Jump to content

no Fog display Win7


Recommended Posts

JoMc67, you have to be aware that when you state your setup it could be hiding all sorts of things. For example, are you talking a vanilla setup, or a very modified one? From what I have to guess at, you have an older machine on which you've upgraded to Win7? If so, you could be one of the few who had a Dell Vista Business setup (which comes with the in-built capacity and software options to run either Vista or XP, depending on the user's, or the seller's, setup wishes), and probably running DirectX9c. And some other Vista-ATI setups could also emulate fog (probably also running DirectX9c). And so you might have been running Vista and then upgraded to Win7? Now, although new Win7 machines will ship with DirectX10 or 11 (and new graphics cards of course), from what I understand, Win7 can run in a basic mode on DirectX9c so long as your old graphics card can support pixel shader 2 and has WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) architecture. Or maybe you now have DirectX10 but still have the 9c elements also (but I start getting lost at that point).

And furthermore, not sure if it's relevant, but DELL computers can be a bit unusual in other ways (virtual drivers etc) compared to other machines of the same period.

And it sounds like your graphics card is not the original on-board, but a PCIe add-on? I've read that in PCIe setups if you add a graphics card then the original in-built graphics can still handle some of the basic functions, so your machine could be doing something odd there to provide all the game's functions.

I can at least explain why your fog looks odd! A few years ago, ATI and NVIDIA cards stopped providing 16bit dithering. Most older games don't play in 32bit colour (CM1 is either 16bit or 24bit). So 32bit graphics cards would "dither" (or smoothe-out) 8, 16 and 24bit colours. But newer cards/drivers don't bother anymore and so you see the banding. As a long-shot, you could dig into the Monitor's and/or the card's own colour-display options just in case there's some 16bit options or fog table options there, but I doubt that'd work. If you've updated your graphics driver, you could try re-installing your original ATI graphics driver, but again, I doubt it'd work and it may cause other problems.

Hope some parts of my ramblings are relevant to your case. Just be glad you still got fog! But be aware that if you buy a newer machine, you almost certainly won't get fog. And underneath the headline, this thread (I assumed) is primarilly about newer machines when they talk about "Win7".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh, when I said "virtual drivers" I meant "virtual drives", I think - been a while since I set up my brother's Dell.

Oh, and I when I said try installing your original ATI graphics driver, I meant the original one published for your graphics card - which may be older than the original one that came with your machine when you bought it. Not that it's likely but it might, just as a long-shot, bring back dithering if your card had dithering but a later universal graphics driver update disabled it (please note I've not tried this myself, I'm just musing on things I might try). And, as stated in my previous message, doing so might cause other compatibility problems so I wouldn't do it unless you were desperate.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...