[Herra Tohtori]

If it's the same beam issue as before, you should try the fix in this post.

If it's something else (or that fix doesn't fix it), then describe it, but for now - try that fix and tell us what it does.

[Jadehawk]

Yes that fixed the beams, thank you. Now, just need to fix the cut scenes not full screen size. 

[chief1983]

Cutscenes have nothing to do with the MediaVPs, and as all these people having problems seem to be people who are reverting to an old driver, I'm now wondering if that's the cause of it.  Might just have to put up with it for now.

[Zacam]

And for those of you who have experienced this Fix, could you assuage my curiosity by perhaps a screen shot or two via IMGShack or Photobucket or something? I'd like to see F3 Lab shots of the Ulysses and Amazon Advanced and at least one other ship, just to verify that you ARE getting what you should be based on your recent log parameters.

If not, cool, it is entirely incidental, but I am sorta tenacious that way in details. :-) Thank you in either case for your participation and your patience in dealing with this issue so well, I am glad we seem to have gotten somewhere in figuring this out. Now I _really_ can't wait for those cards to get here, as I have some ideas.

[Reprobator]

I ll try to copy the old dll in my fs2 directory and copy the latest ones in my system32 dir this evening.

I  don't have the problem with cutscene, i got it sometimes but it depend of wich build i use.

I ll post the one that i use to have full screen to work this evening too.

[falcon2105]

Zacam, I'll post whatever screens you want, but I don't know what you mean by F3 Lab shots (Pressing F3 while in the techroom didn't do anything i think). If I just press print screen and paste and crop in a bmp/jpeg is that ok?

Herra Tohtori, I used that fix for the shivan beams you posted, and it works. The new beams are incredible.

Thanks for all your help everyone, everything is working properly and looks amazing!

[Jeff Vader]

I don't know what you mean by F3 Lab shots (Pressing F3 while in the techroom didn't do anything i think)

When in the Main Hall, press F3.

[ARSPR]

Zacam, I'll post whatever screens you want, but I don't know what you mean by F3 Lab shots (Pressing F3 while in the techroom didn't do anything i think). If I just press print screen and paste and crop in a bmp/jpeg is that ok?

Press F3 from mainhall and voilá you get a pretty lab room where you can see EVERY ship and weapon you have in the game. It is VERY easy to use, just play a little with it. To exit it just press Esc or click "Exit" menu. Please notice that this can be a HUGE game spoiler. (Lobo has been faster than I).

For screenshots, just press "Print Screen" key at any time. Screenshots are saved in screenshots subfolder inside your freespace2 folder. You can take as many screenshots you want at any time in the game. You don't need to copy paste to any other application.

(Take in mind that because of the game gamma setting, your screenshots will usually look darker than in game. To get the same looking you'll have to tweak your Windows gamma so it is like fs2 one).

[falcon2105]

Hey,

Here are three screenshots. That lab thing is mad cool, never knew that existed before. Lemme know what your conclusions based on these screens are. Glad to help!
Oh yeah, this is my first time posting images here, is this an appropriate format?

[chief1983]

Looks like all the maps to me.

[Zacam]

Somewhat subdued almost. Almost couldn't make out if I was looking at the occlusion effects on the diffuse map, but on close (zoom) inspection, yeah, I'd have to say normals are there.

And yeah, those images worked decently, though as JPG tends to introduce compression (even with no-compression selected), I tend to prefer .png.

[Reprobator]

ok so here are my results :

I ve copy my atioglxx.dll in my fs2 root folder, then completely update my ati's drivers and restart the computer,
i ve launch fs2 and here it is : everything is working perfectly.

[Enioch]

DAMNATION!

It seems the fix works for everybody but me! It probably is Vista's fault; dammit....

My AmAdv sure as hell does not look that way...

[/rant] Sorry about the pointless post. 

[Reprobator]

the dll is a xp one not a vista one, on vista i did find no way to fix the problem...

good luck with vista and your ati... (i had some kind of similar prolem with games under vista that use opengl and nvidia

[Jadehawk]

Here is mine:



Everything is there to me

[Mongoose]

On a related note, is the Ulysses model supposed to have those bare gray segments along the edges of the wings?  They look a bit off to me.

[chief1983]

The newer ones aren't _just_ for the X1xxx series.  They're for all their newer cards, with only minimal updates for their older cards, and very often using a common file for all of them can end up breaking older cards.  It happened many, many times to my Geforce 4 after the Geforce  FX series came out, I finally just stopped updating once I was happy with the way things were.  Zacam's right, the unified driver arch almost causes more problems than it solves.  They should have separate packages for each series and only backport the most necessary fixes once a line matures.

[chief1983]

PCI-Express 2.0 cards have been on the market for the better part of the year, but they're still backwards compatible with the first gen PCI-Express 1 slots, so yes, you should be able to use just about any PCI-Express card.

[Zacam]

Not necessarily. And it certainly is not supporting them well. And the fact that it took until the HD series for ATi to admit that they did not bother with VTF inclusion means that they did not do a full disclosure on the type of support for SM3 the cards have, instead they listed it as "full" instead of "fully compatible".

The reason why the older driver works and the newer one does not, is because it is dynamically translating VTF to R2VB, hence the slow down you are experiencing. And since you cannot (as far as I am aware) path them both without separate branches is why the newer drivers break on the older cards.

Which is why each GPU family should have a designated Unified driver on a per family basis. Not one driver for all cards in existence.

[Tahna Los]

I just wanted to throw this out there but I have had no problems with Catalyst 7.10 on Windows XP.  Yet.

I originally went to Catalyst 7.4 until my girlfriend accidently updated the graphics driver using the Windows XP update utility.  My guess is that for this card, 7.10 is the latest that Windows will support.

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/previous/radeon/radeonxip-cat710-xp.html

Hope this helps.