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Major Graphical bug - repost

Jul 26, 2004 Forum Moderator link
Whups! I had a little mishap while deleting a post. Here it is all in one shot, and edited for clarity. Sorry. Pretend nothing happened here.

Major graphical bug

2004-07-25 13:38:45 AlienB
Whenever I look at a station, particularly those with lots of docking ports, the frame rate stutters, sound chugs, etc etc. I can force Vendetta to quit, and everything else continues to run normally, vendetta just gets pretty f'ed over.

dual p3 1.0, geforce 4 TI, latest drivers, 1gb ram, soundblaster live.

<edit> it also did it with the geforce III I had in the box previously, I thought it was just some weird combination of things that would just make it happen on that card, but since it's doing it on another one, I'm reporting it.
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2004-07-25 20:30:39 raybondo
If this is windows, are you using dx or opengl? How much video memory do you have? Try lowering the texture quality or lower one or both of the scene LOD settings.
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2004-07-25 21:30:31 AlienB
Ray: these video cards have had no prior problems, and this issue is new to this version. I've never had any problems with it before. Mind you this is both a Geforce III 64mb, and a GF4 TI4200 64mb, both have played Vendetta flawlessly before. I don't know whats up, but I can switch to my Radeon 9700 in the same system and the problems dissapear. The problem occurs only in DX, OGL doesnt suffer this problem.
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2004-07-25 21:30:54 AlienB
Yeah I suppose I can attempt to try and record the problem using my webcam and another machine.
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Jul 26, 2004 mcnut link
I will second this. I've noticed it is notably bad around the docks for one reason or another.
Jul 27, 2004 AlienB link
This bug should be high-priority. Makes the game totally unplayable.
Jul 27, 2004 raybondo link
Our Gf4 TI4600 works fine.
I think it's the shaders on the stations, but they've always worked fine on gf3 cards before.
Lower the texture quality or scene/distance LODs and see if that speeds things up.
Jul 27, 2004 AlienB link
Yeah I did. I just reformatted and we'll see how it works now.
Jul 27, 2004 AlienB link
I just formatted, used fresh drivers, all the newest, bla bla. It's still doing it. it helps when I turn down LOD and distance, but if you get close enough to the station, it still flips out.
Jul 28, 2004 andreas link
Make sure you disable doshaders. That helped with my PowerBook.
Jul 28, 2004 AlienB link
Yeah um, thing is, I shouldnt have to.
Jul 28, 2004 a1k0n link
Did you try lowering your texture resolution? And it doesn't matter what you should or shouldn't have to do. We're trying to track down the god damn problem.
Jul 28, 2004 AlienB link
Lowering texture detail removes the problem
However, why was I able to run the game perfectly before without taking this step? How much texture memory does vendetta actually use?
Jul 28, 2004 AlienB link
Also, it only appears to be a certian module on stations, some dont appear to have it, and dont suffer the performance glitch, while most it's centrally located on the station models.
Jul 28, 2004 roguelazer link
From what I remember, Very High uses slightly more than 64MB. I only remember that because with my old 64MB card fps used to take a nosedive when I went from high to very high and it turned out that it was because Very High wasn't compressed enough to fit inside the VRAM. Of course, that might have been fixed by now.
Jul 28, 2004 AlienB link
Well that's the thing, I've always used "very high" with 64mb cards and never had a problem whatsoever.

<edit> Sorry for being a bit rude about this, I havnt been sleeping very much this past week.</edit>
Jul 28, 2004 roguelazer link
I guess they fixed it. *shrug* I haven't looked into it for awhile.

PS: Can you give us an exact fps or a dump of a framerate graph? 'cause I've always had my fps drop when looking at astation and I'd like to know how much yours drops. For comparison, like.
Jul 28, 2004 AlienB link
Um...well....it like...stops?

as in, 1-2 frames per minute.
Jul 28, 2004 roguelazer link
Possibly useful thread bumped.

As you can see, opengl gave me ~4fps looking @ station, isthat what you're talking about?
Jul 28, 2004 Arolte link
I think this pretty much sums up what's been happening on the Mac side also. Now it has just spread over the PC side. Luckily the framerate droppage is gone when "doshaders" is off, unlike before when it happened all the time regardless of what you did.
Jul 28, 2004 roguelazer link
Setting doshaders off gives wonderfully high fps. Of course, it also disables rglow and makes things generally MUCH less pretty...
Jul 28, 2004 AlienB link
Hm. I only had the problem under DirectX