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fjaekel

graphics bugs with ATI 4800 series (4850/4870/4890)

By fjaekel, in ARMA 2 & OA - TROUBLESHOOTING

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WillaCHilla    10

WillaCHilla
Posted

@=KCT=BlackMamba:

How big is the performance increase for you (in FPS) after installing the new one? Are there any disadvantages with the new driver (e.g. CCC is bugged in any way)?

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Naku    0

Naku
Posted

I get plenty CTDs with 5870 and latest 10.3 drivers. There is no error messages or anything game just shutdown. Does anyone else have same problems?

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=kct=blackmamba    44

=kct=blackmamba
Posted

so far in the "benchmarktest 1" i get 2 or 3 more frames per second...

not very big difference but hey its 10% when u normaly get 30 fps..

---------- Post added at 06:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:50 PM ----------

I get plenty CTDs with 5870 and latest 10.3 drivers. There is no error messages or anything game just shutdown. Does anyone else have same problems?

yes last week twice.

but it was related to my @addons folder...

when i was playing vanila arma2 i started getting dutch army suits and equipment when playing online.

so renamed my folder and game runs normal again.

conclusion the game didnt like me to use almost the same name as the standard addons folder...

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UberSloth    10

UberSloth
Posted

Hi, this here be my first post, but I figure it might be half useful to those that may have a similar problem as my own. I literally bought this game about 3 days ago and have spent every night after work debugging my graphics problems. From that you can take away at least one thing - I'm a n00b.

So my mate wanted me to play ARMA 2 with him a little while back and presented me with a couple bits and pieces to put in my (quite frankly ageing) rig... all I had to do was put it together and purchase a graphics card. I went for a HIS Radeon 4850 1024 for a £100. My wife's pregnant so there is absolutely No way I could have got something more expensive without her bleating. Bless her. It had a chunky heat sink and a big fan, figured that would be enough.

So I threw it all together, installed the game, patched it, updated to the latest catalyst drivers ran it and walllla!! There I had a big shiny aircraft carrier chugging along towards me. Looks pretty so far... Running a bit fast for my liking mind. :) So I went to the video options settings and chucked everything up to Very High. Nice. Ran the Armoury ran about a bit and... wtf. I had quite reasonable frame rates, bloom looked nice, volumetric smoke effects looked pretty but why are the textures flickering randomly with a pattern of plain grey or red or green squares and properly ruining this quite frankly very pretty game. So I lurked in these here forum's and took all of the following pearls of wisdom away to try and fix this problem.

I... from the advice of many others... and I recommend you do this

1. Uninstalled Catalyst Control Center - It's a piece of junk anyway so get rid of it.

2. Installed and ran Driver cleaner Pro in Safe Mode - the amount of redundant crap that gets rid of is quite impressive but use it carefully. Make sure you have specific target driver set to get rid otherwise you could find yourself reinstalling your motherdrive drivers or worse...

3. Installed and ran CCLeaner to hlp clear redundant registery items - Helps clear away Catalyst control Center too so best run this after uninstalling that.

4. Installed and ran Ati tray Tools - Basically a light weight Catalyst Control Center with a lot more optimization features, and allows you mess with clock settings on your graphics card.

Now at this point I tried absolutely F***** everything for about 6 hours to fix this problem disabling features, enabling features and messing about with all the Graphics settings in game whilst in window mode so I can see results but all to no avail. I then read a post about a fix for a Warhammer game using Radeon cards which basically boiled down to overclocking the card to run at 750 mhz using Rivatuner. Tried it. good software, but didn't work. Then I thought I'll use the ATI Tray tools to overclock my card whilst keeping the temperature between 60 and 70 degrees. No matter how high I got didn't make a blind bit of difference to the stupid flickering. Tried underclocking it. Still had the problem. Seriously thought my card was broken at this point. Maybe there was a problem in one of the memory modules. Ran some analysis programs. No artifacts, no slow down, a sizeable benchmark, and no problems or warnings.

So if its not my hardware, and it's not the graphics settings... then that leaves memory. Which in way makes sense because the flickering is as if there is a lag between the reading and writing of the texture to the screen. Well I only have 2 Sticks of 1024 DDR... but I have a maximum of over 12 gigs of Virtual Memory spread over three partitions... thats pretty much maxed out each with initial sizes of 2GB so VRAM shouldn't be a problem... So if it's not Memory, then we're back to hardware. Hold on what about hardware memory.

I checked ATI Tray tools again, looked at the overclocking section. I'd overlooked it before but there's a Memory Speed slider. Now bare in mind here I still had ARMA 2 open in a window and it was running in the background I was monitoring the values of the BIOS Mem speed and the Current Mem speed while I was flying my Apache. Bugger me... why hadn't I noticed that. Bios speed runs at a steady rate (as expected). Current Mem though fluctuates dependent on the power needed to render a 3D scene / frame. Occassionally the Current Mem would rise above Bios Mem. this means that the Bios mem would be playing catch up with the Current Mem which would mean that it wouldn't be able to render a whole scene within a frame lifetime resulting in flickering squares of default color on a polygon surface it would have been dropped at the end of the current frame lifestime. This was my theory anyway. Lets put it to the test.

Dropped the Memory Speed right down to 700. So that's 200 mhz slower then then what it was, what happened to the game? Well For starters it slowed down considerably by about 8 frames or so... but there was no more of that stupid flickering! Oh yeah. Played with the settings a bit and stuck with a setting that was 40 Mhz slower then the Bios Mem. I can now fly around in my Apache at break neck speeds with no flickering and the video options maxed out. Not a glitch in site. Lucky for some I guess.

So well that worked for me, try it, I hope it helps some one. Thought I'd add this, give something back to the community for all your help.

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guttersnipe    1

guttersnipe
Posted

Help please!

Usine a 5970 Sapphire OC.

Card works well with most of the other games I'm using at the minute, definite performance gain.. . . however...

When I boot Arma2 with my regular settings (1280x1024 for both, all high, save for AF &AA @ normal & Post Process @ low (personal choice, I don't like the blur) - - I get a constant flickering/flashing which persists through the game no matter which in-game settings I alter (flickering aside there's a +15-25 fps from what I had).

The only way I can stop this is to go into CCC and set the Cat. A.I to 'disable' -when I do this the game loads normally & without flicker (albeit with a very much reduced frame rate).

Having read around a few posts I gather this means that I'm only using one of my GPU's?

Is this a driver fault or an Arma 2 one ?

Using XP, DX 9, Sapphire 10.3 driver suite (tried using ati tool tray but it crashes my system (v.1.5.9.1294). Xp & DX up to date. (rest of spec on p421 of this thread here)

Anyone with a 5970 have a similar problem & managed to solve it? (@Bangtail - you seemed to have both your GPU's working in game ?)

Need a little help here as performance isn't up to much, esp for an upgrade :(

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=kct=blackmamba    44

=kct=blackmamba
Posted

hey fellow ATI users,

im not shure so find out for yourself !!

i installed some catalyst profile files from rage 3D's website.

http://www.rage3d.com/xmp/

now when i run benchmark test 1

with Vanilla ARMA 2 i get up to 49 fps,

when im running ACE 2 i get up to 40 fps.

my ingame settings are

video memory: default

antialiasing: normal

shadow detail: high

world detail: highest

object detail: highest

post prossesing: highest

viewdistance: 1632

if u gained a few fps'es please post your score... :)

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Protegimus    0

Protegimus
Posted (edited)

It is and it immediately caused a problem for me with TrackIR 5 - TrackIR would crash on startup, version 5.0 05b, ATI Radeon HD5870 with WinXP Pro SP2.

Fortunately the debug log pointed me to where the problem lies - atioglxx.dll version: 6.14.10.9756 included with Catalyst 10.4.

Temporary fix for me is to expand the atioglxx.dll version: 6.14.10.9704 from Catalyst 10.3:

Under directory:
\ATI\Support\10-3_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Packages\Drivers\Display\XP_INF\B_96537

at a command prompt use M$:
expand.exe atioglxx.dl_ atioglxx.dll

under
\Windows\System32
rename the version: 6.14.10.9756 atioglxx.dll to atioglxx.dll.bak

then move the old expanded version of atioglxx.dll to your
\Windows\System32 directory

Not directly ArmA II, but hope that helps others that use TrackIR.

Jury is still out on whether 10.4 offers any improvement for ArmA, be interesting to read others experience (with hardware details), I see the following issues:

shadows incorrectly/sporadically drawn on buildings and MFD's within aircraft (got this on nVIDIA too, but was eventually fixed and appeared to provide a overall performance boost when they did)

Since BIS introduced the mouse lag changes

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=

mouse movement in the menus is sometimes very sluggish (appears to be when you drill down to the second level of menus or the multiplayer browser screen)

mouse pointer accuracy in menus is wierd, e.g. on the multiplayer browser screen at the top of the server list point, click and everything is cool

move down, point to a server and click and it selects the server below the one you're pointing at - I think this has something to do with FOV as you can induce the problem by manually editing the FOV values.

Various artifacts or missing objects depending on in game video memory setting (soldiers missing heads, distorted hands, objects such as the Javelin and helicopter rotors get the perspective rendering bug (objects drawn with surfaces rendered as planes disappearing to a vanishing point)

White sparklies around vegetation (orange bushes in particular) and men making them look like they are cut outs stuck on the scene...sometimes

Generally, performance isn't stellar, so any optimisation ATI could offer would be awesome, system spec's. here.

Anyone got a link to petition AMD to improve driver support for ArmA II? I tried the Catalyst feedback but that doesn't appear very useful.

Protegimus

Edited by Protegimus
Added graphical glitch details

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langgis08    10

langgis08
Posted (edited)

hoping this is the right thread for it ... :)

just a general question, perhaps even a question of taste:

what's your favourite for setup/configure your ATI-drivers (in my case Radeon 4870)

catalyst control center or ATI Tray Tools (mine: latest beta) ?

My opinion is ATT is better to handle, quicker to open, settings are quicker to customize ... and ATT doesn't use as much of ressources as CCC does, right.

But the most important question I have is: are there any features/settings I can configure via CCC rather than via ATT ? So is CCC closer to the driver/to the card than ATT is ? I'v made the experience that there's no feature (except of hydra vision and stuff) in CCC that ATT doesn't come with, so ATT is techniqual equivalent to CCC, or is that wrong ?

and ... of course ... the basic thing is if there's some "best practice"-setup in CCC or ATT to get the best (my preference is better graphic, not maximum of fps -> therefore my cpu is too weak, I know now) out of ArmA2 :-)

Edited by langgis08
building bridge to ArmA2

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gulag    10

gulag
Posted

I tested catalyst 10.4 driver, so far no problem for me, but neither signs of better performance, I have ATI Radeon HD5850, q9550, 4Gb RAM, Win7 64 bit.

So far I have not seen any problems with shadows.

White sparklies around vegetation - i have this issue more when there is smoke in the background.

Soldiers missing heads - only if I set the objects detail on normal, now are on high.

I have seen these issues, but I don't think it has to do with 10.4 driver, because I had these problems before.

I use CCC because ATT does not work on Win7 64 bit.

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langgis08    10

langgis08
Posted (edited)
ATI Catalyst 10.5 Released !!

:)

yes, but I wish it hadn't been released: FPS-drop by roundabout 10% in ArmA2 FPS analyser and about 20% in main menu screen (empty world) compared to 10.4 :mad:

@Radeon 4870/512

maybe the new driver is better for the newer cards ...

I'll fall back to an older (for me faster) version now

Edited by langgis08

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SnR    1

SnR
Posted

Like any other ATI driver over the last few years nothing beneficial for Arma players

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rowdied    44

rowdied
Posted
Have the Drivers actually fixed anything? still getting major problems.

ATI Radeon HD 4870 with the 10.5 drivers.

Are you using the default memory setting? I only get that when I use it so I use high or very high with no problems.

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MajorT0m    10

MajorT0m
Posted

It improved slightly when I increase the Memory setting, however it's still got the same effect, and is unplayable.

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InFireBaptize    0

InFireBaptize
Posted

i have 4870 1GB but i have never had this bug with arma2. I remember i had something like this in arma1 but disappeared once i replaced my PSU.

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