[Guide] Increase texture quality

[parrworg]

I wanted to increase the texture quality in WoW so I did some research on the matter and found out that a negative LOD Bias would grant the desired effect. You can adjust it with a program like RiveTuner (nVidia cards) or ATI Tray Tools (ATI cards), which will be the ones used in this short tutorial. By the way, this works for other games too!

NVIDIA USERS
First of all, go download RivaTuner: RivaTuner v2.09 download from Guru3D.com
Extract the package somewhere and install the program. Once you run it the first time, it will take a while to build up some registry databases. After it has finished building the databases, the main window will appear.


Click the button marked with the red circle:


Select "DirectDraw and Direct3D Settings" from the menu that appears.



ATI USERS (thanks to Valkyries for this method)
Download and install ATI Tray Tools: ATI Tray Tools
After that's done, run the program and right click the tray icon. A menu will appear.


Select "3D" and after that "Settings" as shown in the image.


Click the "Additional" tab and you'll find the LOD adjustment.

There you have it, adjust the LOD bias as you see fit. The smaller the value is, the sharper the textures are ingame. I would suggest you use a value near -1, since after that some of the textures (mainly ground textures like grass and water) get sharpened a bit too much and it's not really nice to watch when you are moving.

Here's a preview of the effect, although I must say it's a lot more noticeable ingame. The smaller mipmaps don't get displayed at as short distances as before resulting in overall raise in texture quality. I personally find this very useful since some of my own item reskins used to blur out way too much when the camera was dragged further, especially the parts with transparency. I knew it was a problem with mipmaps, and this tweak solved it. I hope you find this useful as well!

[strobel]

Sick +Rep

[Valkyries]

I've always been looking for something to increase the WoW graphic/texture quality. I might give this a go, thanks! +rep

[Classicclean]

I cant customize my driver settings...im using an ATI Radeon HD 3870...can anyone help me ?

[Valkyries]

Same, I dont get the customize button on my drivers. Using an x1950 pro with Catalyst 7.1 drivers.

EDIT:

Darn

[thefrozenmct]

Awesome, made my game look so much better. Thanks.

[spikmun999]

wow nice, im definatley gonna try this +rep

[Classicclean]

Ah, i see. The Catalyst Control Center just got an own mimap center..u can adjust the quality there

and no, it works with ATI Cards... You can turn off the automatic Catalyst shit while configurate things with RivaTuner

[Valkyries]

Ah I have my Catalyst control center disabled, i just have the driver enabled lol.

[Classicclean]

Ah I have my Catalyst control center disabled, i just have the driver enabled lol.

Where can you enable/disable it?

[Roffle]

Wow. Ty for finding this. +Rep

[meh]

so is this kinda like changing your settings from high to ultra high?

could you possibly post a before after shot of an image with trees/water in it?

[[Blaze]]

Awesome, +rep

[netarangi]

Nice find man. This is awesome. To bad I've got an ATI.

And yes, I have seen that you can change this in the Control Center. I'll try to do that now.

[parrworg]

Added some more previews. The -3 is there just for comparison, it shouldn't be used since the grass starts flickering a lot when you move. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering do reduce the flickering but they also eat a lot of performance. I suggest you try it yourself and see the results, since the screenshots don't show the effect in motion and they're still somewhat blurry compared to what it actually looks, I think.
Anyway if somebody who has done the same with an ATi card could post some directions on how to do it, I'd certainly add it into the tutorial and give you credit accordingly.

EDIT: I did some searching again and people say you can adjust the LOD bias for ATi cards with ATi Tray Tools ( ATI Tray Tools ). I obviously can't test it since I have an nVidia card, but you with ATi cards can. Install and run the program, then right click the tray icon and select 3D > Settings. On the Additional tab, there should be an option called Texture LOD Adjustment, which is the one to modify. I hope it works.