je_saist

*headtilts*

I'm... not entirely sure this is accurate. The 2gb limit for memory access is for 32bit processors... but graphics processors have been running at much higher bittages for years now. I'm fairly sure that the OS's system memory limitations don't exactly apply to the memory limitations of a graphics card.

This post is NOT Kitty Approved.

Stomps into the thread with the RIBBONATOR! Assault Battle Suit, aims the multi-tracking ribbon howitzers at Bpphantom, and FIRES!!!

Here's a dirty little secret about most video games out today.

Video memory doesn't actually mean that much.

There are several other limitations in the graphics card architecture that will affect performance long before video memory size comes into the equation, such as the bit-size of the memory controller and the memory controllers speed. Sure, you can shove a full gigabyte of memory onto a 64bit or 128bit memory controller... but really, putting more than 256megs on a 64bit bus, and 512megs on a 128 bus... and in practical use... you'll just never see a benefit.

In the specific case of the 9800 GT, the weaker model, it had a 256bit memory controller with memory generally clocked at 900mhz (factory reference), and a memory controller speed of 1.1ghz. Depending on whose card you bought, those speeds could be higher or lower, and it did come in both 512meg and 1024meg memory configurations.

However... that only memory space really turns into an advantage if you are running in really high resolutions, or are applying a bunch of filtering affects. On a 9800 GT, for most games, you'll only see a performance difference either by cranking Anisotropic Filtering and Anti Aliasing up, or by cranking the resolution.

Will it matter in CoH?

Well. It doesn't really matter in UT3, Borderlands, BioShock 2, or any other popular game. Okay, you might have to run with only 4x AA and 8x AF with only 1680*1050... but... come on... that's not really a bad thing is it?

*inserts sound of 100 cars piling up*

You have no idea how close you came to completely ruining your computer. Graphics drivers are very complex to begin with, and outright deleting a .dll that's in use can have disastrous effects on your Windows Operating System.

So yes. There's /LOTS/ of problems with what you just did. atioglxx is just ONE PART of the Catalyst driver set: http://developer.amd.com/drivers/ccc/Pages/default.aspx

When it comes to drivers, you NEED to use the uninstall utilities first to make sure the operating system is no longer trying to access or utilize the driver in any way before you go about trying to manually delete. If you're not sure whether or not Windows is no longer using the driver, put the computer into Safe Mode first so a VESA driver is loaded, then delete.

www.khronos.org/opengl
Okay. I know you weren't looking for a press release for this question. OpenGL is a graphics API that is exposed by the graphics drivers. OpenGL allows your hardware to process specific graphics related commands.

As OpenGL is exposed by the Drivers of a graphics card, and not by the Operating System, it is relatively platform independent. All known computer systems with graphics capabilities can use OpenGL to access hardware acceleration of those graphics.

***

Anyways, what you need to do now is start from ground-zero.

Go to the add/remove programs, or programs and features section of the control panel.

Remove any applications that are labeled ATI catalyst.

Reboot the computer.

Run Driver Sweeper.

Reboot the computer into safe mode.

Run disk defragment.

after the Windows disk defragger finishes operating, boot back into regular mode.

Run MyDefrag: http://www.mydefrag.com/ with the Defragment Only option.

The point of running both of the defraggers is that defragmentation is still required maintenance for NTFS formatted drives, but Microsoft's included tool is literally the worst in the industry. This also assures that the old graphics drivers are permanently deleted and overwritten.

***

Now, download the latest Catalyst Update from http://game.amd.com/us-en/

Do not use the version found in Windows Update.

***

This should put your computer back into a state where the correct graphics driver is loaded.

I presume you mean a tank picking up a scrapper and hurling the scrapper into the middle of a mob?

hmmm. I'm not sure I can answer that truthfully in regards to the City of Heroes game without breaking NDA right now.

I can tell you, that... from an implementation of OpenGL itself, OpenGL has become a lot more like DirectX. What I mean by this is that more of the actual processing is described in the specification, leaving less room for one single vendors interpretation of how what that processing is supposed to produce.

In the previous history, certain vendors (aka Nvidia) were prone to implement proprietary OpenGL extensions. One of the primary reasons Nvidia was known for this is that the OpenGL architecture review board moved at a speed that even Glaciers would call a bit slow.

Khronos's.... overtake... of the OpenGL API changed this speed of development, and the wiggle room of developers implementing the specification. As of OpenGL 3.0, there's not a whole lot of wiggle room for true-er implementations. Ergo, with the OpenGL 3.0 cards, if somebody is using the specification from Khronos as the reference guide, you should get identical images regardless of what graphics card you use.

Right now, neither Nvidia nor ATi are pushing any vendor-specific OpenGL extensions that I'm aware of; and at least the RadeonHD 2x00-4x00 series of cards from AMD, and the Geforce 8x00 - GTX 2xx series of cards are all capable of running the OpenGL 3.0 feature set.

Whether or not the entire feature set is exposed in the drivers...

well. I can't answer this fully in regards to CoH... at least not without stepping on more toes than I want to.


You give your card too little credit. The 8800 GTX was a freaking monster of a card. It was one of the reasons Nvidia had such a hard time pushing 9800 GTX's... it just wasn't that much faster than the card it was supposed to replace.

Not going to argue this particular point. It's why my posts tend to be rather verbose when I counter something somebody said. I try to take the time and paint the logical path and the theory behind that path.

That being said...

One of the big issues with many of the threads in the Suggestions and Ideas forum is that so little have had any thought applied to them. A large percentage of threads are generated because another game did something, so if another game did something, this game must do something. Very few posters stop to think about that sort of development response / strategy tanking Planetside, Star Wars Galaxies, and Tabula Rasa.

After a while, it becomes a bit grating. Maybe I can explain it like this:

• It's one thing to have an idea...
• It's another thing to have an idea, realize it's incomplete, and ask for help on improving the idea or completing the implementation of that idea...
• and it's quite another thing entirely to have an idea, not complete it, and just toss it on the forums, and expect everybody to treat it like a complete and whole idea.

Does this help explain why so many Original Posters seem to get jumped for quick shot ideas?

Oig. Lets hit the Dave and Busters in Atlanta. I'll buy the drinks and we can swap horror stories.

With the responses I got, I'm not sure there's anymore to elaborate on. It read like a catch-all I don't like how the game does this so I think it should change post.

I know the PvPer's don't like it, and they tend to be the most vicious about it, but there isn't a large enough PvP playerbase to justify spending any development resources on a PvP system. As I understand it, PvP is no longer a work in progress, it's now a do we keep it in the game, or remove it and move on from there? Now, I could be wrong on this. Player versus Player content could come back some day, but there's a large disconnect between what Castle, Posi, War Witch, and the other developers want to give players, and what the existing PvP player base wants.

I described it in another thread a few months back. Castle is interested in providing a PvP enviroment where players are balanced and everybody has a fair shot at winning a fight. This is good PvP. Pretty much every other PvP game out there, from Planetside, to Unreal, to Quake, to Tribes, to Call of Duty, and so on, is based around the concept that everybody has a chance. A cloaker in Planetside can take out a Max armor. It's difficult, but it can be done. A player in Unreal with a Flack Cannon can take out the guy in the tower with the sniper rifle. A player with a rail gun in Quake can take on the player with the rocket launcher... and has a chance. When you leave the FPS world and look at other games, the chances hold up. A person playing the Terrans in Starcraft can take on the Zerg. A person racing in Mario Kart or Jack X gets better power-ups and can take the lead.

The existing PvP player base, and the few people who left after the I13 changes, largely want a Ultima Online style auto-gank, haha, I win, tea-bag emote, run back to my base where I can't be attacked and proclaim my uber-awesomeness. Yes. There is a market for this style of play. However, it's not a large market. It's certainly not anything to base an entire game on. Ultima Online succeeded since, for the most part, it was the only game in town. Same thing with Everquest and it's open-PvP.

NCSoft found out the hard-way with Tabula Rasa that the number of people willing to pay MMO prices for a PvP-centric game was a drastically smaller number than the vocal minority had indicated. Tabula Rasa wound up offering players a PvP-experience that was less polished and incredible unbalanced when compared to Planetside, and a PvE experience that suffered drastically from the shift in developer focus.

The Tabalu-Rasa debacle is something that I'm pretty sure Paragon Studios and their publisher are not going to forget anytime soon. Sometimes that squeaky-wheel needs to be greased. Other times it just needs to be taken off and thrown away.

***

In the same way, base raiding as we knew it under Jack Emmert and crew is gone. It's not coming back. The demand from the player base is not there.

So bringing up either of these two issues, PvP or Base Raiding, in any discussion about the future of the game or how it works, indicates to me that the person broaching the subjects does not have a clear handle on how the game works, nor how the developers make money. It's basically the equivalent of I haven't been paying attention, so I'll bring up something that I know was a hot topic years ago.

Ultra Mode

Wait.. what? Could you clarify what you mean by this statement? What mechanics problems need to be addressed? Which need to be removed?

This sounds more like a sock-puppet statement than anything legit.

Probably not going to happen.

While some of the Task Forces are up for revamps, such as Positron Task Force which is getting revamped in Issue 17, much of the existing content will remain that, existing content. So far with the known information in Going Rogue efforts are being focused on completely new leveling / leveled content rather than rehashing existing content.

Okay. This line is bull manure.

The topic on server merges has been done to the death. Short version, it's not going to happen.

The first fact is, maintaining separate servers doesn't carry a large financial cost. The physical hardware has already been paid for.

The second fact is, each server has multiple slots. If one server isn't busy, GO PLAY ON ANOTHER SERVER. You have multiple character slots for a reason. USE THEM

The third fact is, not everybody wants to play on a crowded server. Sorry. But a large percentage of the game is quite content with their broadcast channels being free of conversations that make Power_NA and Vitality seem smart by comparison. Not everybody likes getting off of the train in Talos and getting lagged out.

The fourth fact is, what most of the people clamoring for a server merge want is for the developers to mandate where players can go to play. Most of the game doesn't want to be told where to play. If the developers told me that I had to login, and that I had no other choice but to play on the same server as you? I'd quit. I'd head right over to the PlayNC account and cancel.

The fifth fact is, we just had two months of completely free-of-charge server transfers. If you don't like your server? If you think it's dead? TRANSFER OFF! If you didn't take advantage of those free character transfers, don't come to these forums and bluster about merging the servers. All you are going to do is tick off every gamer who has been through a server merge before.

The sixth fact is, what you really want is more slots on the server you play on. Well, fine. Ask for more slots by asking for more slots. Don't ask for more slots by asking for the entire game to sit on a hot red spike of (this comment has been censored due to extreme vulgarity and comparisons of unnatural and barbaric acts involving intimate relations with Planetside)

*head tilts*

I've got a 4850 running Catalyst 10.1 with Dual Pistols and no problems here. Can't say I've heard of this type of problem.

Do you get crashes in any other games?

It's ranking up there with Martial Arts for Blasters and equal level Mastermind pets, that's for sure.

***

Okay. If you like that game. Go play that game.

Don't try or suggest bringing Champions Online into City of Heroes.

Oh wait, was this supposed to be a don't mention the game name because it's JUNK deal or something?

This explains a lot about SOE's servers...

Microsoft gremlins.

Okay, I understand your question now. The thing is, you can use DirectX as a feature basis, since Microsoft and partners like FutureMark have done a better job of communicating what each release of DirectX does or supports.

DirectX 9 is about equivalent to OpenGL 2.0
DirectX 9c is about equivalent to OpenGL 2.1
DirectX 10 is about equivalent to OpenGL 3.0
DirectX 11 is about equivalent to OpenGL 3.2

For Ultra Mode graphics you do need a physical card that supports DirectX 10 / OpenGL 3.0.

You, however, do not need an Operating System that supports DirectX 10.

Right now, in theory, if you are using... say... a RadeonHD 4850... you'll get the same visual image across Windows NT5 (2000/Xp), Windows NT6 (Vista/Win7), Linux (Cedega), and OSX (Cider).

Now, while it can be confirmed that Ultra Mode doesn't require an NT6 operating system... I'm afraid there's a limit on just how much else can be said at this point.

(like, if you have a card that only supports DX9 / OGL 2.0, Ultra Mode features are not exposed in the game client)

Okay, point. Badly phrased. It was supposed to be a point that there's not a whole lot of difference between $15 a month and $10 a month if you are paying each month as it comes. If $5 is the breaking point for somebody's income on a consistent per monthly basis... I'm not entirely sure they should be playing an MMO.

Granted, I'm saying this having spent years supporting Cable TV and Cable Internet where there was an endless parade of people with either or both service(s) that couldn't afford things like:

• a new pci network card. The network card's port had gotten buggered up and the customer flat out said they didn't have the money to buy a new network card... although they were paying for the fastest HSI service Cox offered. For those interested, the buggering up of the old network card involved peanut butter. No. I didn't ask WHY there was peanut butter in the network card port.
• batteries for the remote. Customer's account had the premium cable service (StarZ, Showtime, HBO, all of the HD channels), and when told to replace the batteries in the emote, exclaimed they didn't have money for batteries.
• A portable radio. This is one call I wanted to get a copy of. During Hurricane Katrina I took a call from a customer who had both the fastest Internet Service and all of the optional Cable Services. As there was a freaking HURRICANE going on, of course both services were off. The customer called in on their cell phone, desperate for us to send a truck out... in the middle of a freaking HURRICANE... to fix the cable service. Why? Because according to the customer their cable TV and cable internet was the only way they could keep track of the weather. When asked what happened to the battery powered radio that anybody in a freaking HURRICANE should have, the customer replied that they couldn't afford a portable radio.

The point of these anecdotes is that they have generated an inherently low opinion of people buying, or thinking about luxuries, that duck behind the well if it was $5 cheaper or I can't afford that. If $5 buck item purchases are the make or break point on things like video games, well, there are larger issues at hand that need to be dealt with. Namely food, shelter, water, medical supplies, and basic utilities.

Ai, this sort of nails it.

One of the problems here is that the pay-scale on CoH already runs from ~$11 - ~$15 a month if you pay in advance versus paying monthly. I, personally, save up and pay for a 12month / 14month subscription which means I don't have to worry about setting aside $15 each month, nor worry about the subscription dinging the bank account at the wrong time.

There is the empirical evidence from Sega that some gamers will play some MMO's just because those MMO's have a lower monthly cost: e.g. Phantasy Star Online

Ergo, I think that most MMO's could probably afford to decrease prices over-all.

However... in a niche game like City of Heroes, when it's the only game that offers this kind of experience, it's a bit of a moot point. If you really like to play the... ante up and pay up. If the cost of a happy meal is what's keeping you from playing each month, well... maybe this isn't the game for you.

OpenGL deary. Not DirectX. Please read the thread.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=502
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=464
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=446
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=444
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=379
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=347
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=268
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=257
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=224
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=211
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=210
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=206
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...0&postcount=67

And yes, we did get a developer to directly comment (indirectly) on CoH's graphics engine.

Oops. I did it again. Yes. Television did say the following. No, I forgot the quote wasn't visible to everybody.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like Television and crew are staging stuff inside OpenGL 3.2 as well. That could be... interesting.

so. let me get this straight. Nearly 4 months after I make this thread, you log in and openly troll another member of a forum?

okay. I'm not going to say that talk about Electrical Control is pointless. I am going to say that yanking threads that are buried in the archives is just a bad idea to begin with. If it's that important, make a new thread.