Driver issue with ATI is nonsence

[KillMonkey]

Having to roll back to Cat 4.11 when I am running a ATI X800 pro card is not a solution. I went to the Lucas Arts webpage and already rolled back to the driver they said was supported (Cat 5.1 I believe) and I still get random scrolling black bands across my display. What kind of garbage is this? How can Developers wonder why people get so annoyed and reluctant to purchase there products when they put out junk like this. Having to wait for a patch is useless as well. How about you just hold back the release and put out a product that works.

[JamieKirby]

Having to roll back to Cat 4.11 when I am running a ATI X800 pro card is not a solution.  I went to the Lucas Arts webpage and already rolled back to the driver they said was supported (Cat 5.1 I believe) and I still get random scrolling black bands across my display.  What kind of garbage is this?  How can Developers wonder why people get so annoyed and reluctant to purchase there products when they put out junk like this.  Having to wait for a patch is useless as well.  How about you just hold back the release and put out a product that works.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Well, a company wants their cash and they tend to **** us over, but hey, they got their money.

 

Besides, no game is ever bug free, so stop complaining.

 

When Kotor I came out, i had to wait until 1.03 patch came out before i could play it, but i never moaned about it...so you should stop moaning, it won't bring the patch any closer.

 

besides 4.11 is the best ATI Driver for Kotor II

[Haitoku]

Having to roll back to Cat 4.11 when I am running a ATI X800 pro card is not a solution.  I went to the Lucas Arts webpage and already rolled back to the driver they said was supported (Cat 5.1 I believe) and I still get random scrolling black bands across my display.  What kind of garbage is this?  How can Developers wonder why people get so annoyed and reluctant to purchase there products when they put out junk like this.  Having to wait for a patch is useless as well.  How about you just hold back the release and put out a product that works.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Well, You see ATI continues to focus less and less on OGL games, and because of that newer drivers aren't that great.

 

 

FYI You don't have to use the 4.11 drivers, You can simply extract the ogl file from them and use it for kotor2

[FI_Obi-Wan]

Having to roll back to Cat 4.11 when I am running a ATI X800 pro card is not a solution.  I went to the Lucas Arts webpage and already rolled back to the driver they said was supported (Cat 5.1 I believe) and I still get random scrolling black bands across my display.  What kind of garbage is this?  How can Developers wonder why people get so annoyed and reluctant to purchase there products when they put out junk like this.  Having to wait for a patch is useless as well.  How about you just hold back the release and put out a product that works.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

This isnt Obsidians Fault......Blame Lucas Arts and their rediculous deadlines.....I do not believe this to be Obsidians Fault. I heard Luca Arts only gave them 1 year to make this game.

[Kiwegapa]

I'm running the 5.2 Catalyst drivers on an X800 XT card with no issues aside from the lack of lightsaber glows and skips around the beginning and end of movies.

 

I'd say the Cat 5.2 set is really pretty good. And ATI have actually improved performance with OpenGL in every driver release for the last six months. The reason why Cat 4.11 is recommended so much is for three reasons:

 

It was the last driver to have fixes designed for KOTOR 1 incorporated into it, and is officially recommended because of the testing done on those fixes.

 

It was the last driver to have properly working lightsaber glows. Many people switch to the 4.11s just for this.

 

And some people who have odd crashes seem to have resolved them by returning to the 4.11 set. However, I tend to believe that there's something else going on if people with near-identical configs can have different experiences with the same driver.

 

A CLEAN 5.2 install should work just fine. If it doesn't for you, then I'm not sure why. A 'clean' install is one where you completely uninstall the current driver and control panel, reboot to safe mode, clean out all old files and DLLs with Driver Cleaner or other handy util, reboot back into regular Windows, and install the new driver and control panel. If your system has been around a while, I also recommend deleting any 'ATI Technologies' registry keys while uninstalling. I've done so and the 5.2 set is working very well indeed.

 

Still want my lightsaber glowies, though.

[will_990]

I'm running the 5.2 Catalyst drivers on an X800 XT card with no issues aside from the lack of lightsaber glows and skips around the beginning and end of movies.

 

I'd say the Cat 5.2 set is really pretty good. And ATI have actually improved performance with OpenGL in every driver release for the last six months. The reason why Cat 4.11 is recommended so much is for three reasons:

 

It was the last driver to have fixes designed for KOTOR 1 incorporated into it, and is officially recommended because of the testing done on those fixes.

 

 

Still want my lightsaber glowies, though. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I

[Kiwegapa]

Still want my lightsaber glowies, though. 

BTW: What about the glow of the lightsabers??? They do look just like the ones in Kotor1, or did I miss something?

 

Well, that's what is driving me crazy. I don't have two machines to test KOTOR on side-by-side, and I haven't been able to get screenshots of the glow enabled and disabled. But a very large number of people report that Catalyst 4.12, 5.1, and 5.2 do not render the lightsaber glow.

 

If I understand what they mean from text description alone, not only is the lightsaber blade bright, but it casts a tint upon any nearby surfaces and has a bit of colored haze in the air near the blade. *shrugs*

 

About five people promised me they'd 'send both screenshots as soon as I get home from work', but haven't.

[JamieKirby]

well, the only driver based issues i have is that the sodding glows don't work on dirvers above 4.3 and the slowdown in open areas on Drivers 4.12 and above. (Dantooine and Malacor V)

 

Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1 in swkotor2.ini fixes the dantooine slowdown, but not sure about on Malacor V.

 

I used to be able to run Kotor II with 4.11 drivers and the 'atioglxx.dll' file from 4.3 into Kotor II main directory for the neat saber glows and all other light sources.

 

But now, it just causes the game to go into a black screen after a movie. (basicly, if i start a game without it and save it, i can then put in the atioglxx.dll file into the main directory and it will work fine until the next set of movies and bam, black screen.)

 

Removing the atioglxx.dll file fixes that problem for me.

 

It is a pity that the so called issues were fixed were not fixed is annoying me...well, i hope they fix this problem, whos ever responsibility it is.

[Mark Havel]

As far as I know, Ati announced many times their will to provide better OpenGL support. It seems they didn't change many things since Quake III and when Doom 3 arrived, they decided themselves to work again on the OpenGL part of their driver. But it's not an easy task and we'd better wait a few month to see if there is any results.

[Haitoku]

As far as I know, Ati announced many times their will to provide better OpenGL support. It seems they didn't change many things since Quake III and when Doom 3 arrived, they decided themselves to work again on the OpenGL part of their driver. But it's not an easy task and we'd better wait a few month to see if there is any results.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I imagine thats also the reason Nv trumps ATI so badly in Doom 3 (well, sm3 too)

[JamieKirby]

can we not let this turn into another nvidia vs ati war again.

[Master Dahvernas]

can we not let this turn into another nvidia vs ati war again.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

No one is starting a war.

 

It is just fact Nvidia OGL drivers and chipset architecture is superior to ATIs. It always was. This is why Nvidia bought Voodoo (because their OGL was so good) and integrated their architecture because then (mid-to-late '90s) OGL was "the" API vs. DirectX that MS had just started to push on developers to grab a share of that (then) untapped gaming market as well as the CAD, Maya and other professional rendering applications market that to this day still use OGL as their primary API.

 

The big problem with ATI used to be the OGL driver team was separate from the rest of the Catalyst team. In fact, it was spread around the world both in Germany and Canada. Now the German team has moved to Canada, so communication problems should not be an issue any longer (that was one reason why the OGL drivers were bad; one team literally did not know what the other was doing apparently as well as the language barrier).

 

Tthe big, techical reason ATI OGL drivers are weaker than Nvidia is that they have parts of the FireGL (professional based apps) code still in them and anyone who is knowledegable about the industry knows that professional rednering apps are much slower than gaming applications because of the precise nature of the work. Ergo, ATI has been using drivers that are supposed to be slower to power their gaming cards and that is the real reason they aren't as fast as Nvidia's who specialize and separate professional apps and gaming apps with regard to their OGL drivers.

 

Also, OGL would basically be just for professional apps if it wasn't for John Carmack constantly promoting OGL in all of his and ID Software's games. OGL was on the way out until Doom III came on the scene and will now keep going strong because of this.

 

From what I have read, OGL is actually a faster rendering method and can do a lot of the things DirectX can do (Pixel Shaders; Vertex Shaders; Bumpmapping; etc), but the real reason it isn't as used as much for gaming is because Microsoft pushed DirectX for development purposes since it is a unified language and most devs adopted it out of compatibility necessity more than anything else (more PCs run Windows than Linux; DirectX is more universal than OGL in that sense because it is integrated into Windows).

[Mark Havel]

I don't think there is much technical differencies between Direct3D and OpenGL. But Direct3D is made for games as the DirectX API and it's certaintly one the main point of MS's strategy to perenize the Windows platform.