Waycool Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 Hi All Is anyone else having issues with opengl specifically atioglxx.dll crashing on various offsets? I have a XFX 4770 (new ATI Radeon) and do get crashes with reference to the dll file. Apparently you can use Catalyst drivers 9.4 but my card is not able to install these, to new I guess. My video card has been stress tested with furmark opengl benchmarking and stressing utility for 2 hours and is solid. Temps seem good power supply solid 750watt Corsair. I have tried Catalyst drivers 9.5 through 9.7 and various atioglxx.dll files with newer builds the 9.4 included atioglxx.dll will not load the game. Sometimes I can make it through a quick battle or scenarion but more often it seems to crash 5-10 minutes in. Anyone ??? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roman9441 Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 IF u use Vista 32/64 Try ATI 9.8 Beta it work for me play 2 hour without crash or something but i'm not Sure hope u can play it 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waycool Posted August 4, 2009 Author Share Posted August 4, 2009 Thanks for the heads up Roman I am running XP so the 9.8 beta should be along soon for XP. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LukeFF Posted August 7, 2009 Share Posted August 7, 2009 If all else fails, stay with the 9.3 drivers. They are AFAIK the latest drivers which will run the game without crashes on XP. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjara Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 I am playing on CMSF with the british module and keep getting atioglxx.dll (open gl driver) as the faulting module when the game crashes. Mine also crashes in about 5-10 minutes. I have a 4870 1GB on Vista 64bit 9.7 drivers. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waycool Posted August 8, 2009 Author Share Posted August 8, 2009 same here kenjara 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Smaragdadler Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 I have an ATI R4870 with driver version 9.3. In game goes mostly well except for the known fps slow downs on certein maps. But since v1.20 CMSF likes to crash with out-of-memory when I alt-tab on desktop and have other programms running in the background. Also, when I want to switch on vertical sync. in the option menu, CMSF crashes. At start-up I get sometimes strange negative graphics from other programms I have run before, as long the battlefront intro movie loads. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjara Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 I have an ATI R4870 with driver version 9.3. In game goes mostly well except for the known fps slow downs on certein maps. But since v1.20 CMSF likes to crash with out-of-memory when I alt-tab on desktop and have other programms running in the background. Also, when I want to switch on vertical sync. in the option menu, CMSF crashes. At start-up I get sometimes strange negative graphics from other programms I have run before, as long the battlefront intro movie loads. You do realise by running the 9.3 drivers you missing out on numerous performance increases for the 4870 right? Sounds like you may have some other issues with your pc, you should post your specs. If I tick vertical sync on my menu it locks the main menu when I come out of options. Tried the 9.8 beta drivers, they made no difference at all. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LukeFF Posted August 9, 2009 Share Posted August 9, 2009 It sure would be nice to hear a word from Battlefront about whether a fix for this is in the works. How long has it been since the 9.3 drivers were released? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjara Posted August 9, 2009 Share Posted August 9, 2009 It sure would be nice to hear a word from Battlefront about whether a fix for this is in the works. How long has it been since the 9.3 drivers were released? Perhaps the best part of a year at a guess. So its not a viable solution, im pretty sure they predate the 4870 itself. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrWombat Posted August 10, 2009 Share Posted August 10, 2009 Yeah, it's frustrating. I bought the British module and now can't play CMSF at all, without downgrading to 9.3 and screwing up my other games. It's weird that the Vista patched CMAK works fine (once you fix the text issue) but CMSF now is inoperable. I sympathize with Battlefront on having to keep up with the changes in PC video card technology, but blaming ATI seems a bit daft, too. You have to assume that PC hardware manufacturers are going to improve their products over time. You have to assume that your development cycle is going to span several of those product improvement cycles in regards to things like drivers for video cards. And you have to try at least to make sure your game will work on your best guess of the hardware/software available when it comes out, not when it started development. As this seems to be the only real issue with ATI drivers, it's hard not to wonder whether the fault is more on this end than on ATIs. But truly, I don't care about "fault," I just want a functioning game. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waycool Posted August 10, 2009 Author Share Posted August 10, 2009 ATI has become more entrenched in the once highend stomping grounds of Nvidia. Therefore ATI are making up a larger share of gaming rigs. BF we need further info on this even a sticky with workarounds as well as what is causing the atioglxx.dll crashes. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted August 10, 2009 Share Posted August 10, 2009 Blaming ATI is actually quite valid. The 9.3 Catalysts were released sometime in March 2009; approximately 5 months ago. ATI has broken something in their OpenGL driver and hasn't fixed it yet. To go from 9.3 to 9.4 and have something not work, would put the driver to blame, not the game. ATI is not fully supporting OpenGL as they should. OpenGL hasn't been a strength of ATI's, which is strange since they hired some SGI engineers a few years ago. DirectX 10/11 is probably dominating ATI's attention and their OpenGL team seems to be dropping the ball. I don't think it would be fair to say that Battlefront needs to re-engineer the graphics engine in CMSF just to fix a problem with ATI's driver. Nvidia's OpenGL driver works fine (generally speaking), what would they have to change to make ATI's work ? If your local gas station started supplying only diesel fuel and you drove a vehicle that operated only with unleaded gasoline, would you blame the vehicle manufacturer ? Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any easy answer/fix for this issue at the moment. Until ATI's OpenGL team addresses this issue, the 9.3 Catalysts are the only answer. Battlefront doesn't get the immediate attention of ATI's developers since they are a "boutique" game company that has a small customer base compared to a game like Crysis or some other large commercial release. The only thing I think that may help to push this issue along with ATI/AMD is to submit some feedback to them. One method is their Catalyst Crew Feedback or their Cusomter Care email form. I have no idea if either method will get you any decent feedback from ATI/AMD or make a long term difference in addressing this problem. It is possible that if they get enough complaints from different users regarding this problem that they may look into it. Still, we could be months away from a solution from ATI. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjara Posted August 10, 2009 Share Posted August 10, 2009 thats not likely to happen, and besides the problem if it is atis driver is between them and battlefront not us. If battlefront cant support a mainstream graphics card make they should not be selling their game or warn people before buying it. Which brings me onto the question why is the no direct x mode anyway, I cant even remember the last time I ran a game in open gl, it was probably quake 3 or something. So far I have spent £30-£40 on something not playable. :mad: 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted August 10, 2009 Share Posted August 10, 2009 This problem has only been occurring since the 9.4 Catalyst release. This isn't a long time and the issue can disappear as suddenly as it appeared. There's no time table on this. As an additional note on what Battlefront has done to support ATI, there's a specific mode for the 3D mouse functions that ATI doesn't support properly that Battlefront had to create. They used some slightly different calls to perform these mouse functions, which cause lag, but prevent the game from crashing. However not all ATI users had this problem. The only people for whom this game would be "unplayable" are those who have graphics cards not supported in the 9.3 Catalysts (Radeon 4770's and possibly some others). While using an older driver is not desirable, it is a very common solution for when the graphic driver developers screw something up - which occurs very often. Ask other game developers and you'll probably find that this sort of thing happens more often than not. Yes this problem is between Battlefront and ATI/AMD, but since Battlefront is a small boutique game company ATI can pretty much ignore them with little side effect on their overall sales. I'm sure Battlefront has notified ATI that they have problems with their drivers, but ATI isn't necessarily going to respond back to them in a timely manner (if at all). It is pretty much luck that some issues get addressed or even looked at, unless your the developer of the hottest game in commercial release, in which case ATI will probably assign some developers to work with your programming staff. If enough customers complain about issues, then ATI may allocate development resources to look further into the problems. With more customer input, you may be able to slightly change the chances of this issue getting addressed. There is no "DirectX Mode" in CMSF since that would involve another two years of development time in making a DirectX engine. Then every fix to the graphics engine would require a DirectX version and an OpenGL version. Battlefront isn't Electronic Arts (EA) - there's only one programmer. OpenGL was a bit more universal than DirectX (i.e. - OpenGL is used within MacOS X.x, whereas DirectX isn't) at the time the graphics API was considered during development six years ago. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjara Posted August 10, 2009 Share Posted August 10, 2009 Well using 9.3 drivers is no solution therefore the game is still unplayable. All I can say is the programmer better be working around the clock to get this fixed or I want my money back. The shop states the game supports ati cards and says nothing about forcing you to gimp your card with out of date drivers. I could not care less about the feud between battlefront and ati, the bottom line is people have paid for this and expect it to work. Also it would be nice to hear something official from an actual developer. At work I have my own software project that will be used in multiple countries and on multiple platforms, if one of those platforms was to change it would be my responsiblity to ensure my software worked for it not the other way around. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waycool Posted August 10, 2009 Author Share Posted August 10, 2009 Agree Schrullehaft but we do have is an issue that is effecting some portion of the player base BF should compile and sticky this posthaste and some sort of notice from the developer to ATI must fan the fire. Furthermore I have tried other opengl games without crashing IL 1946 opengl, so I am at a loss. Battlefronts helpdesk database has zero info on the ATI issue that is a game breaker for users who wish to enjoy the game fully. A formal request was made to BF tech via the helpdesk where they asked some probing questions but that is as far it went. Hoping to get a reply from them soon in regards to sending some crash data which BF said might be helpful. The long and the short of it we BF ATI users want to play:) 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrWombat Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 This would be more valid if there were other significant products not working with the newer drivers. So far, this is the only one I've seen, so it does I think call into question the technical decisions Battlefront made in coding their grpahics. Using OpenGL might not have been the good idea it seemed at the time--DirectX gets a lot more support these days and OpenGL is soooo 20th century Blaming ATI is actually quite valid. The 9.3 Catalysts were released sometime in March 2009; approximately 5 months ago. ATI has broken something in their OpenGL driver and hasn't fixed it yet. To go from 9.3 to 9.4 and have something not work, would put the driver to blame, not the game. ATI is not fully supporting OpenGL as they should. OpenGL hasn't been a strength of ATI's, which is strange since they hired some SGI engineers a few years ago. DirectX 10/11 is probably dominating ATI's attention and their OpenGL team seems to be dropping the ball. I don't think it would be fair to say that Battlefront needs to re-engineer the graphics engine in CMSF just to fix a problem with ATI's driver. Nvidia's OpenGL driver works fine (generally speaking), what would they have to change to make ATI's work ? If your local gas station started supplying only diesel fuel and you drove a vehicle that operated only with unleaded gasoline, would you blame the vehicle manufacturer ? Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any easy answer/fix for this issue at the moment. Until ATI's OpenGL team addresses this issue, the 9.3 Catalysts are the only answer. Battlefront doesn't get the immediate attention of ATI's developers since they are a "boutique" game company that has a small customer base compared to a game like Crysis or some other large commercial release. The only thing I think that may help to push this issue along with ATI/AMD is to submit some feedback to them. One method is their Catalyst Crew Feedback or their Cusomter Care email form. I have no idea if either method will get you any decent feedback from ATI/AMD or make a long term difference in addressing this problem. It is possible that if they get enough complaints from different users regarding this problem that they may look into it. Still, we could be months away from a solution from ATI. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 We're looking into what's going on and seeing if there is anything we can do to "influence" the new drivers. There have been no significant changes to the graphics code for v1.20 so it's probable that v1.11 won't work either. Look, we're as ticked off about this as you guys are. We've also been through this dozens of times before. So have lots of other companies, including very big ones. It's a simple fact of life that each new driver release is like Russian Roulette for existing games. We can't force them to NOT break things which are working fine, we can't force them to FIX things that they have broken. And unfortunately we can rarely work around the problems because the bugs in the drivers are very low level. For those of you who don't understand how things work, it's supposedly very simple. There is an API which tells us what to do to get certain things to work on the card. The drivers, in turn, take those API calls and get them to do what they are supposed to do. In theory if we do what we're told is "legal" then everything should work fine. But the card companies constantly, and consistently, break things and cause API calls to not function as advertised. If the driver has a bug in it then the guy making the call is usually screwed. It's like taking a German language course, going to Germany and speaking perfect German only to find that the guy you're talking to at the train station ticket window doesn't know the German word for "ticket". By trial and error you might figure out that he only knows the Chinese word for "ticket", and once established you can work around the problem. The worst thing about this is 9 times out of 10 the driver is fixed before we can even figure out what the problem is. So we waste all kinds of time trying to fix someone else's problem only to have them fix it on their own anyway. Very frustrating and very bad for customers in general. BTW, saying "this game or that game doesn't have a problem with the new drivers" means absolutely zero. There are thousands of games out there and unless you have at least a few hundred of them then your sample size is too small. With the infamous ATI mouse bug that bit us badly... it was absolutely, 100% a driver bug. We found the bug in two places and submitted the information to ATI. What was it, a year and a half later before they put in the fix? Something like that anyway. And why was that? Because Quake and the other games that are ATI's bread and butter don't use a mouse cursor in a their 3D environments. So they never got bit by the bug because they didn't need the buggy calls we absolutely had to work with. We'll do what we can to work around the problems, but customers MUST understand that we're not the ones you should be bitching to about the problems. It's not us who screwed you. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theFightingSeabee Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 Steve, In your professional opinion, what is the BEST video card, type, or company in regards to cmsf? I'll assume it's not ATI. (Ofcourse I have an x850!). The reason I ask is that I'll have to upgrade in a year or so, and since I'm a cmsf junkie, that would be a consideration. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. At some points in time ATI seems to be putting out a more stable product, other times it is nVidia. The GeForce 8800 fiasco of 2007 seems to be behind us at least! One of the problems is that the card makers make a lot of silent changes to their hardware and they don't advertise them. With the GeForce product line, they had literally dozens of different versions out for their then current lineup (IIRC 4 different primary card families). Different revisions, different sub-components, different tweaks to work with specific motherboards, etc. But to the customer it was the "same" 8600 or 8800 their friend down the street had, even though that was absolutely not the case. The result of this sort of crap is that some people with Card Model XYZ will have no problems, but another person with Card Model XYZ will. Obviously Combat Mission is making the same API calls for both, so it's obvious that something low level is at work and we're very unlikely to figure out what it is unless the customer ships us his exactly system. That's not practical nVidia got a new CEO around the time that CM:SF was having such problems with its hardware. The new CEO promised to stop making so many flippin variations of its cards because it was causing so many problems. It appears he's managed to do that since nVidia, up until the latest release, has been pretty darned good over the last year and a half. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waycool Posted August 11, 2009 Author Share Posted August 11, 2009 Steve The fact is the big video card players are Nvidia and ATI and these are what BF recommended specs say are needed to function with your software, we as users have little control over the BF design and API relationship. We are gamers, end users who merely want a working product; on both a hardware and software level. If there is a change perhaps BF should ask ATI what was changed between the various iterations of ATI catalyst drivers 9.3 through 9.7. Immediately upon getting the error I posted a tech helpdesk request which was responded to from Matt I replied in kind to his requests and have as of yet not received further requests from BF for error logs etc. We appreciate that you will do what you can and I trust you can appreciate the end user dilemma with wanting cards that are noted as being functional with the game actually work with said game. Trying to figure out workarounds here with various versions is indeed Russian Roulette and I am hoping we find a method that will allow us all to enjoy the game fully. Taking the stance that users afflicted with this are bitching when they voice issue with the error and that ATI is screwing us and not BF, I have never purported in any of my posts a bitch and by you using these words IMHO minimizes the actual priority this issue will receive. I truly hope it doesn't as I and many other users have been loyal BF customers for years. Hoping we get something rolling for all concerned. Cheers. Waycool-Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theFightingSeabee Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 I'll be the first to say that Steve and the rest of BFC care an extreme amount for the end user. Where have you ever seen a game maker post replies to nearly every single issue requested or complained about? I have never. I'm not one to brown nose too much, I just think this is the truth. What I got from his post was that he, too, is frustrated because he cannot do anything about it. The happiest I've seen him is when the end user is happy. Out of all the game makers out there, BFC is NOT the one that lets down its customers. As long as BFC is in business, we are going to be their bread and butter. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjara Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 We'll do what we can to work around the problems, but customers MUST understand that we're not the ones you should be bitching to about the problems. It's not us who screwed you. Steve Not a good attitude for a company to have. At the end of the day, we have brought something from YOU that doesnt function, so its YOU that gets the bitching (Its how it always has and always will work). Thats like buying a rotten bunch of apples from the supermarket and them saying, well your'll have to see the farmers about that. And no ones bitching without reason, people have spend their money on something that should work, which doesnt regardless of who the fingers being pointed at. And Wombat is right when he says theres been no major problems with other games on ati card because I have had none either. I buy most of the good pc games that come out. When your talking about hundreds of realeses your including all the cheap crap that is churned out too. I currently have 110 games installed on my computer with 109 of them working. Thats quite a high percentage if you ask me. Either way I hope its fixed soon I just want to play the British module. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted August 11, 2009 Share Posted August 11, 2009 What I got from his post was that he, too, is frustrated because he cannot do anything about it. Yup, theFightingSeabee hit the nail on the head. I'm not frustrated with you guys, our customers, but with the damned video card guys who constantly make us look bad when, almost always, it's something they screwed up. In fact I am sure that I'm MORE frustrated with these video card companies than you guys are because I'm caught in the middle. And they keep putting me there, over and over and over again. Therefore, many apologies for using the word "bitching" since that didn't come out sonuding the way I intended it to come out. Customers are absolutely right to want their games to work with their hardware, and their hardware to work with their OS, and their OS to work with their games, and their games to work with their OS, etc. Any weak link in the chain produces a problem and that problem affects the end user who has plunked down his money and has a reasonable expectation that what he bought will work. Unfortunately, that often doesn't happen. As an end user myself I have to work through these problems just like you guys. I have no hotline to the people making any of this stuff either. I wasted about 2 days on a bug in FileMaker Pro that I eventually figured out and found the only solution was to pay $320 to get a new version. So trust me when I say I feel your pain. Kenjara, And Wombat is right when he says theres been no major problems with other games on ati card because I have had none either. I buy most of the good pc games that come out. When your talking about hundreds of realeses your including all the cheap crap that is churned out too. I currently have 110 games installed on my computer with 109 of them working. Thats quite a high percentage if you ask me. It is, but it isn't really relevant. All of our customers have either ATI or nVidia cards, yet only a very small percentage of them are having problems with the latest drivers. Right there that tells us that the most likely cause is a bug in the driver and not a bug in our code. Provided our code doesn't optimize for a specific card feature (which it doesn't) it shouldn't matter what card or what OS you have as long as it is within our specs. That's because we code for one API and one API only, no matter what the hardware or OS is. Therefore, in theory our game should either run on everybody's cards (because we coded the game correctly) or nobody's (because we didn't). It should never, ever be something inbetween. The reason reality is different is because drivers are notoriously buggy. As for your observations about CM being the only game not running therefore concluding our code is the problem, that is the standard line of reasoning I see and it just doesn't hold up to reality. Even assuming you have just played all 110 games you own for a couple hours each with the new drivers (which I would be surprised if you have), you have to remember that any of the games you have which use DirectX are irrelevant since they use completely different drivers. Of the games that remain the only ones that are relevant to compare against are the ones using the same exact API call, in the same way, that CM:SF is failing on. Who knows which games fit that category. Why is the latter important? Well, I'll give you a direct example. Nobody we ever had contact with (that I can recall) has ever had a mouse lag problem with any other game other than CM:SF. Yet for some with certain ATI cards in certain configurations CM:SF was unplayable. Using your logic the problem would have to be ours since nobody else experienced problems with other games. However, it was absolutely a bug in the drivers and not with our code. After much time on the mouse issue we figured out that our 100% to spec calls to the API were being mishandled by some ATI configurations. We managed to isolate the problem to two very specific bugs in the ATI drivers of the day. We contacted them directly with the technical evidence (very low level debugging stuff), yet we never heard back from them. Because of that we had to make a really ugly hack because, unfortunately, they didn't give a flying fig about fixing the problem since it was obviously not a big problem from their perspective. The hack we made produces some pretty bad side effects, however that's the only solution we could come up with. Then eventually ATI released a fix that worked for most people but not all. So even the very belated fix wasn't a complete fix for CM customers. Obviously we are caught in the middle. We always do our best to see if there is any way around the problems, but as I've said very often there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for the drivers to be fixed. And they always, always need to be fixed. Sometimes within weeks of a release. Either way I hope its fixed soon I just want to play the British module. Obviously that's what we want too. Hopefully I'll have some sort of information for you soon. Steve P.S. Oh, and of course remember that drivers are often released to fix specific bugs in specific big selling games. More evidence of their sloppy quality controls and the fact that they pay attention to the squeakier wheels. Customer comments like "my version of Quake 4 and World of Warcraft work fine" is not a surprise for us to see. If a driver screws up one of those games, they have a couple million people potentially breathing down their necks. Screwing up a portion of our customer base? Hardly enough noise to register as a complaint in our experience 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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