I've noticed in a few games that some of the textures on some of the polygons seem to disappear momentarily and reappear. It's hard to explain. Here are a few screen shots from Joint Operations with different detail levels:





The player sat next to me in the helicopters should have full comouflage on instead of the grey you can see. The still picture doesn't really show the problem very well as the textures flicker.

My PC spec is:

AMD Athlon XP 2700
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe BIOS 1.008
1Gb Corsair XMS3200 Low Latency RAM
2 x 160Gb Spinpoint P80 HDD in RAID 0 array
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128mb
Audigy 2 ZS
525Watt Power Supply
Windows XP Service Pack 2
All the latest drivers i.e. Catalyst 4.9, Nvidia 5.10, Audigy drivers

I've tried a full reinstall of windows and the problem persists.

Anyone got any ideas???

 

Have you tried them with a previous version of the catalyst drivers?

 

I tried going back as far as Catalyst 4.7 but I have the same problem. I'll try a really early version.

Thanks for the suggestion though

Here is the problem in Sims 2



The grass flickers between light and dark.

 

No major loss on Sims 2 then Missus is playing it at the mo, at least it gives me some free time

Here's some other snippets of help that might be useful, some might be out of date but worth trying anyway.

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4548.html
http://www.short-media.com/forum/arc...hp/t-6403.html

mentions a few things like turning off anti-aliasing (if you have it on), turning on/off VSync. Unfortunately nothing seems really obvious

 

Hmm..

Wonder if the 9700 suffers like the 9800 can with fast-writes enabled on the AGP bus - might be worth trying turning this off in the bios or ATI settings. I believe that caused issues with displays - not sure if they are like this thou.

Which DirectX version are you running 9b or 9c? Might be worth going to 9c if using the latest catalysts?

I keep seeing threads on other sites saying XP SP2 is a no go on AMD based systems - not sure how much truth there is in that!? Or if this could be a contributing factor.

Worth checking the ATI site for known bugs if all else fails.

Sorry if the doesn't help much - but some things to try may be.

PS. just seen this on overclockers.co.uk, commenting on SP2 causing weird issues in games:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/sho...eadid=17292229

 

I'm running DirectX 9.0c.

I think it's a heat issue on the card as the probe that I've tried to wedge under the heatsink is reading 65 degrees under full load.

I did go back to catalyst 4.3 drivers which reduced the problem in Joint Operations but not in Sims 2.

My new VGA cooler will be here tomorrow so I'll see if that cures the problem.

I'll try turning off fast writes too.

 

Steve have a look on this forum http://www.rage3d.com/board/

I think they have every known Radeon and catalyst driver problem known to man covered there. Can be a bit "Fanboyish" (ie my Nvidia is better than your ATi) but generally its a great source of knowledge.

 

Temp of your gfx card is normal. ATI cards run very hot compared to a pc cpu. My 9800XT idles @ 70C under full load 73C and its fine. I would strongly recommend u change your Nforce unified 5.1 drivers back to the previous version (4.27). The 5.1 set has many problems and issues. Just check the Nforcers forum to see what I mean.

SP2 works fine on AMD boxes; Disable the sh1tty firewall, dont install any of the 70 or so apps listed on MS website that arent compatible with SP2, disable DEP (maybe) and you'll be fine

 

I would tend to agree, as I'm running it on an AMD3500, but I've seen several posts else where which suggest it has caused problems specific to AMD.. but it could just be gossip. It definitely can cause probs with Apps and games thou, so may be a contributing factor to the above.

I'm backing it out this weekend, once I've transfered all the kit into it new case.

Alex

 

AMD64 related SP2 bug:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;878474

 

Yeh that restart bug only happens if u have mpegport.sys installed, which is only used by certain apps.

I was having numerous IRQL bsods when I first got my new rig. I changed everything, and it ended up being a crappy software firewall I was using that was causing it. XP is very fussy when it comes to hware n sware. SP2 seems to have escalated that. As apps n drivers that worked flawlessly in SP1, dont work or cause incompatibility in SP2.

 

And I'm sure my 3Dmark03 score was better with SP1 too!

M$ pah!