Oh no flickery flickery!

#1 Robert, T2D is flickering badly @ full-screen? That's weird. Are you explicitly setting the monitor refresh rate? If you download the Torque demo from here on our site, does it flicker in full-screen?

Re: DirectX rendering, you can already set that in T2D, check out the demo options dialog. :)

#2 I have the same problems with all Torque engines, and I've always had them.

#3 @Rob: I've added this to the list and when I get to it, I'll see if I can research a little to find out what's wrong. I can probably get hold of a Radeon 9800 from work to try it out.

- Melv.

#4 Well, at least I can make a bunch of TGE folks happy as well, assuming it's within my power to fix it. :)

- Melv.

#5 @Rob: I thought I had a problem with the refresh rate of the screen on my card, but after some investigation, I think it turned out to be an XP issue. It seems that Windows was setting the default refresh rate to be 60Hz in full-screen mode for Torque apps. After forcing the monitor screen to refresh at 100Hz at each offending resolution, the problem seems to have gone away.

I don't know if there is a way to manually change refresh rates within a Torque application (like you can change the resolutions or colour mode). If there isn't, then this would be a good addition to the next version of the Torque codebase. More than likely there is though, I just haven't found it yet! :-)

- Dave

#6 Hmm. I'm not sure then to be honest. I don't have enough knowledge about how the engines work to be able to give a comprehensive or potentially accurate answer.

Do you still have a problem after setting your monitor to optimum Hz? How do you set this? I am forcing my card's refresh rate through the Nvidia Analogue settings specific to my card (Geforce 6800 GT), rather than generically through Windows. This works for TGE as well as T2D.

I'm guessing this might just be a Windows problem - I haven't tried it on Linux or Mac to compare. Definitely worthy of further investigation though, as I'm sure a lot of casual users won't want to override settings in order to play a game.

- Dave

#7 If you run windows XP you will find that all OpenGL games tend to run at 60hz regardless of the graphics card used. Similarly Directx games (with xp service pack 1 and up) will try to run at the current refresh rate or 75hz depending on if the games resolution supports the current refresh rate or not.

so for example, if you have your desktop refresh set to 85hz in 1600 * 1200 the following applies to Direct X:-

Your game will run in 800 * 600 in 85hz under direct x unless your monitor does not support 800 * 600 at 85hz. If this is the case directx defaults to 75hz.

Opengl will run at all resolutions in 60hz regardless of what card or what modes your monitor supports.

@Robert Quake III runs at 60hz also as do jedi knight and all other opengl based quake engine games I know of. This isn't a game thing but, is an ATI and Nvidia driver thing. Check your control panels, usually they let you force the refresh rate games should run at.

#8 Is it currently possible for Torque to provide "out-of-the-box" functionality to change the refresh rate in-game (like you can do with resolution and colour depth)? Or would this functionality have to be added to the C++ codebase?

-Dave

#9 I've found this thread within the forums which might help:

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=16020

#10 @Robert

All my quake3 games used to default to 60hz (haven't played them in a while). You are right in that the new drivers default to desktop refresh rates for BOTH DX and OpenGL so the fault would seem to be pointing to T2D and TGE. The likely areas to look in this case would be in how the graphics window and context is being set up. Presumably this has changed since opengl 1.2 or whatever version TGE was originally written under.

I will take a look through the opengl setup code as I had to do extensive work with opengl while at the beeb so may be able to spot what is causing this.

Edit: Robert can you tell me what drivers you are using?

Ok glut allows for the refresh rate to be specified but, so far I haven't found anything in OGL that let's me set this. As TGE does not use glut it just defaults to the drivers preferred mode, which is 60hz.

I haven't really looked into the DX reason for defaulting to 60 but, I suspect that it's just down to the version of DX that TGE uses. I think this is version 7 as far as I can tell. As DX is com based and allows you to initialise it to whatever version you choose, I guess no-one has bothered updating this.

#11 I have a Radeon 9800 Pro 256.. I also had the 60Hz problem--my monitor informs me if my refresh rate is anything lower than 85Hz. However, in ATI's control panel under displays, if I set a refresh rate override of 85Hz, T2D will use 85Hz. My problem is that there is no D3D option in the shooter demo. It doesn't really matter to me, but it just seems strange.

#12 You guys should Google. :)

There's been a 60hz problem under Windows 2000 and I believe XP for ages. All manufacturers have released tools to combat this. Even today, nVidia provide a section in their drivers to specify refresh-rates for certain resolutions.

I'm not conclusively saying that TGE/T2D cannot do anything about it.

60Hz Problem

There are many more references to it using Google with "Google for "60Hz refresh rate problem windows".

- Melv.

#13 I wasn't involved in the development of those products.

I think the "problem" is that T2D is not specifying the refresh if I understand things and so you're getting the default.

Again, all this is talk. I've already said I'll look at it, that's all I can do. I'm prioritising things and this is low on the list.

The link above doesn't resolve your issue?

- Melv.

#14 Im pretty sure refresh rate can be set when initializing DX or OGL. And, it should be set to at laest 85 if possible, lower if not. I remember coding some stuff in DirectX8 and it defaulted me to 60Hz, I had to get hardware caps and manually setting refresh rates to 100 or 85 if possible. This should be a default action of T2D.

#15 Yes, it's all easy when you have a specific case on a specific OS but we've got a cross-platform system here and things can get a little complex. I cannot just jump into the code and do a little hack on anything that touches platform-level stuff. Stuff like this takes longer than you would expect because there are many other considerations.

Again, no big deal, I'll do some investigation, chat with Ben Garney and Josh Williams and see what's the best approach.

That's the best I can do at the moment guys.

- Melv.

#16 @Melv

Yep you are right. I did say this in my first post, that OGL defaults to 60hz regardless of resolution etc. As far as I am aware only GLUT allows you to specify the refresh rate and directx 8 and upwards do to in the form of the present_parameters structure used to create a DX window.

It is possible to make driver calls from a game and I assume this is what Doom and other modern games do, otherwise I assume they just use gluts gamemode call.

I suppose the GG guys will tackle this as part of the code clean-up of TGE 1.4/1.5, after all I'm not sure why we still have the GL2DX code hanging around when we should be moving to a TSE style GFX object heirarchy hint hint :-)

#17 @Melv - Don't stress about this, you go far beyond the call of duty as it is. I agree that this shouldn't be a high priority issue at the moment. It is mildly annoying, but certainly no biggie in the grand scale of things. At least we all know what the problem is! :-)

@Rob - Have you tried the steps shown in the link I gave earlier? Haven't had chance to test it myself, but I'm sure this will give a temporary solution to this problem.

- Dave

#18 @Peter: Don't ask for things, you may just end up with them if you're not careful. :)

- Melv.

#19 Happens here and I have a Radeon 8500.

#20 I'm pretty sure that both ATI and nVidia's drivers allow you to force a refresh rate (I know for certain Catalyst allows you to). While this is not an ideal solution (as your target audience may not know how to do this, and really should not have to), at least you will be able to have the optimal refresh rate during development.

To do this with Catalyst drivers, go to display properties, settings, advanced, displays and click on your monitor. Set the refresh rate override to 85 Hz or whatever your card supports. For my monitor, at 1600 x 1200, 85Hz is my max refresh rate, which is more than adequate to eliminate flickering.