Re: A very sad personal decision with regard to "pc games"....

Zaghadka wrote:

No, no. Why did THEY bother to write all this code that isn't needed and I can
take out of my HKLM:run and still have a product that works fine?

Why bother? Why are they wasting the man hours writing all this unnecessary
code?

Hey, you only really need the software resident if you're using it.

Hey. The app broke when I installed the 7.2's, and it *stayed* broken when I
rolled back to the 7.1's, even though it worked fine with the 7.1's before. You
want to call that a conspiracy theory, go ahead. I call it cause and effect.

It's clear what broke the program, installing the 7.2's, and it's clear that
ATi *doesn't* appreciate this freeware author showing up their Catalyst team.
Add those two together, and it isn't the stretch you imagine it to be.

I hope it wasn't deliberate. Since they monkeyed with the CCC's a lot in the
7.2's, to bring a quicker cleaner experience to their users, I would hope it
was just an accident.

Or maybe I just had a weird experience limited to my machine alone. Dunno.

If you read their driver downgrades faq you'll probably find a comment about uninstalling any curent drivers _completely_ (back to VGA) & then rebooting, then re-installing the older set. Did you do it this way? You can't expect older software to be forward-compatible either ya know ;-p

That's the full reason. I *am* an x850 owner you know. Before that, a 9500
owner, prior to that a 9000 owner and before that a Radeon 32MB DDR owner, so
you're not talking to someone who dislikes ATi.
I had a Riva128, then a Voodoo3 2000, GeForce 2 Ti, 9600Pro & now this X800Pro. I like to spread myself around ;)

Yup. They're good cards.

[snip]

Hell, I run Oblivion, G3, X3 & most fps on the current rig just fine for my tastes. Haven't really given Supreme Commander a good thrashing yet, but I believe that's more cpu/bus bound so that's a complete system upgrade if it's a no go.

I never saw anything like that in Kotor, but I was probably just using the default DX drivers. Why use OpenGL with Kotor if you have an ATI card anyway? More pigheaded stubbornness? ;)

KoTOR is an OpenGL game, friend. It doesn't run Direct3D at all. However, many
of the problems only happen when you have both AA and AF enabled. If you didn't
use antialiasing or aniso, then you wouldn't have seen it.

I probably didn't to be honest. I think I'll reinstall this w/e just to see (& to piss you off ;-p)

But ATi would apparently rather *market* their cards than make them work. They
spent a lot of time designing Ruby, who flopped, and far less time fixing BUGS.
Never heard of Ruby. See, marketing BS at work & not working :)

Yup. She's the chick in the Control Center. Waste of time and money on ATi's
part.

Hey, I liked that NVidia Fawn chick with the ATI wrapper & nude 'hack' - anything similar? <g>

Heh. With the new R600s(?) it's hard to ignore ATI though. They look to be oh so yummy. Not that I'll afford one for another year *sigh*.

Dunno. If the software isn't there, then the hardware means bupkiss. I've lost
confidence in ATi's ability to write software. Their Radeon *hardware* has
always been top notch.

By all accounts it creams the top offerings from NVidia. I guess that's what we get when the big 2 get into out-of-sync series releases.

Maybe that's the result of deliberate sabotage, but it's the fact. If you want
to play KotOR without lines and seams all over the place, plug in an Nvidia
card.
Again, I don't follow, as my 9600Pro & X800Pro after it played Kotor just fine (but perhaps with DX). There was the hardware mouse driver bug early on which caused the game to crash (IIRC that was ATI driver related), but that was easy fixed.

There are little lines all over all the menus if you run both AA and AF. There
are also some nasty artifacts on Tatooine, on the buildings. Sometimes you can
see some funny seaming, but that's pretty rare. Turning AA waaaay up, makes
most of it go away (in the blurriness).

Have you run the game on an Nvidia card? How do you even know what it's
supposed to look like, otherwise?

I guess I don't, but only being a semi-gwhore I thought I would've noticed. :-/

It's not unplayable, it's just that they should have fixed these issues. The
reason they didn't was because they've always been half-arsed on their OpenGL
ICD. Not enough games use it, so they didn't want to rewrite the whole thing
just to fix KoTOR. They did some work with Carmack to make sure the 9700 played
Doom 3 well, but that was about it, and you still had guys hacking the shaders
for that game to improve the experience for ATi gamers.

ATi simply has a poor track record with OpenGL support.

I won't argue with that, just with how important that is for gaming to this mercenary :) Mind you, if I decide to take the Linux plunge I guess I'd better get on board, ey? ;)

I don't think it prudent to ignore developers like Lucas, Bioware and iD,
nevermind the ENTIRE linux community, and expect to be a market leader.

OpenGL is important, despite Microsoft's fantasies.
I don't disagree, but to be realistic, for the gaming market right now it's just a spec of dust in an ocean of M$. If you can't beat em...

Don't have to. I just won't be playing. I'm thinking of buying a Wii.

Don't go there! You can't clear your conscience of adultery by becoming gay & batting for the whole other team ya know! ;-p

I'm sorry you've ended up at the arse end of the tech-issues minority, but that just tells me there's other factors possibly at work here (mobo, bios, OS/patches, etc). They say oils ain't oils & any 2 PCs are nothing like each other if you look closely enough. It's a miracle they run most games & software as generally reliably as they do.

I meant that you have kill the CLI.exe line in startup or your machine takes 30
seconds to 1 minute extra to boot. You've already told me YOU kill CLI. You
have to edit out the stuff ATi installs by default, because it's unneccessary
and makes your machine start up slow.

Actually, to be honest, I reboot so rarely that, no, I haven't taken the startup lines out of the registry (or using msconfig.exe). So sue me. ;-p

So I'm of the opinion that Catalyst is a complete and utter pig, and I'm not in
the minority on that opinion, there are entire tweak guides about what parts of
.NET and Catalyst you can shut down and disable and still run just fine and
keep your commit charge low.

Please, I'm glad you're happy with YOUR system, but I'm far from alone in being
unhappy with the way the Catalyst program has gone.

Oh I know - I've read plenty about them here & elsewhere over the past couple years.

If they *don't* change direction, they'll end up in the shitter, just like
3dfx. Anything can happen, save more of the same.
Well, they're in the AMD shitter now. I doubt that conglomeration will go quietly into the night any time soon without at least forcing some serious competition out of the opposition, which can only be good for the rest of us one hopes.

Or maybe it's just MS hedging their bets and creating a second (and competing)
Intel/Nvidia? ATi was very much in bed with Microsoft in the run up to Vista,
so their drivers WORKED, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Nvidia has
had such troubles getting good drivers on that system.

I think MS is monkeying around with the hardware industry, and pitting these
two conglomerates against each other. Time will tell.

But it won't heal anything...really...;)


--
'Some day, guys like John Lewis will be remembered as the
"Judges" of an Internet Priesthood, and will be quoted by
4th grade teachers in AntArtica. Do we realize that
millions of people read our feeble-minded debates every
single day .. forever?' - johns 23/2/2007

Nostromo
.