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Which 256 or 512 video cards work with CMBB and CMAK?


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The best thing to do is to test any prospective game using its available demo.

By and large, if a demo works, so too will the original game.

Most video cards released over the past few years have had 256 megs of VRAM or more and most of them work fine with CMBB and CMAK but some of the newest DX 10 type video cards have been having trouble.

Normally that trouble crops up when Vista is the OS, but we are getting reports of similar issues now with these brand new cards and XP as well.

Please understand that CMBM, CMAK and CMBO are FINSIHED products, no updates or new patches for them will ever be made, so please always check with a demo before you purchase one of these older games with an OS or video card that came out since they were released (3-5 years ago now!).

Madmatt

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Originally posted by Der Alte Fritz:

Can anyone let me know if they use CM games with no problems on a graphics card with either 512 or 256 of memory?

Ta

My ATI X1900XTX (512Mb) works great, except that fog effects are not supported :( . There is no fix for this, so I avoid combat conditions in fog (to eliminate the magic "sudden popping into veiw 30 metres from you" of units.
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Um, telling us to try the demo is singularly unhelpful, since for most of us it isn't a matter of seeing if the game will work on a system, but of deciding what system to get in the first place. We pretty much all already have the older games at this point.

Personally, I have my eye on a new desktop I can get a good deal on, that uses a Geforce 8800 GT video card. This is a smoking card and I'd love what it does for other games. But I really don't relish laying out lots of money for a beautiful new rig, only to find it can't play the single game I care about most in the world, CMBB.

So some running sticky post of cards that successfully run CMBB, and others that successfully run CMSF, would be extremely useful. No, fishing through years of tech support posts is not an adequate substitute.

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Hi JasonC

Do not buy your 8800GT. It will not work properly, all the game text boxes will be surrounded by a white box and the available fix is only partial because is replaces the white box with a black box!

I have just sent back a computer with a ATI 2600XT card because of this.

In short any card that supports DirectX 10 will not allow CMBB to work properly. So you are limited to NVIDIA 7950 or below and ATI 9800 or below which are the last of the DirectX 9 cards. For really good performavnce and frame rate, people report better results from even earlier cards like XT1900 mentioned above.

I have just bought a NVIDIA 7900GT on the basis that it woll run both CMBB and CMSF (and any follow ons) but still have my ATI 9700 XT in reserve. Will post the results.

You can still get some really fast and even 512 sized DirectX cards but will probably have to buy the card seperately as the PC manufacturers such as DEll are pushing the new DirectX 10 cards.

cheers

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Just keep the older rig around to play CMBB and such and use the newer one for newer games.

Alternatively, you could run a second video card in your newer machine, in say one of the PCI slots, but this could be tricky. You'd probably have to disable one of the cards in the system BIOS. I don't think both will work at the same time.

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"Just keep the older rig around to play CMBB"

Really not an option. The old desktop is too long in the tooth, and can't hog desk space too much longer. I currently play CM on a laptop - less than optimal for screen issues etc.

Thanks for the Direct X 10 warning. Right now I am holding off and hoping between SP fixes from MS and driver updates from the card makers, at some point CMBB will run again. What I'm not going to do is lay out serious money for a substandard rig, just to stay backwards compatible.

Incidentally, I've seen some occasional white boxes on my laptop, but minimizing and maximizing the screen fills them in correctly.

For now, I put up with laptop performance and I wait...

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Just as well really.

Since I posted this reply I have had one person on the CMSF forum report they do run both CMSF and CMBB on a NVIDIA 8600 GT. Assume they mean on MS XP. Am investigating.

The ATI HD2600XT with the white box bug seems to affect both the 2000 and 3000 series ATI cards. With a properly functioning card, the background to the text is transparent. These ATI cards do not recognise this so put it as white box. You can mod the image and put all sorts of backgrounds on it but they all show through. It does not recognise pink as transparent. The black box is the least noticable but means you cannot see the text when you come to save a game!

So looks like ATI cards are out of the running but we need more information on the new 8000 series NVIDIA ones.

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  • 3 weeks later...

As promised, here is a report on my new machine.

OS = XP

chip = AMD64

RAM = 2 GB

GPU = NVIDIA 7900 GT

runs both CMBB and CMAK at a blindingly fast speed with great graphics even big games (except fog which is very streaky especially from height) and it runs CMSF with latest patch 1.07 very quickly as well with no real graphics problems so far.

tongue.gifsmile.gif:D :eek:

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 months later...

Hmmm,

It seems like the problem is DX10. Since XP only runs DX9, any video card - no matter how capable - will only be able to run in DX9 since that's all the operating system can do.

With Vista, since it is capable of running DX10, there can be issues. If the video card is DX10 capable, Vista will run DX10. Then there are problems. If the video card is NOT DX10 capable, then Vista will revert down to DX9. At that point, all is good.

All the above is based on my personal experience and sifting through many posts.

The solution offered to Vista users with newer cards to run dual graphic cards with a lesser CMBx card for DX9 purposes seems to be valid... Of course, I haven't tried that.

In sum: Vista with DX10 card equals trouble. Anything else should work.

Regards,

Ken

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