true colour textures. They will be converted to 16-bits per pixel by the fastest means possible.

Score 1 to the Permedia2 which renders 32-bit textures perfectly well on 15/16/32-bit targets.

You could try hinting to the driver to use "nicer" texture quality. However, I don't know if the voodoo3000 actually supports 32-bit texel data at all.

The later cards definately support 32-bit rendering, both for target surfaces and for texel data.

I think the voodoo3000 might have been the last of the 16-bit only chips.

The last generation voodoos to appear were both surprisingly powerful rasterizers, had decent render quality as well as some features not seen elsewhere at that time. They also supported multiple GPU rendering. However, nobody really wanted to spend a fortune on a 6-GPU card by then when it was clear that existing CPUs couldn't keep them fed fast enough. By this point NVidia and ATI were making T&L hardware that simply removed that existing bottleneck, giving much better overall performance.

@Cymric

WritePixelArray() is a function provided by CyberGraphX (IIRC, it isn't provided by the OS) that takes a pointer to some chunky pixel data (in a typical ARGB32, RGB24 or 256-colour "CLUT") format and writes it to a RastPort.

The hardware pixel format of the underlying BitMap is understandably device specific, so WritePixelArray() does conversion of the data where needed. Unfortunately (as I discovered a long time ago) this function (as well as BlitBitMap between different pixel formats) are rather slow.

What kas1e is trying to do instead is to take his 32-bit source data and use it as a warp3d texture map instead.

The reason for this is that 3D hardware can generally take colour conversion in its stride, mapping a 32-bit source texture to a polygon on any supported 15/16 bit screen, dithering it, processing transparancy, shading it (in a variety of ways), scaling it, filtering all with total hardware acceleration that leaves the equivalent OS/CyberGraphX/P96 routines (where they even exist) eating dust.

Unfortunately, it seems the voodoo3000 only wants to use 16-bit texel data, so kas1e's 32-bit source data is being pre-converted by the driver.

kas1e wrote:
to Karlos
i tryed use W3D_HINT, and played with all params, but here is no any good result. Maybe do you know some software for convert 32bit pict to 16bit for A4R4G4B4 ?

Photoshop is pretty good at that.

well, how i can exactly do it ? i trying to found any mode for 4bit per pixel, but only 8bite minimum is here. And if i saved any pict as tiff, png, etc, in any case i have 8bit per pixel.

You should all bow to the superiority of the Permedia2

/ducks