ATI Issues and Settings Recommendations

I have an ATI Radeon 3100 Graphics and I've been having input delay problems. Do I need a better graphics card or do I just need to update it? And how do I go about updating my graphics card?

Hi, I'm a bit lazy to read all the pages, but as I mainly play on a laptop bought January 2009, I was wondering if you could give me any warning/advice about what I could make in order to get a better performance from UM. Here are my specs:

HP Compaq 6735s
AMD Turion(tm)x2 Dual Core Mobile RM-70 2.00 GHz
4,00 GB RAM
Windows Vista Home Basic Service Pack 2 - 32 bits
ATI RADEON HD 3200 Graphics
driver version 8.479.1.4000 (although ATI CCC says 8.479.1.4-080521a-064461C-HP)
Direct3D version: 7.14.10.0567
OpenGL version: 6.14.10.7417

To sum up, I can play with some UM features set at "Low", but as soon as I try to set them higher my screen nearly freezes up. My current UM settings (after enabling and disabling several combinations) are:

- FSAA: N/A
- Shadow Mode: Stencil
- Environment Reflections: Disabled
- Water Effects: Low Quality
- Ambient Occlusion: Off
- World Texture Quality: Medium
- Character Texture Quality: Low
- World Detail: 200%
- Depth of Field Effects: Disabled
- Desaturation Effects: Disabled

Thx in advance for any suggestions.

That graphics chipset is rather low end and is not designed for gaming so it won't support the higher levels of UM.

You can see where this graphics chipset falls (2nd page) on a Graphics Card Hierarchy chart from March found here.

Being a laptop, you likely can't upgrade the graphics chipset and even if you could it would likely be a lower end chipset as well.

Some have reported that setting FSAA at 2x or 4x instead of Off has helped them.

Lower the World Detail to 100% instead of 200%, that should help you out a bit.

BillZ, with your initial settings, can you tell me why you have the character detail set to 200%?

And also why you have the CCC verical sync to 'always on' and the in-game vertical sync 'disabled'. I would think it would be the other way around.

Pertaining to my issue with the shaders and the newer settings and my lack of shadows.

When I change my shader setting from 'stencil' to 'shadowmaps' with the next slider on the 'lowest setting' the game is unplayable/lags horribly and everything has a moving shadow attached to it.

What I didn't mention is that my shader quality setting locks on 'high'. Is that supposed to happen with the shadowmaps setting?

If I can get that unlocked and am able to put it on 'low' (with world bumpmaps) which was my initial setting with the older graphics settings, that may be my solution to having no shadows. I am guessing it would give me less of them which should not lag me up.

I have notice playing around with 'low' (with world bumpmaps) and the 'high' setting under shader quality there is quite a difference in game. For instance the signs in the deteriorating arena area where you level up are not lite up in the 'high' mode but are lite up in the 'low' (with world bumpmaps) setting. There is also a big difference in the archnos base maps.

Anyway my main question with this is does the shader quality setting lock on 'high' when the slider is moved to 'shadowmaps' or is it my drivers?

World Detail now affects reflection of objects in the water and I believe Shadows (not sure on the shadow bit) and not just the how close an object needs to be before it's rendered.

Sorry, misunderstanding on my part about the World/Char sliders.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Father Xmas World Detail now affects reflection of objects in the water and I believe Shadows (not sure on the shadow bit) and not just the how close an object needs to be before it's rendered.

There are still a few anomalies. Take for instance boats. The moving kind, out on the water. Their reflections don't show up until you're almost on top of them, no matter what your World slider is set to (even vis_scale 4). Kind of jarring. Another very glaring anomaly is the boardwalks in Talos. You know, Spanky's Boardwalk, with the long docks that go out from the island? Those boardwalks' reflections also don't show up until you're almost right on top of them. And because they're made up of multiple "pieces", as you get closer you can see them appear in a line. This is also something that's not affected by setting World Detail higher. Maybe I should make a separate thread about this...

Folks, I know I stated that I was going to get up a new thread this weekend, but there's FAR too much video freakiness going on with both Nvidia and ATI cards and Issue 17 for me to be able to do so.

I just don't have the real life bandwidth to spare to give this the attention it needs and probably won't for several months.

Does anyone know if the 10.4s render the ogl 4 preview drivers obsolete?

I am running the CCC 10.4 drivers with no real problems. Is there anything to be gained by installing the 10.4a and/or the ogl 4 driver instead?

Thanks for any advice!

Running 10.3 myself and not sure if I should update my drivers or not. For now i think i'll leave well enough alone and just keep them.

10.3 has the same problems that 10.2 had, the 10.4's don't have those issues.

I Just got my new PC yesterday. It's my first time using an ATI card, so bear with me...

I logged on this morning for about 10 minutes (spent all night downloading CoH and other stuff). I tried cranking everything to Max video wise... the framerate was around 20-25, with zero lag. So I was happy.

Only thing tho, is if I touched the FSAA, the game looked like it became 8-bit... The higher up I went with it, the more it started looking like an NES game. If I left that at zero, but left everything else cranked, the game looked and ran fine (well, looked as good as can be expected without the FSAA on).

I know the drivers it has on now are 10.3, and the card is an Sapphire ATI 5870 1gb. Anything I can do to fix it? I tried removing the AO since I heard there were issues with it and FSAA, but it didnt do anything, it still looked like old school Mario Bros.

Have you tried 10.4? FSAA + Depth of Field has issues with blockiness, but nothing like you describe.

Four quick pieces of advice for ATI users:

1) If you have ANY drivers other than the 10.4s installed, install the 10.4s. They contain a fix for the Shadow Map shader quality crash issue which affected the 10.2 and 10.3 drivers. Be sure to completely uninstall your old drivers first. Note: laptop users and people using ancient ATI cards, make sure your laptop doesn't use legacy video drivers before you try to install the desktop or mobility 10.4s. If your system screws up because you tried to install incompatible drivers, not my fault.

2) There is currently a compatibility issue when trying to use both FSAA and Ambient Occlusion. This issue typically affects the 5xxx series ATI cards, but it might also happen on certain older cards. This issue has been present since the beginning of the I17 closed beta. Unless ATI can come up with a solution, the only way around it is to use either FSAA or Ambient Occlusion. Using both, regardless of what setting either feature is on, will result in graphical artifacting.

3) Make sure your CCC and in-game settings are compatible with each other. Be sure that CoH is controlling both your FSAA and your AF, that your vertical sync settings are compatible,and that any other possible conflicts have been resolved.

4) Triple check your in-game settings. The overall fixes to rendering which have made most ATI cards fully compatible with CoH have made the old work-arounds for FSAA and AF unnecessary. Furthermore, enabling Ultra Mode for the first time from the login screen changes most of your in-game settings. Go over your options panel with a fine-toothed comb to make sure that everything is where it should be, keeping in mind your CPU and GPU capabilities and limitations.

Ok, so removing the depth of field helped a bit, but did not remove the problem. Removing DoF and AO completely does not change the fact that FSAA for me makes the game look like an NES game the higher it goes. Only thing I have left to try is the 10.4 drivers.

I'll try to post pics later today.