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BF.C; status on OpenGL support from Nvidia?


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Tell me about it. This lack of OpenGL support by nvidia has tipped me into the ATI camp for my current build. It's a free market: Nvidia's drivers broke the rendering; ATI's work. Hence, my money follows the producer which meets my needs. (Currently using a Q6600 CPU and an 8800GTX GPU; Building a Phenom II, HD5000.)

I hope Nvidia starts supporting existing users better, rather than trying to get a fast buck with new razzle-dazzle fermi marketspeak.

Ken

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I had an ATI card for years, then when i got my new card i got an ATI, i had that for a day and after that all that it would do was turn its fan up to full (The PC wouldn't even finish booting up) so i traded it in for an NVIDIA. When i get my next build this will tempt me to go back to ATI but then again when the next round of drivers comes around NVIDIA might well have fixed this and ATI break it again. It seems we are basically at the mercy of the driver builders here

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  • 3 weeks later...

It feels good knowing I'm not the only one with this problem.

I first had this problem when I replaced my older 8600GT with a GTS250. I was worried because I thought that the card was defective. Now I realize that after installing it I also installed the latest drivers.

The problem is that I can't use older drivers, since the newer ones give me a big performance boost with everything. I'll try pre-190 drivers, but I feel I'll be moving back to my current drivers after 10 minutes.

At least the bug isn't really serious, and my card is fine.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I tried the new 257.21 drivers and the flashing problem is still here.

I also modified the game profile with nhancer, an utility that is very useful to tweak games (you can change nvidia profiles : sli, antialiasing etc...) but it didn't fix the problem.

I tried the new drivers with il2 1946, also an opengl game, and there was no flashing problem at night.

So i decided to make a copy of il2 profile to use it with cmsf without success.

It seems nvidia did not change anything about that bug and i'm afraid that we will have to revert to old drivers or to live with this.

I noticed that when you shoot with a machine gun for exemple, you see the flash when you're behind it but not when you're in front and the shooter is behind you.

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I'm starting to get pissed at Nvidia. I've wanted to get the latest drivers now for quite some time but since I play CMSF a lot, I don't due to this problem. Some of you guys said you've opened up a "ticket" with Nvidia. Where does one do this? I'd like to voice my displeasure with them as well.

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Tried the new NVIDIA drivers (257.21) and we are back to the disappearing soldiers/terrain when shadows are turned on. Not a deal breaker, but annoying. Seem to remember this was an issue with the drivers and OpenGL support, but maybe my memory fails me, and there was some tweak to solve it in the NVIDIA control panel.

Shame, cos I seemed to have got a little (but noticable) performance improvement with the new driver. On the other hand, perhaps that's cos no shadows are rendered...!!

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I'll ask and see if either Charles or Philip can/wants to be involved with submitting some of the code to the OpenGL Forum. One major problem though is the amount of code that may need to be submitted in order to get useful feedback on the issue. The lighting code may be complex enough that it would be hard to submit enough of the requisite code examples to get some sort of diagnostic from anyone with enough knowledge to look through it.

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I don't want to go THAT far. I've only run a couple of night QB's as tests, and the muzzle flashing certainly did not light up every building. As soon as I'd done some firing, I exited. So, I wouldn't even call it a test; in my run through, I did not see the flashing with which we are all so familiar.

Try the new drivers. If they don't help, roll 'em back.

Ken

Edited for this: I run anywhere from 2 to 5 PC's at home at a time, depending on upgrade paths and needs. (Okay, not "needs" how about "compulsions"?) After Nvidia broke their implementation of OpenGL for THIS game, I waited for a fix. With none forthcoming, I voted with my wallet. ATI/AMD got my money. I am very satisfied with the HD6870. My 8800GTX will need to be replaced soon. The 3rd machine I have will also need a video card. I will continue to vote with my wallet.

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The ATI/AMD drivers never suffered from this particular problem of 'flashing' that the Nvidia drivers do (to my knowledge). That's why it appears to us as if there is something wrong with Nvidia's drivers and not our code.

The pathways taken in drivers to render OpenGL commands to the screen can be quite different between the video chip developers. In fact they can often be quite different between certain driver iterations from the same company. The 190 series from Nvidia started supporting OpenGL 3.1 (and higher). It possible that with the new OpenGL support that certain things may have been changed significantly within the driver's pathways that are causing us problems. I'm not very familiar with OpenGL's deprecations that may have happened with the 3.x spec, but I wouldn't have thought that there is anything we're specifically doing that is relying on a deprecated OpenGL extension.

I've submitted a request for Charles or Phillip to look into the thread on the OpenGL forum and see if it would be useful for them. However right now they're busy and I'm not sure how useful the feedback may be on that forum. While some Nvidia engineers browse the forum on occasion, I'm not sure how likely we are to get a reply from Nvidia engineers or anyone else who may be able to interpret the code and see the issue and point us in a useful direction. Charles or Phillip may participate in the forum discussion that was started, but I don't know when or if they will have the time or inclination to do so.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I don't know who did what, but I really want to say, post 1.31, thanks for fixing this how ever it happened.

(an aside to ken, I too will be replacing an 8800gtx soon and I'm seriously considering doing so with 2 HD6870's in crossfire. Has your HD6870 remained issue free since your earlier post?)

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Yes, the 6870 has been issue free. However, as you state, the 1.31 patch should fix the nvidia bug. Kudos to BF.C.

I'm still running the 8800gtx (it will probably be replaced and migrate to another machine), but have not tested it to ensure the patch fixed the lighting issue. (I have no reason to think it isn't fixed.) It now comes back to picking a video card based on factors OTHER than night battles in CM.

Crossfire 6870's? Sounds like fun.

Regards,

Ken

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