Christian Knudsen Posted March 22, 2001 Share Posted March 22, 2001 Hello there! I am fast becoming a slave to Combat Mission, so kudos to Battlefront and to all those putting out the great mods and scenarios that are taking up so very much of my time. Well Done! To business. I run a Matrox Millennium G200 8MB 3d card on a Celeron 400. Sadly, there are major issues with transparency - I cannot use the transparent occupied buildings, nor the fancy smoke or fog settings. A major disappointment. I am using DirectX 8, and Matrox's latest drivers. Can someone please tell me if I need to buy a new 3d card, or if there is some arcane way to get around this problem. I am going to have a hard time explaining to my wife that I need to spend a couple of hundred bucks to get make improvements in one game. You can see my predicament. Thanks, and keep up the good work, Christian Knudsen 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted March 22, 2001 Share Posted March 22, 2001 It looks like the G200 has transparency issues. Either Matrox hasn't updated the driver or there is some sort of hardware incapability in regards to transparencies. You could probably buy an NVidia-based TNT2 16/32Mb card (skip the M64 and Vanta TNT2 versions) for less than US$100. An older thread about this problem with the G200s and Charles' answer at the end: http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum8/HTML/000126.html 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Knudsen Posted March 22, 2001 Author Share Posted March 22, 2001 Thanks Schrullenhaft, I had hoped this would not be the case... I am using all of the latest drivers and such, so I decided to try the Matrox support forum to see what they said. Unbelievably they seem to have not heard about Combat Mission at all, and seemed sort of interested in the problem. The tech guy's initial reaction was that it might be an issue with the G200 only having the 8MB VRAM, but I hope not. Thanks, Christian ------------------ Cede Nullis - Yield to None 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted March 23, 2001 Share Posted March 23, 2001 I wouldn't think that the 8Mb would be the issue here for the transparency capability (but that may depend on Matrox's programming for DirectX). Some of the G200s support RAM upgrades (SDRAM/SGRAM ?) of an additional 8Mb. You would have to inspect your card to see if it could be upgraded. I took a look at their forums and it seems as if Matrox is having a lot of OpenGL problems (and low DirectX performance). Matrox really hasn't been a "game" oriented company. Their video cards typically make very good 2D display devices, but the 3D performance is a bit lacking compared to the higher end offerings of other companies. The G200 is among the first Matrox cards with actual 3D capability (from what I could gather in the forums). It's life span (for support and updates) is probably near an end however and there may be no solution for the problem that you're seeing in CM. It looks as if the G200 has been able to benefit a bit from some of the programming done on the G400 series (a similar hardware foundation). But the G400s received a fix for this issue awhile back while the G200s haven't. Thus it would seem that the G200 is incapable of addressing transparencies on a hardware level. However the possibility remains that maybe in "downgrading" the drivers from the G400 family to the G200 chipset something was inadvertently dropped. I'm completely speculating on Matrox's internal development here so most of what I've said here may not be correct. If I'm correct it may be possible that a future driver update could address this particular issue, but considering the age of the product it may not see this update. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Knudsen Posted March 23, 2001 Author Share Posted March 23, 2001 Yeah, my card does actually support the 8MB upgrade, but why spend the money to upgrade a card that - as you point out - is nearing the end of its service life. I have a very faint hope that Matrox will jimmy up a solution, but if that doesn't happen I guess I'll have to pony up. It's a shame really, as up until now I've been highly impressed both with Matrox and the G200 card, which with a little shoehorning has seen me thru everything up to this point. It is unfortunate that Matrox has turned away from the gaming market, as I would seriously consider buying another of their products if that were not the case. Still though, there is a nice looking Geforce 2 32MB card at a nearby store for only ~$170.00 Cdn... Thanks again Christian ------------------ Cede Nullis - Yield to None 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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