Cpt.Kloss Posted May 28, 2003 Share Posted May 28, 2003 I changed my video card from Ti4600 to Radeon 9800 PRO. This time (with newest ATI drivers) FSAA makes game unplayable (alt +tab does not help). I am tired with different gpu driver - juggling. And maybe some guy form battlefront instead of pityful explanations like "certain drivers have a problem with CMBB" would admit that "CMBB has a problem with certains drivers" and do somethnig about it! If FSAA, fog (ATI) etc. run fine on ANY other game maybe it is a time to admit own mistake. However, if it is truth that the game was build upon outdated verson of directx I fear nothing can be fixed now. But please Battlefront, learn from this lesson for your future releases and do not try to put the blame upon nvidia or ati drivers...because as I said : it is pityful approach... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted May 28, 2003 Share Posted May 28, 2003 Perhaps you would like to give us an explanation as to why some drivers work without problem in CM ? Your Ti4600 card could actually use the 30.82/30.87 drivers in CM without problem. Yeah, newer drivers have problems, that's the way it works in the computer world - the drivers don't support all of the graphic API calls properly - otherwise they could just release one set of drivers and never have to update them until another video card was released. An 'outdated version of DirectX' has nothing to do with the problems of CM and some video card drivers. There's nothing wrong with the DirectX calls that CM makes. It's a problem with video cards supporting them. Different games make use of different graphic API calls. There are some graphic API routines (or their sequencing, etc.) that CM uses that MANY other games don't use (and the reverse is true too). They're still part of DirectX and they're not 'discontinued' - they're just not as commonly used and so the video card manufacturers often miss them in their QA processes for their drivers. As for fog. Fog-tables were one of the more universal ways of representing fog when CM was originally being programmed. It tends to look better and may be a bit more appropriate in some ways for the way CM uses fog (different view levels and all) than vertex fog (which is all that ATI supports under DirectX). Vertex fog was nowhere as universally supported as fog-tables were when CM was originally programmed. Anyway... BTS/BFC are very aware of the problems that customers have with drivers, etc. The new engine will be programmed in OpenGL and hopefully there will be fewer problems (since OpenGL tends to change less frequently than DirectX). However there will probably always be a problem of one sort or another when it comes to video and audio drivers - it's an unescapable fact of personal computing. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cpt.Kloss Posted May 28, 2003 Author Share Posted May 28, 2003 --->Schrullenhaft: "The new engine will be programmed in OpenGL and hopefully there will be fewer problems". Great news. As for drivers and cards. I had Ti4600 and I had problemms. Now I have Radeon 9800 PRO and it gets worse. No other game I played had problemms with ANY driver either on nvidia (earlier) or ati (now). So maybe IT IS cmbb not a driver problemm? Maybe it is time to change coder in BTF? As a gamer I do not care about api and directx difficulties. What I care is that cm is my only installed game I have problemms with! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cpt.Kloss Posted May 28, 2003 Author Share Posted May 28, 2003 Maybe it is time to change BTF profile from "homemakers" (resourceful and genius in a way) to software company? Clients will be more and more demanding, and programing difficulties challenges even greater. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jiggles Posted May 28, 2003 Share Posted May 28, 2003 Can you run any other DX5 games successfully? I can't. There are some DX7 games which don't run under anything later than Windows 98. Whose fault is that then? You may or may not be aware that all shades of s**t are hitting the fan over recent driver releases by both NVIDIA and ATi. Essentially both companies are messing about with their driver codebase to improve their benchmark scores with the latest GPUs and the latest releases of DirectX. The fact that older games get screwed over in the meantime is irrelevant to these companies. CMBB works with driver version A, doesn't work with driver version B, works with driver version C, doesn't work with driver version D, ..., where's the variable there? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StellarRat Posted May 28, 2003 Share Posted May 28, 2003 Yeah, but I have some games that work with every driver level (at least all the ones I've tried), so I think there is definitely something wrong on the CMBB side. Maybe the other companies are coding work arounds to make sure that their games work no matter what. IL-2 seems to work with all the drivers I've tried. So does Falcon 4.0 and Homeworld. No problems with Heros of Might and Magic IV or Age of Wonders II. There are others too. It seems to me that claiming it's the driver for the last three years is getting a little old. Even if it is there is probably a way to fix it in the game code. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abn Air Cav Posted May 29, 2003 Share Posted May 29, 2003 Cpt. Kloss, for my 9700 Pro I had to roll all the way back to the Catalyst 3.0 drivers, if you are still having trouble I would suggest trying them if they'll work on a 9800 Pro. I tried the 3.4, 3.2, 3.1, no joy, altho I did not fiddle with all the settings (FSAA, AF, etc.). Unfortunately, the 3.4's had a fix I wanted, that's why I had installed them. I just bought a CD-ROM drive, to try to rebuild an old PII-450 just to run CM, with a GeForce 3 Ti 500 I have. That way I'll also be able to take advantage of CMAK, if it has the horsepower to handle decent size battles ... fortunately I pretty much just PBEM and I'm not a big fan of the larger battles anyway. IMHO, this is a sad state of affairs, no matter who is to blame. At least Apple had the smarts to obsolete their old API, looks like Microsoft will need to do the same since the hardware folks are not supporting these old API calls in their current drivers. And, some folks are like me in that they need some of the functionality that only exists in the latest drivers. I expect that these boards will see an increase in traffic once the retail versions of CM hit the shelves ... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmatt Posted May 29, 2003 Share Posted May 29, 2003 We understand and appreciate the pains some people have to go through in order to play CM as intended. You need to understand that in the case of Nvidia and ATI both companies have repeatedly admitted to us that the various faults reported here are the cause of their drivers and not our internal graphics code. Even if we were to code a workaround to compensate for a specific issue (which there is no guarantee we could even do) that does not guarantee that a new driver release from the video card company would not break the fix all over again. Look at the history of the Nvidia drivers. Prior to version 30.82 there were driver releases that worked perfectly well and then others that broke FSAA. With the release of 30.82 and 30.87 Nvidia addressed all the issues and they worked great. With 41.09 they again broke FSAA. Later drivers also created severe framerate loss (a problem encountered by many other games I might add) until just a few weeks ago they released 44.03 which fixed the framerate issue but still did not compensate for the FSAA bug. As a small developer we have to get the very most out of our patch releases and we simply can not continually dedicate time and effort to releasing numerous driver workaround technical patches especially when the video card makers do not provide any roadmap on when new drivers will be released and what, if any, issues they can cause or fix. The claim that "these drivers work for all my games" really doesnt mean anything. You do not own ALL games that are out there but I can ensure you that CMBB is NOT the only game in which any given driver has problems with. As said above, our code is the constant here. The various drivers are the variable and therin is where the problems exist. CM's core code (on the PC) was written from the ground up to conform with Microsofts standards for a DirectDraw application. Unfortuantely many videocard makers like to play fast and loose with those standards in order to eeck out every once of performance of their drivers. The result is that often certain features become broke. While Battlefront does have a working relationship with both Nvidia and ATI they are not always too quick to address the issues that crop up. All we can do is continue to report the issues to them and be hopefull that future driver releases resolve them. If ATI and Nvidias drivers are so stable and bug free, why do they both release so many new versions seemingly every month? There is an assumption here that we are just sitting back when a new driver issue is reported and say "Whelp, its up to them to fix!", but that is not true. Everytime I get a report of some technical issue I conduct internal and external testing and research to properly indentify the problem and where the issue lies. When the problem is found to be in the drivers we then contact the video companies and we proceed from there with trying to get them to issue a fix in a future driver release. Some of the issues we have indentified in the past with various drivers and reported back to the manufacturers include: * Z-Mask sorting order out of synch * Anti-Aliasing not properly reinitializing when in a mixed 2D and 3D environment. * Mipmap level corruption * DirectDraw screen refresh failures * Misallocations of available VRAM * Miscalculations/reporting of available VRAM All of those issues above (and there are many more) were core driver function call issues and not something we could have coded around. In the end, we want you the gamer to enjoy our games with whatever hardware and software you have installed but the era of driver unification and support is still a distant dream. We will however continue to do whatever is within our means to make our games as troublefree as we can and when troubles do surface we will maintain our commitment to getting them resolved as best we can and passing that info on to you. Thank you for your time. Madmatt [ May 29, 2003, 03:20 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StellarRat Posted May 30, 2003 Share Posted May 30, 2003 Matt, Based on what you've said above it sounds like Nvidia does not test their newest drivers against CM before they release them and that you are using features that other games don't use. I guess you have to be a bigger company before they'll listen to you. I bet they test the drivers against UnReal. Well, I guess we'll just have to live with things they way they are for now. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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