Torque with ATI RADEON 7200!

#1 I get this all the time... it really bugs me. :<

My theory is that it may be related to ATI's "TruForm", since T2/Torque is the only engine I am aware of that has partial (or full?) use with it.

Would anyone know how to turn this off, so I may test it? Like via the pref$ or something? Or a better way to fix?

Thanks. :-)

#2 There is a code snippit to show the trueform and FASA, look through the code snips at right.

#3 Thanks Shawn. That doesn't seem to be the problem after all.

It doesn't (apparently) happen in DX mode, and Chad's suggestion of textured fog being turned on does work.

So, I'm going to turn off OpenGL's compressed textures feature and see if that does the trick.

#4 I hope it does. It drives me insane on how the textures fly everywere!

Let me know how it works out.

#5 Throw away the ATI cards, BWHHahahahha!

#6 I can't believe you wasted your time writing that. That could have been the most un-usefull thing to say.

#7 Chad... no luck. :( It seems like I had fixed it a couple of months ago and then later tried tweaking it and it came back. Not sure what I had done, though. My memory's about as long as my... nevermind. ;)

Ace... Yeah, yeah... laugh it up. That's my ONLY complaint about it. Everything else about it is great!

#8 Well that sux. Thanks for trying to help though.

BTW, what version of drivers do you have?
I just found out that there are new drvers again. vr 4-13-01-9039. I have one version lower then this, and I'm wondering that if this might help or not.

Thanks again for your help.

#9 I've got -9050, which I believe according to the website is the latest supported ones.

#10 You can email ATI developer support from www.atitech.com, get their latest beta drivers and mail them a detailed report.

#11 Annoyingly enough, this problem still exists for me, even with the latest (Catalyst 2.2) drivers. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse. Shapes that previously didn't fritz up are doing so now, wrecking framerate on the more complex objects. Originally, it seemed to only occur when I tasked out of the application, but now it seems to do it almost constantly when there are enough shapebase objects in a mission (waterworld, for instance).

I'm inclined to think that this couldn't just be a driver problem, as it seems to occur only in Torque games. The problem seems to be reduced when the settings are in the performance or balanced position.

#12 I never had this problem at all when I only had the drivers off of the CD installed. But I had to upgrade my drivers to play other games. Tribes2 isn't everything ;).
I have more problems with Realm Wars then I do with Tribes 2. And that game... Dogs of war, my card makes the FPS go 7 at the max sometimes. I wish I knew how to just magicly make everything better.

#13 I'm having this exact problem on my Radeon 7500. I posted another message in the Graphics forum on this before I realized you had already posted this message. I seem to have the most trouble when looking at weapons on the ground or when I'm in 3rd person mode.

Have you had any luck resolving this issue? I've e-mailed ATI and hopefully I will hear back from them soon. I'll let you know if I figure anything out.

#14 People should definitely message ATI, especially with reproducible cases of a given ATI card (especially recent models), recent catalyst drivers, and maybe running RealmWars and giving a particular point to go to that shows the issue.

ATI should be able to debug the issue pretty quickly.

Also note that I've been using an ATI 8500 since early on (around the initial release) with no problems, and on the Mac side have run against the 8500 and vanilla Radeon (now the '7500) with no problems. So it isn't the chip -- likely the driver, or how exactly TGE is trying to do certain things graphically.

Have people honed in on what polys seem to be going wacky, and whether it shows up under both D3D and GL?

d

#15 ATI was not much help - no help at all in fact. I received the following response from ATI. I think when I said it was a gaming issue they immediately ignored it and posted a generic response.

This problem only occurs under GL. However, on my machine (Athlon T-bird 1400, 512MB RAM,...) D3D runs really slow, unplayable at almost any resolution.

ATI's Response:
------------------------------------------
Based on our experience, games issues are usually due to system configuration
errors.
We believe that you may find your issue addressed at our Games FAQ section on
our web site located at:

http://www.ati.com/support/faq/games.html

If you have one of our Radeon products, then please visit:

http://www.ati.com/support/products/pc/radeon/radeonissues.html

If your issue is still unresolved, you should consider trying some of the most
common troubleshooting steps listed below.

You may also consider using the new SEARCH ATI function on our web site. It can
be found at:

http://www.ati.com/search/index.html


Regards,

Customer Service Canada
ATI Technologies, Inc.
http://www.ati.com
-------------------------------

#16 Well, I figured it out!!!

I downloaded the latest Tribes 2 patch and I noticed that their radeon.cs file was updated. Among other things, this line was added:

$pref::OpenGL::disableEXTFogCoord = "1";

When I changed this from "0" to "1" in my prefs.cs script, the badness went away. Woohoo!!

Also, related to this I just noticed that I have the same issue on the game Arx Fatalis, but it is much worse.

#17 Hey man, I tried out what you said. It work. But thats because all that setting 0 to 1 does is the exact same thing as turning on interior textured fog, which fixes the problem but creates a new one. (Try playing in sactuary, you'll see what I mean.) So all in all, setting 0 to 1 will make it have Interior Textured Fog, weather you turn it on or off in the control pannel. I guess that was the only way they saw how to fix this problem in the update.

My advice is to leave it at 0 and turn it on under the graphics section in settings, this way you can play without graphics errors on the maps that work great with it and on maps like sactuary, you can turn it off to prevent error correction lags.(not very fun)

Do what works best for your system.

-Chad "DigitalEagle" Kullhem

#18 Have you guys figured this one out yet, other than turning off fog? I'm about ready to purchase the Torque engine, but something like this really keeps me from going further. I really have to see exactly what I develop, without error.

Let me know if any of you guys have found a solution.

-bugiz

#19 I have a Radeon 7500 Mobility in the laptop I do development on and have none of these problems, it is more machine specific than anything.

#20 I couldn't tell any significant problems with turning on the fog on my 7200.

I have, however, had problems with the ATI Catalyst 3.0 drivers and Torque. It would just lock the game. Someone had mentioned it possibly being a motherboard driver issue, but I haven't tried 3.0 with the latest
drivers for my board.

The solution on whether to buy Torque or not is simple enough: Download Realm Wars. It'll let you test it yourself.

-Eric, MRT