Windows+ATI star and nebula display bug solution.

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 6:44 pm

Kaks wrote:
Screet, I'm sorry you got burnt by ATI's broken drivers: however, as someone older & wiser told me many a time: It ain't worth it! walk away, man, walk away & don't look back, life is too short!
Hopefully the nvidia card will go some way to make you forget all this hassle...

The strange thing is that I feel a bit bad: I had a 3870x2 but it broke shortly after the 4870x2 came to the market...so I returned it and upgraded by the refund I got to the 4870x2...and this now turns out to be malfunctioning so much that it's unusable...and guess what...the GTX295 hits the market, the vendor takes the other card back and I can again upgrade this strange way. Makes me feel sorry for the vendor...I really do hope that they also get their money back. They are not to blame, ATI is...especially the way they treated this case (and the others with the same card and the same problems).

I really never expected it to go this way...and never intended it. It really feels strange. However, the card is already packaged for return tomorrow and I'm currently running oolite with the X1550 at the exact same "speed" as before...thus I won't even have a bad time waiting for the replacement.

Screet

Baza · Post by **Baza** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 7:15 pm

Just to report that 9.3 no better...ah well

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 10:53 pm

Baza wrote:
Just to report that 9.3 no better...ah well

*GRRR* Not that I did expect them to solve much.

I always thought that all those great, impossible looking screenshots from the screenshots thread came from the trunk version with new graphics capabilities. Oh, I was wrong. It was because OpenGL did work properly on their machines.

Seems I need to explore the whole universe anew...not only that I don't have texture loss anymore, it's also all looking VERY MUCH different. Gleaming stations in the sun-light, metal really looking like metal, stars looking like stars and so on.

I also previously dubbed Crysis "Crash Crysis". Hmmm. Only did give it an hour long test so far, but I did not have any problems this time. No corrupted graphics, no crashes...

Screet

Solas · Post by **Solas** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 8:08 am

the fact that ATI drivers for Vista32, Vista64, XP64
do not process the following correctly ..

glTexEnvf(0x8500,0x8501,_lodBias);

means that the ATI cards are not compliant with OpenGL 1.4 core ( and later versions ).

http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/glsp ... 080811.pdf
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/spe ... spec14.pdf
http://www.opengl.org/registry/api/glext.h
#define GL_TEXTURE_LOD_BIAS 0x8501
#define GL_TEXTURE_LOD_BIAS_EXT 0x8501

this is contrary to advertised claims and capabilities reported by the cards themselves.
affected ATI hardware owners may request return to suppliers subject to warranty period.

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 10:19 am

Solas wrote:
this is contrary to advertised claims and capabilities reported by the cards themselves.
affected ATI hardware owners may request return to suppliers subject to warranty period.

This is pretty much what I did...how else to get a company to solve their problems when they ignore any other attempts to fix this?

Ohhh...and Oolite is really much more lovely with proper rendering...even when my old card did show ships, they just did not look that way.

I wonder if my card had damaged shaders, though, as I also suffered many problems with Crysis...including driver crashes every few minutes and graphics errors...all gone!

The funny thing is that Vista has this problem-solving thing built in. It came up today to tell me that M$ has tracked a frequent problem to the ATI drivers and that there is currently no solution available.

I was also happy to notice that the new card has many of the driver features I was missing with ATI and in idle mode it runs 40C colder! On the other hand, for enabling/disabling a second screen, the ATI driver was much better built. I still hope that both companies survive and learn from each other...

Ohh...and on the ATI forum there was a user constantly reporting about some unresolved nVidia problem whenever people were publicly thinking about switching. Turns out that he did make it up, that problem is not there, on the contrary, those drivers even properly support much better features for that than the ATI drivers have.

Screet

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 6:45 pm

Strange.

I've always seen several ships without much to look at...even without the noticeable shader bug, they were shown the wrong way. For example the Shreddies ship - it always was brown without much to look at. Now it's got a detailed box to see!

Another point is the gleaming metal of some ships and stations - it wasn't there, although it was possible to see how lighting conditions did affect what I could see - but far, far from what it's now.

Thus, aside from all those visual bugs which came there after some time or sometimes right upon launch, there was very much of the games beauty simply missing with all my ATI configs I had. Some ships were NEVER shown properly on my ATI systems! How can that happen? Are there some more ATI related bugs or does this game have some sort of ATI incompatibility?

Screet

Post by **Kaks** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 7:08 pm

Edited! I wrote the first draft in a bit of a hurry, and on re-reading it it didn't seem to make much sense. hopefully draft nr2 will sound better:

@Screet: No idea, there shouldn't be any specific ati incompatibility, apart from what was mentioned in relation to the nebulae. Maybe I' not paying enough attention, but I seem to be able to see exactly the same stuff with ubuntu & ati 2400 something card as with windows xp & geForce go 7300. Shaders full, reduced detail off, of course.

Maybe it's just a case of the newer ATI card drivers not being up to scratch - as already mentioned a few times? Getting bought by AMD is bound to have disrupted a few things, but it's all too easy to come up with our own theories about that... hopefully the ATI team will get back to its previous form.

I just had a thought: since I haven't got any of the latest cards, I might be missing out a lot of the new graphic stuff! I don't think so, though: I get a fantastic shimmering effect from one of Griff's Kraits, and if there's even better stuff I haven't seen, I'll be forced to get a monster computer, just to see what I'm missing!

Solas · Post by **Solas** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 11:18 pm

after my latest post on the Game.AMD - ATI Radeon Graphics forum thread ..
http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview. ... erthread=y
their server now responds with ..

ERROR: Sorry, we were unable to locate the object requested.
Error Code: 102

other threads posted close in time to my thread are accessible.
the following is what I posted there and is as I posted here previously ..

the fact that ATI drivers for Vista32, Vista64, XP64
do not process the following correctly ..

glTexEnvf(0x8500,0x8501,_lodBias);

means that the ATI cards are not compliant with OpenGL 1.4 core ( and later versions ).

http://www.opengl.org/registry/doc/glsp ... 080811.pdf
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/spe ... spec14.pdf
http://www.opengl.org/registry/api/glext.h
#define GL_TEXTURE_LOD_BIAS 0x8501
#define GL_TEXTURE_LOD_BIAS_EXT 0x8501

this is contrary to advertised claims and capabilities reported by the cards themselves.
affected ATI hardware owners may request return to suppliers subject to warranty period.

I got no response from ATI/AMD other than the removal of the thread from public view.

Some time back I was blocked from posting by their server based on a cookie set previously by their server on my machine. On that occasion I simply deleted their cookie and could post again. I have an HTTP Header Log recording those events and can make it available to senior ATI or AMD staff.

Removal of the thread from public view and blocking users based on cookies require senior permissions at the server side.

Anyone considering purchasing ATI or AMD hardware should be aware of the quality of support they will receive.

Baza · Post by **Baza** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:30 pm

well ive abandoned my twin HD3850's and gone for a 8800 GT (best i could aford at pres). I await proper textures with baited breath

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:35 pm

Baza wrote:
well ive abandoned my twin HD3850's and gone for a 8800 GT (best i could aford at pres). I await proper textures with baited breath

It's really unbelievable how much difference a properly working card makes. Was there no way to RMA your 3850s?

Screet

Baza · Post by **Baza** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 7:52 pm

Didn't try, will use them in relatives machines or something.

Baza · Post by **Baza** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:09 pm

ah...... the sky is full of stars!

lfnfan · Post by **lfnfan** » Tue Jun 02, 2009 11:02 am

I have been doing this game a quiet disservice.

I also saw the weird 'squares' in space, and just assumed that these appeared 'as designed'. "A bit odd," I thought, "but it's probably the best that can be done (this is a free game, after all). Perhaps it's just a stylistic evocation of how 'space' should look. Perhaps it's just reflections off the visi-screen....".

Now I see this thread and think - uh-oh it's me!! I have an ATI HD4670 (XP32).

I will check this evening that I am using the most up-to-date drivers, but given others' comments I am not hopeful that this will resolve things. My card was clearly advertised as OpenGL 2.0 compliant. What gives....

I understand that there is a workaround in trunk, but by the sounds of things, this will not show off the game to its fullest effect.

Sorry for misunderestimating.

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Tue Jun 02, 2009 11:28 am

lfnfan wrote:
My card was clearly advertised as OpenGL 2.0 compliant. What gives....

I understand that there is a workaround in trunk, but by the sounds of things, this will not show off the game to its fullest effect.

I haven't tried on my X800XTPE with drivers released in the last two months, but before, it was a general ATI problem. When I returned my 4870x2 because of it's problems running OpenGL and exchanged it for a GTX295 I was in a really different Ooniverse! There are many ships which never did show up properly on my ATI cards. Furthermore, Crysis finally became stable instead of crashing permanently with driver problems

If you've got the possibility to install Linux on your system, it might help. From the reports I've read the problem is caused by the Catlyst drivers only, thus those cards deliver better graphics when using Linux...

Screet

lfnfan · Post by **lfnfan** » Tue Jun 02, 2009 12:05 pm

I will check the latest drivers and see if any change.

I also found a possible workaround for 1.72 here:

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=67418

you must edit a text file called .GNUstepDefaults.
=== Graphics ===
Key: sky-render-inset-coords
Type: boolean
Default: NO
If set to YES, the outermost edges of stars and nebula parts will be cut off. This is intended to help with a rendering problem where boxes are drawn around stars and nebula parts on certain systems with defective graphics drivers.

I am keen to learn linux, and have Mint 6 running in VirtualBox on my PC. But I can't get the display set properly, and I can't get my head 'round this whole linux way of doing things, so it's all a bit frustrating really...!

Quite happy with my graphics card otherwise, so loath to change it for this alone (although it is rather tempting!)