eta on cat 11.6 fix?

please see top of forum:

Also, to answer your question, this is a driver issue with AMD, not a game issue with Paragon Studios. You need to go file a /bug with AMD: http://www.amd.com/us/CatalystCrewSurvey

This is far from certain.

ATI drivers worked well until the introduction of i20, and more specifically i20.5. In other words, players using the same ATI driver before and after the issue launch had the game "break" after the issue change.

This does not mean it is a Paragon Studios problem. But it isn't clear as to who is at fault.

It would be great if Paragon Studios could get into contact with ATI and hash out where things went wrong and how to fix it, though.

Oh, it's pretty clear to me, to be honest. *Immediately* after installing 11.6 - and I tend to not just "install over the top," but uninstall, head to safe mode, run driver sweeper, THEN install the new ones fresh - I went from rock stable to crashing repeatedly.

Uninstall, re-download, clean, reinstall - same thing.

Immedate reversion to 11.5 - all issues stop. No COH patch in between.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Yep, same thing here, although I had to go all the way down to 11.3 or .4 (can't recall) before the problems stopped. No changes with CoX at all, just driver updates.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Yea, I agree 100% it's an ATI issue. I had the same experience with 11.6 with all other things being equal. It wouldn't be the first time ATI/AMD has had this problem. Back in 2004 or 05, Creative had a similar issue with their audio drivers that caused me to lose a little hair.

Reportedly the OpenGL rendering problem has been fixed in the 11.7 preview released for gDEBugger: http://developer.amd.com/tools/gDEBu...s/default.aspx

Note: i haven't actually tested it myself.

really?

Okay?

Yes / No / Not really.

For starters, there are multiple versions of OpenGL. Ratified versions of OpenGL include 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.0, 2.0 ES, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, and 4.1. In addition OpenGL also supports Vendor Specific / Proprietary Extensions.

The original City of Heroes rendering engine was built with help from Nvidia and leveraged several proprietary Nvidia extensions for graphical effects. This was why ATi users had issues with depth of field and water effects for so long.

During Going Rogue development Paragon Studios worked with AMD to rewrite the legacy graphics engine to use API calls only in the ratified OpenGL 1.4 / 2.0 specifications, which incidentally broke compatibility with Intel graphics chips that also depended on vendor-specific extensions. In addition AMD and Paragon Studios implemented a Ratified Specification compliant rendering engine based against OpenGL 3.0, I believe the first retail game to leverage OpenGL 3.0.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, OpenGL is a complex API covering a wide range of acceleration technologies designed for fast-single-pass rendering such as those used in game, and multi-pass techniques used in rendering jobs for the likes of Pixar and Dreamworks.

Changes to an OpenGL driver that improves performance for something Pixar does may have negative impact on performance for a rendering job such as that used by City of Heroes. This is also why Driver vendors often issue warnings with their drivers to not upgrade unless you need to.

Really? As far as I'm aware none of those games support the sheer number of potential players in a single area with anywhere close to the number of possible particle effects and other rendering techniques called for by Costumes and Powers alone.

Whether you like it or not, CoH is incredibly graphically intensive in the Ultra-Mode settings.

Performance should be the same. According to the graphics masters at Valve Software and IDSoftware (e.g. Gabe Newell and John Carmack) there isn't a whole lot of performance difference between OpenGL and DirectX.

Have fun with that.

You do know that Nvidia is in major financial trouble, right? http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:NVDA

Bull Manure.

It took Nvidia over 4 years to fix a bug in their 96 driver branch.

Oh, and Nvidia has a total of 3 different OpenGL legacy drivers from the 71, 96, 175 branches to cover just how often their driver breaks, neverminding their current 275 stable branch and 280 development branch.

And then there are threads such as this one where everything was fine before a CoX patch. (User looks to be using ATI 11.1 drivers.)

And yet there are users (like me) that have severe crashing issues with ATI 11.5 drivers that 11.4 works for. (I haven't tried 11.6 at all.) And there are those users that 11.4 doesn't work for. And I could keep going.

And yet there are several users that have issues with nVidia OpenGL drivers.

As long as we are using circumstantial observations, it appears that CoX isn't coding properly for OpenGL.

But it isn't that clear. As players it is impossible to roll back versions of the game (I'm not even sure Devs can do it - they may not even have that code anymore) to do any real proper testing. Not to mention, as players, we won't even get paid to do it.

All we can say for certain is that something in CoH (likely Ultra Mode related) and something in ATIs 11.X drivers aren't playing nice together.

Even if they should ever port CoH over to a console platform, I surely would not abandon my computer to play on it. Another game tried the whole PC/console platform, guess what, it blew chunks.

I've had very few graphics issues myself and haven't had to roll back, but then I've been a little slow in updating my drivers, seems that's been a good thing this round.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

/this. The last console I actually spent time on was an Atari 2600. I've *had* an NES and PS2, but they went away quickly.

The games I like and the flexibility I want are not available on consoles (go ahead, try to play Sins of a Solar Empire on one... or find a *real* flight sim) - and I almost never have trouble with games on the PC.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Not guaranteed on consoles either, if you want to be honest about it. And also not guaranteed NOT to break (especially in this day of Internet-connected, pushed-update consoles) afterward.

My personal success rate with PC gaming is in the exceptionally high 90s - we're talking 99-and-many 9s before we change percent. Games that didn't work right away? Right now, they tend to be VERY old games (Mechwarrior II - even the Win95 version, Subwar 2050... um... that's actually all I can think of that don't work for me right now,) or it's a driver revision that can be rolled back.

(Which is a choice I wouldn't really have on a console. "Update or be locked out, and new games may not run either" is where you are there.)

Yes, it was worse in the days of DOS, and if you play with alternative OSes, it's more work with no real guarantee of success. But a Windows PC... yeah, it's pretty good, usually.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Early preview driver 11.7 works fine with me and CoH, the 11.6 crashes are all gone and forgotten

Awesome, will have to try it out when it's released.

I noticed that trend. (I happen to have a Radeon HD 5750.) Although it isn't limited to the 5XXX series.

But I am pretty certain that is just a matter of "playing the odds." For many, many, months several cards in the Radeon HD 5XXX series have held the "sweet spot" for price versus performance. I don't think it would be an unsafe bet to wager that the largest percentage of cards in gaming computers is a Radeon HD 5XXX series card. Of course, to hedge that bet, it is almost certainly true among ATI cards.

I have a 5870. Still running the 10.8 drivers, which have proved to be rock-solid. I tried several newer versions; each eventually wound up having issues so I decided to stick with this version until I actually need to change. I've had zero crashes of any type for months, even playing several games that happen to be very-crash prone (as in devlopers forced to admit they really shouldn't have released them in that state). Still, zero crashes.


I have a friend with a high end 4xxx series ATi card. He upgraded his drivers and started having tons of problems (in this game and others). Rolled back to the 10.8's...all problems went away.

We play for several hour sessions on Monday together, trials and all. No issues.

you need to first uninstall your driver, if you don't know how, AMD has a nice tutorial on how that's done. You'll know you've done it right if you get prompted to reboot your computer, do that. with the 10.8 drivers, after proper install, you will be prompted again to reboot your computer, do that again.

Or be more thorough - grab DriverSweeper. No longer at guru3d, though.

1. Run the uninstall via add/remove. Make sure you're getting everything, including the catalyst control center.

2. Reboot in safe mode. Run driversweeper. Have it remove all ATI drivers.

3. Reboot normally. Install your new (or, rather, older) drivers.

As for what I'm running:
Core i7-860
8 Gb RAM
Win7 x64 Home Premium
ATI Radeon HD 5770

See my Guides and Tutorials

This is not the case for me at all.
Everything was fine until I updated to the most recent driver whenever that was. I rolled back the driver and everything returned to being just fine.
That's been my anecdotal experience/ ymmv.