Radeon X1600 w VS 3.0 and PS 3.0 "too old" for TGEA

#1 My X1600 512MB works fine... Hmm.

#2 The card 'worked fine', but running the 1.0 release of TGEA on Vista resulted in an unsightly dialog telling me my drivers were 'too old'.

And who knows how fine it worked anyway if the engine thought the drivers were too old. Perhaps it was using fallback code, and how would someone know if it was?

Quote:
Initializing GFXCardProfiler (D3D9)
o Vendor : 'ATI Technologies Inc.'
o Card : 'Radeon X1600 Series AGP (0x71C2)'
o Version: '4.64'
- Scanning card capabilities...

#3 The card itself is most definitely not too old for TGEA. Vista is a new beast altogether and it doesn't surprise me too much that an error like that pops up. I have forwarded this on to Brian to see if he has any ideas on if a solution is necessary or whether or not it's safe to ignore that message for the time being, until Vista is officially supported by Torque products.

#4 Thanks for acknowledging the post Kenneth.

Just passing information along that might be helpful. This seems like the kind of issue where a little bit of thought now could prevent a whole lot of grief later on when you do decide to support it.

I bet Brian never expected driver version numbers to start going backwards :-)

#5 You're welcome :)

I'm assured that it will not cause you any grief, other than the annoyance of having to deal with the incorrect driver message. This is definitely something we will fix in the future but for now i'd just ignore it.

#6 Im so glad I found this little area. This is the first major problem of any sort Ive had with any TGE/TSE based products so far.

Ive just got hold of a new Athlon 64x2 5000+ with 256mb ATI X11300Pro mid range vid card. 2Gb MM.
Ofcourse, I am now running Vista Ultimate ( 32bit tho...) .

DirectX 10 is installed on the PC, TGEA picks this up in the console as 9.00t .


Problem is, when I run the new release TGEA_RC1, a lovely little Vista Dialog comes up and tells me it has stopped working. No nasty error numbers, and the console log is absolutely fine. Its just that it refuses to work. I thought it might be because this was my own self compiled one, so I unpacked the original only to the same end. So i went through all the releases I have of TSE/TGEA - and sadly, every version EXCEPT upto and beyond TSE_MS4_2 works fine.

Ive upgraded new drivers just as of over an hour ago to be sure, yet the same. The most annoying thing for me now is that the old TSE Dojo and Car demos do actually work !!. Has anybody had ANY experience with this or something similar ? Can any one tell me if this is a Vista issue?? Or is there any (serious) code changes to Rc1 that would be perhaps creating a conflict with Vista's much vaunted (loathed?) internal security system.

Look, this is the first time Ive ever really hassled anyone for help. If anyone can help me in anyway whatsoever that would be so fantastic !!! Im literally at a loss now. I was SO looking forward to spending some quality time with TGEA_RC1 these next few weeks.
Best regards to you all ,

Daniel.

#7 I know you have DirectX 10, but...

Try installing an older runtime of DirectX 9 (the October release seems to be the target version). It won't screw anything up. It will just add the older versions to the latest one, and things that are looking for older versions will be able to find them.

I have 19 DLL's in my windows/system32 directory starting with d3d. I have d3d8.dll, d3d9.dll, and d3d10.dll and many flavours of d3dx9_?? where ?? ranges from 24 up through 31. If I remember correctly, TGEA didn't work for me either until after I installed MS Flight Sim X, which in turn installed a version of DirectX 9 that it was designed for. After that, TGEA ran fine.

TGEA definitely runs on Vista, and it actually runs fairly well. It doesn't require administrative privileges or any other compatibility fixes to run. I suspect that many of the issues people are going to run into with it are driver issues and not issues with Vista itself. The driver architectures for Vista are new, so it will take a while for the device drivers to settle out and stabilize, but TGEA is far more aligned with the DirectX spec than TGE was, so in the long run TGEA has a better chance of working perfectly on Vista than TGE.

(running it on this Intel Core-Duo Mini Mac uner OS X Leopard might be a totally different matter :-) )

#8 Actually, that sounds like a fairly reasonable idea.
Im just a little bit paranoid. I thought, as this is only my 3rd Brand New PC in the history of me actually being old enough to earn proper money, that I would intentionally keep everything "clean".
Ie fresh PC, fresh OS, fresh drivers - everything up to date, no dirty hacks etc etc... a new start on life ....

And, coming to think of it, although Vista is DirectX 10 compliant, the actual video card is not, so Ill give it ago. I think that the last version of DirectX that worked for me was 9.0c - October - so yeah...
PS- Ive *NEVER* actually downgraded DirectX before - so Im a little scared ... :(

Honestly I was just a little surprised that TGEA did not run, yet the very excellent TGE 1.5 did !!
Also, this is really the first actual "problem" Ive had with Vista. I'll probably be castrated for saying this, but I do actually find it to be quite a nice, elegant OS :)

Well, Ill give it all a go as soon as I can, and as a courtesy Ill keep you up to date with a post or two, if you're interested, just to let you - and anyone else - know whats going on...

Thank you so much for the reply. Its REALLY appreciated !!!!

Best regards,

Daniel.

#9 Just to set your mind at ease a little, you're not really 'downgrading' DirectX. DirectX is smart enough not to disturb more current versions when you install it. All that will happen is that in addition to the most recent versions you now have, older versions will become available to applications that specifically need them.

Applications that don't specify a particular version will get the latest. Applications that request a specific version will get that version once you make it available. TGEA is requesting a specific version because the more recent ones have deprecated some of the features it depends on relating to the ability to use Pixel and Vertex shaders prior to version 2.0

So rest assured you are not downgrading any of the new stuff. You're just adding in some older things that TGEA relies on in order to function. Vista would freak out heavily in any case if anything tried to tamper with the versions it ships with.

PS - TGE 1.5 does not use DirectX shaders, and therefore it does not require the specific ability to use 1.x versions of the shaders. It therefore does not need to specify a particular version of Direct X.

#10 I second the above suggestions. Put the Oct SDK on and you should be good to go. Just remember to return the debug/retail setting to retail in the directx sdk control panel if you stop doing debugging work and want to play games or something.

#11 You don't really need to downgrade dx, nor install a new sdk. Just place the proper d3dx9_??.dll into the same dir as tge.exe resides.
Also, there's a pretty good article in this months GD mag on things we developers need to know about proper Vista support. Overall, it's not a lot.

#12 COMPLETE SUCCESS GUYS !!!!

I downloaded the October DirectX release - version 9.0c - to be sure.

In all my time with DirectX work, and various other APIs, it has always been hardcoded so that I know exactly what is going on and what is needed. This often resulted in the most spectacular lock-ups, glitches and polygons that "appear" when/where they should not, but always with the advantage of having a crash log to observe later. Now the fact that TGEA crashed on me so elegantly, without so much as a reason or error-code, and also as this is my first development time with Vista, I *honestly* would never have even considered it to be a DirectX issue. Simply due to past experience.

So, although this appears to be not a problem at all, I would still very much like to thank you guys for pointing me in the right direction. I would have found out later on my own for sure, but Im talking weeks/months here. I kid you not. I would have been looking at a whole lot of other things instead.

I must admit though, I did have a little laugh out loud when the demo said my drivers were old.
I just made an initial profile for the console detected card, but that didnt seem to be enough, yet observing through the console as the card was being initialized, it appeared to be working in a cascading manner. In the end I just made a couple of custom profiles for the ATI card, and also applied the driver changes to the base ATI script, and it seems to work with no issues at all.

As suggested above, it would be a great option to have the cards version/driver numbers yanked from memory at runtime. It seems this isnt really an issue, but I feel it can give alot of people grief were there needs be none.

I think a dedicated Sticky or update page for what you MUST need to run TGEA on Vista should be put up, if there is not one already. Simply a list of bullet points to observe as an initial reference, so that one can eliminate alot of silly posts like mine. ( I simply did a google on GG -and landed here - YAY !)

Once again guys, thank you so much for the input. Great help !!! Now I can get on with finding some
"real issues" wiuth TGEA !!!

Best regards to you all,

Daniel.

#13 Things always seem to come together better at 3 AM, don't they?

Glad to hear everything is working for you. Perhaps you could post the section of console.log that shows what driver version is being reported as in the third post above. It might help the folks at GG establish some baseline info on driver version numbers for down the road when they decide to officially support Vista.

#14 Noticing that you modified the stock ATI profile that ships with TGEA. Modifying stock files is never satisfying as I'm sure you'd agree. Here's what I did...

I create a new profile that is more specific than the generic one, and it's contents are as follows:

if(GFXCardProfiler::getVersion() >= 4.64)
{
$GFX::OutdatedDrivers = false;
}

Since TGEA runs the scripts from most generic to most specific, this more specific script has to 'unset' the variable set earlier by the script that is getting it 'wrong'.

You'll have to determine what to name your script based on the name of your video card, and how it is being parsed into a script name. You can determine this by looking in console.log . Search in there for 'D3D9.ATITechnologies.cs', and just after that you should see a longer and more specific name being looked for. It's not being found now, but if you create it and add the snippet above, you can rever the stock profile scripts back to the 'as shipped' scripts from TGEA and save some hassle down the road when you get an update.