visuals

[cauzomb]

anyone tell me wtf is going on with my graphics drivers or rendering api? it looks like everything is stuck in 16bit mode, surface reflections are all crosshatched and lighting effects look like an old tv with scan line gaps.

I'm using ati radeon x800 and x850 pro videocards, dvi out to dell 19" ultrasharp.

Here's a screen cap showing the crappy looking texturing, driver settings are all high quality 32bit AA, force tripple z buffer, v-sync on. Basically everything is on high quality. if you zoom in a little you can see all the ugly cross-hatching. For some reason this was rendered at 640x480 even though my resolution is set to 1280x1024. I hope that it's not a driver optimization to prevent the card from having sucky performance and refusing to work in the modes that I set.

[cauzomb]

Here's a screen cap that's cropped zoomed into the explosion at the end of aquamark, this one is actually not looking too bad, it doesnt' have the crosshatching like in the other cap. the resolution is set to 1024x768x32bit 4x aa, Aquamark ignores my 3d control pannel settings, so I guess the other application also ignores the control pannel settings.

[F1]

You may have to experiment with different versions of the drivers for your card. I have to use 2 year-old drivers for my 9800XT card because of the motherboard it's used in.

[Gizmokid2005]

Try updating your Catalyst drivers again...I was having problems with my card a few weeks back when trying to play Cabela's Off Road Adventure 3...it would just freeze. I had new drivers back in February, but they updated them recently....

Maybe?

[cauzomb]

here is what I learned; one bench app uses 640x480x16bit mainly to reduce workloads on the GPU and CPU so that it can measure the memory bandwidth between agp, gpu/frame buffer etc, so it don't care too much about the graphics settings on the 3d control pannel since it doesn't have any higher settings to use, it did however show a slight reduction in alliasing when using custom settings in the control panel.. 3dmark responded well to the 3d control pannel, so it actually has the ability to run at higher settings but there's still this problem I am seeing with reflective surfaces in some applications that are actually set to 32bit textures, UT2004 does it, and so does 3dmark in some of the apps, it's supposed to be a lighting flare/glow/halo effect but pretty much throughout the whole effect it looks like it skips a couple vertical lines, then renders a couple, skipps a couple etc.. like an old television.

[cauzomb]

OK here is another screen caputer showing parallel lines in the textures, z-buffer? I remember having this issue some time ago with carmageddon 2

I'll get another capture showing the vertical lines in lighting/fog effects.

[WarhammerTX]

I cant really help you on that issue have you tried using different drivers such as omegas. I quit using the cats several years ago you might try them. If you do be sure and download the latest wdm drivers from his site as well. They are faster and no where near the memory hog like the cats.

[cauzomb]

the problem shows up while using 16 bit settings with either Omega or CAT drivers, so if I stick to 32 bit settings it's ok, just a little slower. The Omega's are keepers though although with reduced texture quality to keep the game play nice n smooth, it doens't look as good but ohwell, it's a budget card so whatever.