New CATALYSTS!

The only game I have visual problems with at the moment is an old Directx 5 game called Ultimate Race Pro. This game ran perfect even with the early cats that came with 9700Pro last September.

1) All animations are flicking at 46 degrees:
Normal - keep a note of boat that moves along the water following the road
www.jlmay.f2s.com/Ultimate Race Pro1.JPG
Error - boat has changed position creating a flashing effect
www.jlmay.f2s.com/Ultimate Race Pro2.JPG

2) Wherever the game uses a fog effect ie Sun dazzle it's many times stronger than it should be to the point where in some positions you can't see 50% of the screen. Whats even weirder is when I do a snapshot of the worst area the screen is perfect - how it should be when playing.
In this pic you can see the distance haze effect but ingame the top 50% of the screen is just white (I've drawn a line to demonstrate)
www.jlmay.f2s.com/Ultimate Race Pro fog1.JPG

 

The only thing I've found wrong with the games I play after updating to 3.7 is that they were horribly slow once I stopped benching and started playing. Apparently my refresh rates were no longer set and I had to use RefreshLock to lock in my rates (200hz at 640, 800, 1024, 1152, and 1280. 120hz at 1600) and keep the games from defaulting to an eye cringing 60hz.

Amazing though that I never had this issue with 3.2 and 3.6 Cat drivers.

 

What games?

 

UT2K3 (my current primary game), UT, Moto Racer 3, and Half Life.

For instance, UT2K3's framerates in online play were dipping into the teens and 20s regularly, even with no fire fights. I was playing instagib. 7 or 8 people get on screen and dip in framerates became utterly painful.

I installed RefreshLock and set my refresh rates to 200hz as I stipulated above and everything returned to normal. Smooth as butter. Like I said, I never saw this in 3.2 and 3.6. I set my refresh rates in the XP control panel and they'd stay there. Now I have to run RefreshLock unfortunately. Oh well, whatever works I say.

 

I've always had to run RForce after a driver install. Now that Sony's finally released a decent monitor driver for my monitor I don't also have to use the custom one I made--I used to have install my own monitor driver (XP would install the PnP driver) & use RForce at each driver install. So now all I have to do is to use RForce after each install. Heh...

Of course, I routinely delete certain ATi registry entries at each driver update, so that may have had something to do with it in my case.

 

Well, if it's a problem with refresh rates, I can understand that. I normally play with vsync off, myself.

 

OT:

HOLY CRAP DUDE, WHAT MONITOR DO YOU HAVE THAT CAN DO 120hz at 16x12???

/monitor envy

 

22" Iiyama, I guess. Then again, I think even the 19" might do this too.

 

Yep, it's not app-specific and it does fix it for me setting it to High Performance. Here's an old thread on Rage3D from April where I experienced that in my own app but didn't put two and two together and see it was choosing 16-bit textures. I don't even remember what Catalyst version it was back then. At that time the error happened at the Quality setting, but as of 3.6 it moved to all of them except High Performance.

As someone pointed out at Rage3D it happens when an app requests an unsized internal texture format like GL_RGBA instead of a sized one like GL_RGBA8, and the driver seems to choose a 16-bit format instead of 32-bit as you'd expect on a high quality setting (I wonder what else this slider affects apart from these unsized texture format requests?) So bug the developers of whatever game you have the problem in to request explicit formats!

Not sure where that OpenGL 1.3 idea came from?

 

Oh no you don't understand. I always play with Vsync off as well, forced in the D3D and OGL tabs. Yea, it's weird that I have to set RefreshLock even for Vsync-off play. I can't explain it. As I said, I didn't see this issue in 3.2 and 3.6.

 

21"/20" Hitachi CM814U. Running 16x12@120hz right now. Very clear. This 9800 Pro really has fantastic 2D quality compared to my old GF2 GTS. I couldn't run 16x12 on my monitor with that GF2 because the text would be too blurry.

I bought this monitor in 2000 I believe, or 2001. It's pretty old, but good.

 

Hmmm...now that's an issue I don't have. I run at 160Hz 640x480 & 8x6, 120Hz 10x7, 100Hz 12x10 & 85Hz 16x12 simply so that I can run with vsync enabled and still get a decent frame rate if I choose.

Maybe your problems have to do with running RLock, instead of RForce, since lock is running resident...?

 

I only started running RefreshLock after I noticed the issues when upgrading to 3.7. I had not run the program when I was using 3.2 and 3.6.

 

I find that Rforce didn't work very well for me. The built in "force refresh" of the Cat drivers themselves works perfectly, though you might need to disable the "Use DCC" option to stop windows resetting it all the time.

 

Eh? Where is the "force refresh" option?

 

Never had a problem with Rforce...what sort of problems were you having...? (Maybe I could help.) I like it because it sets up a refresh for the desktop, D3d, and OpenGL for each resolution (unlike XP which tries to carry the same refresh rate to all resolutions.)

 

I only looked at it breifly. IIRC, it seemed to create new monitor settings, so when I needed to boot into safe mode or when I rebooted in the middle of the driver, I got a blank screen because the OS no longer knew how to run the monitor at lower refreshes. Plus I'd rather not have any more hacks in the system than I have to.

Thanks for the offer Walt, but as I said, I'm now using the force refresh built into the ATI drivers, which kind of keeps everything neat and doesn't seem to give me any problems.

 

Control Panel -> display -> settings -> advanced -> displays -> monitor ->monitor attributes -> refresh rate override.

If it doesn't work right with DDC on (keeps resetting itself) ty turning DDC off.

 

BZB, RefreshForce doesn't do anything to the monitor driver. I've never had the specific problem you allude to with it, and have been using it a long time. What RF does by default is to take the highest refresh rate value for each resolution that your monitor driver & 3d card driver supports and writes those values to a separate monitor profile in the registry (you can select lower values at initial setup of the proggy if you choose--I just simply let it select the highest by default) and from that point on any screen you open (2d desktop, D3d, or OpenGL will open at the refresh rate you selected.) Nothing runs in the background or is required to run. Uninstalling RefreshForce is simplicity itself--merely change monitor drivers and the registry changes are undone (installing the PnP monitor driver and then reinstalling your standard monitor driver will undo the registry changes.) A reboot is not required for either the installation or uninstallation of the program. It's pretty safe, simple, and bullet-proof, IMO.

What some people have done with RF is to incorrectly use the program to try and set refresh rates which fall outside of the capability of their monitor driver to support--that's about the only thing I can think of that might have caused the symptoms you had. I let the program configure refresh automatically, the values for which are the highest possible obtained directly from my existing monitor driver--so I never have that problem. The other thing is that people have problems with the sister program, RefreshLock, which is a utility that runs in the background to actively change refresh on the fly, and doesn't work if the program isn't running. I've never liked that version of the program, but RefreshForce is great, I think...A couple of mouse clicks and you're done.

I honestly don't see the use of RefreshForce as any more of a hack than using the DX refresh override mechanism, and it has the added advantage of affecting all OpenGL screens as well. I mean, it's OK fo course if you prefer not to use it... I just wanted to relate that use of the program has been problem-free for me.

 

Dumb thought, but do you have the right monitor drivers installed? I can't use the plug-n-play ones on some of my monitors, I had to use PowerStrip to write custom drivers for 'em to get the max refresh rates out of 'em. (The things I do to get 85Hz on an old 17"er. )