Flashing textures cured...

[WhiningKhan 0]

...by latest Radeon8500 beta drivers, at least on my system. :)

[Placebo 29]

With HW T&L selected?

[WhiningKhan 0]

Yep.

Although, I switched from Win98SE to Win2k before trying the latest drivers and didn't test OFP in Win2k until I had installed the new drivers. So, in theory, it could have been something else that fixed it.

Anyway, it's now fixed for me and the T&L is on!!! Haven't played it much since, but enough that I'd have noticed the flickering - at some places & angles of view it used to flicker almost constantly.

Anyone else had luck?

[Ginbo 0]

I just got the latest drivers as well, and it still flashes. I was killed by a gun with a hat on a flashing road.

[WhiningKhan 0]

It is indeed using HWT&L. I checked; It says it is enabled in the options. To make sure I tried to switch it to standard Direct3D mode in preferences - the slowdown was was noticeable. (Although not totally unacceptable, I admit...) Turned HWT&L back on, and there's still no flicker. For example, the last single mission in non-Resistance missions, Battlefield, was previously flickers galore when watching the platoons move forward - guns flickering, skin textures flickering, large patches of ground flickering. Now it looks as it used to be before installation of Resistance, no flasher-soldiers.

I'm happy now. I hope I'm not the only one.

My specs:

Win2kPro, AthlonXP 1700+, MSI K7T266Pro2 MB (using the on-board AC97 sound), 256MB CAS2 DDR, Radeon 8500LE with the 5.13.6193 drivers. R3DTweak installed but no special tweaks added at the moment. Not overclocking anything.

[nierop 0]

For me also all troubles solved....yipppiiiiiieeeee.

BTW what does the W-buffer do?

Oh yeah, I have Radeon 8500LE and winXP pro.

[Lt_Damage 0]

W-Bugger should be turned off unless you are having problems with compatability with OFP and your video card.

Off the top of my head I think W-Bugger makes performance a little better if you must use 16bit textures.

Mister Frag could tell u.

[Mister Frag 0]

The W-Buffer is a non-linear depth buffer.

When running in 32-bit mode, you get more than 4 billion possible Z (depth) values. In 16-bit mode, you only get a little more than 65000.

If you are running with a view distance of 1000 meters, in 16-bit mode you thus cannot distinguish the depth values of objects that are less than 1000 meters / 65,535 = 0.015 meters apart. That's only 1.5 centimeters, but enough to cause flickering of textures that are about the same distance from the viewer. Small parts of objects such as weapons, faces, and trees exhibit this behavior.

The W-buffer tries to address this shortcoming by allocating the Z values in a non-linear way, with an emphasis on the near and far range of the range at the expense of the mid range. Basically, things very close and very far away should render correctly, while there may be some artifacts in between.

The best solutions is to use a 32-bit mode if you can. If you cannot, and your video card supports a W-buffer, try enabling it.

[WhiningKhan 0]

Getting a bit off-topic, but I have to nitpick a little:

Actually, Z-buffer depth does not need to be linked with the colourdepth; NVidia's drivers used to force 32bit Z in 32bit color, I'm not sure how they are nowadays. At least ATI (don't know about others) lets the application choose the Z precision. Furthermore, current videocards do not support 32bit Z-buffer; they implement it as a 24bit Z+8bit stencil buffer. Thus, you do not get 4 billion possible Z values but 16.7 million instead in the '32bit Z' mode. Anyway, 16bit Z buffer is insufficient for OFP.

The W-buffer used to have some funky problems on OFP & Radeon earlier. If everything seems OK, don't enable it, but if you do and all still looks fine, good for you...

The legendary Derek Smart has been bitching around lately about Z-buffer and texturing issues with ATI. According to him, these drivers fixed the texturing problem in his Battlecruiser-project too so it seems there were at least two developer groups doing something that that caused the drivers to hiccup.

[Katto 0]

Still doesn't work for me, I uninstalled the previous ATI drivers before installing these and installed XP Service Pack 1 (with DX8.1B in it), no dice.