ATi Radeon 9600

[EAF92_Tango]

Could someone confirm that this card is supported?

Everthing starts off fine, but after a short but unspecified time things start to get a patchwork texture - knife, people, and the pictures of people and objects in inventory etc.

I've got the latest patch, and the latest card drivers.

[Waldluft]

Could someone confirm that this card is supported?

Everthing starts off fine, but after a short but unspecified time things start to get a patchwork texture - knife, people, and the pictures of people and objects in inventory etc.

I've got the latest patch, and the latest card drivers.

Sure...why not?
BTW, I have a 9600xt and it plays fine...

[EAF92_Tango]

I thought it would be pretty weird if it wasn't supported, but I'm getting some very strange texture effects as I say.

My card is the 9600 Pro 256Mb version.

I also find that the game is jerking almost constantly as though the swap-files are being accessed but I have an AMD 2.4XP+ processor, 1GB of RAM and a 7200 HDD.

I'm going to follow the advice on tweaking elsewhere in the forum and check my mobo drivers, see if that helps.

Cheers.

[Cartoon Corpse]

kill all user processes, including explorer. it's what i do

my rig: P4 1.4g, 1G rdram, 9700pro, 4x AGP, XP pro

i don't get a great FPS, but i only get occasional stutters.

[EAF92_Tango]

Cheers.

I'll give that a try.

So far I seem to be the only one with the textures going blocky. It's weird because it doesn't happen with everything - for example the pistol was borked but the knife wasn't. Some people had broken out in squares and others were fine. The sky was stuffed, the road wasn't.

I tried following the instructions for removing stutter and so forth posted on this forum and things run a lot more smoothly now, but I still have the patchy textures.

I was wondering if it's anything to do with the security system - I'm not sure what happens when the game thinks that an illegal disk is being used ... could that be it?

[McDBigMac]

Can be lots of things. Weird that it starts off ok though. Normally I would suggest the first thing to try was a reinstall of the game itself, you can still try that, but because it starts ok, becomes unlikely that your installation is corrupt.

It might be that your gfx card is defective. Is it just Boiling Point you have a problem with? Are playing other games at the moment without any probs? It might be the cooling which isnt working optimally anymore, in combination with faulty memory. As far as I know it is a passively cooled card (no fan on the gfx board).

[EAF92_Tango]

All the other games I'm playing at the moment seem, by and large, to be running fine. The last game I played was Deus Ex: Invisible War which is fairly heavy on the settings and that seems to run pretty well.

Any thoughts on how I can test my memory? I've tried memtest in the past but I've been told that it's not that reliable.

[GAMEBOY]

i think that on very high resolution with 9600 PRO and 1.5GB RAM we can play that game, or shutters will be anyway?

by the way what drivers u use catalyst 5.6?

[EAF92_Tango]

Still get stutters but so far they seem workable.

My main problem turned out to be that the drivers (5.6) that I thought I'd installed hadn't, in fact, installed and that I was playing with the old ones that XP rolled back to when the 5.6 drivers were unable to be installed.

It was only when I uninstalled all the ATi stuff from my system (including going into the ATI folder and manually deleting the files in SUPPORT and then tried to re-install 5.6 that I realised there was a problem. 5.6 wouldn't install then either, and just knackered up my screen.

I'm not sure if it was just a screw up or whether it was that I was running SP1. I have now installed SP2 for XP and it all seems fine.

[McDBigMac]

Stuf probably got broke after your initial try to install the new driver (without deinstalling the old one). Read the instructions that come with the Ati drivers, they explicitly state that you have to deinstall the old driver first, then do the install of the new one. Just think of this: your video driver is always running. Deinstalling software that is executing is a recipe for disaster. That's why you also have to shutdown after uninstalling the old driver (just to get it completely removed).

Best procedure (at least works for me) is to set a restore point first, then deinstall the old driver, install the new one. You can rely on the rollback feature of drivers in XP but just in case the install (for whatever reason) corrupted something else than the video drivers itself, I use restore points, which is a complete copy of the system as it was before the install.

So you lost the texture corruption now, only have some occasional stutters? Those may just be from on the fly loading parts of the map that you are entering (which may involve loading new textures into your gfx memory, and the access speed of your HD).

[EAF92_Tango]

I was weird, I ended up having to remove all of the drivers and firing up XP in VGA mode in order to at least get the thing so that I could fix it.

I tried it with old drivers installed, no drivers installed, but it only seemed to work with SP2 installed. I guess it's just one of those things.

Sometimes I reckon, as far as the stutters are concerned, that the only real difference between this game and games that have loading times between areas is that games with loading times between areas have a little bit of text in the centre of the screen saying "loading". I guess that that's just, as you say, down to my HDD access times.

Still, I'm happy. I even found that all my savegames work fine with no texture corruption.