1) Mouse flicker (this problem still exists in this time of age?)
2) Massive artefacts / garbage when starting a new game
3) Intro and background movie only occasionally shows up (sound is always there).
I managed to solve the first two problems and posted solutions below... The third one I havent been able to solve yet. I suspect it is more of a logic problem... since the intro movie was playing right through the ending credits (I hit escape when it started repeating).
These solutions might be ATI-specific only, as I do not have an NVIDIA card to test with.
My system info:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
ATI Radeon x1950 PRO 128MB AGP (Omega 4.8.442)
ATI Radeon 7000 PCI (Omega 4.8.442)
GeiL 2 GB DDR2-400
ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2
Windows Server 2003
My settings:
Everything enabled / high, with the exception of texture quality (low, due to video ram capacity) and vsynch (off), full screen at 1280x1024.
Solutions to mouse flicker:
This one has to do with some conflict with FSAA. (I suspect some race conditions in the drawing code). To solve it, I used ATI Tray Tools to set FSAA to "Application controlled".
Solution to massive artefacts:
This one should probably be explained, a picture says more than a thousand words.
This can apparently be solved by overriding the vertex shader (VS) version to 2.0 using ATI Tray Tools.
It seems the game has some dodgy approach to vertex shaders. The official requirements state that you should have a card capable of VS 2.0. The x1950 PRO however has VS 3.0 (which is why I bought it) and DXCapsViewer (Microsoft DirectX SDK) confirms this. So how can forcing the VS to a lower version have any effect? I can only assume that the VS version is mis-detected and / or that it is in fact sending VS 4.0 commands to my card. I dont get paid to debug GPG games so I leave playing with PIX to the devs.
One more thing I would like to note is that the manual cleary states:
Quote:|||Your graphics card is dead.|||If I had to guess, I'd say it's your drivers.
Perhaps SS doesn't play well with the Omega's.
I'm not experiencing any of these issues with my HD4870 on the official Catalyst 8.6's
Checking my Processor utilization during gameplay, both graphs on my C2Duo are spiking, meaning it's utilizing both cores. It's not maxxing them out, but it is utilizing them.|||DeadMG|||I found two programs that test SM 3.0 specifically. I used 3DMark 2006 and D3DRightMark (Beta 4). all tests passed. So atleast its some reassurance that my card is not fried.
As for core usage... I did some more testing. Basically I fired up the game in a debugger, started a new game, fought my way to the reactor and probed thread times. I did this twice, to be sure. The result was identical:
Lots of threads doing nothing. Most are probably async IO threads and so on. One exception being thread 4FC, which is most likely handling sound. The entire game (graphics, physics, AI, etc) is run on a single thread (thread E58).
Only one thread was created while running (as soon as PILOT speaks for the first time), which is also never released.
So yea, to put it bluntly... this game is about as multi-core aware as a brick... which is dissapointing but 'everbody does it so I guess its ok'.
Your observation about utilizing multiple cores is right Arglaar, it does spread the load. However this load will in total never be higher than 1 core's worth since a thread cannot run itself in parallel.
I'd love to hear some confirmation from devs about this 'multi-core awareness'.|||Also getting garbage on screen, tested on 2 seperate rigs, both using gforce 6600 cards one sli and one agp. Seems the longer you play the more garbage on screen. Tried forcing the above solution but getting it to use shader mode 2 or 3 on the new forceware is a pain unless i go back several versions and that aint happenin
Apart from that I am actually enjoying the game, though in 5 min bursts before the garbage is to much i cant see
|||The last time I had graphical errors like that in a game, a simple reinstall solved all of my problems.|||brent_w|||I've seen errors like that twice, and both times the graphics card had to be replaced.|||Well a Nvida 6600 still works acceptably with DS2 - as long as you avoid 1280x1024, higher details/shadows and sight range enhancements.For Space Siege however, according to the readme.txt a 6600 misses the system minimum requirements.
Indeed you may get the SS demo running nevertheless but anyhow a Nvidia 6600 seems to be too inferior meanwhile related due to its performance or feature support.
So if you get >10 FPS at 1280x1024 and average settings without a SLI-duo and without over-clocking the card then please post how. Perhaps i can apply this on my own one...
About the ATi 1950pro as initially mentioned, i would expect the game should run with it generally since this card should have a similar performance...like … a Nvidia 8600 probably!? (But please correct this.)
However i'm not sure if the design of the DirectX 9/10 pipeline is enough flexible that a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 doesn't need to wait on the results of a graphic card introduced 2 or 3 years ago.
Maybe the reader of this thread would prefer to make up his mind about the dual-core optimization of SS when a more representative hardware combination (with official drivers) is used.|||KillerGremal|||FearlessGoat|||We saw this type of texture corruption during earlier testing a number of times, and every time it was tracked down to heat problems on the video card. Twin systems would not usually exhibit the same problem.
From what I have seen, it is a bit like heat stroke. Once a card has overheated once, it is much more susceptible to the problem later on.
I would suggest lowering some of the video card settings as an experiment (resolution especially), letting the card cool down in a low stress environment like the desktop for a few minutes, and then starting up the game and seeing if it takes longer to exhibit the problem. If it doesn't happen at all, then start tweaking up your settings until you are happy with it.
If this works, keep in mind that a good long term solution would be better cooling for your card or CPU. You are probably prematurely aging your card by running it so hot.
- Servo|||the community manager is right... the artifacting is due to you over clocking your GPU, or having inferior cooling...
if you happen to lock up or crash im going to guarantee that you damaged a sector of your GPU's ram from your OC'ing/inferior cooling...|||GPG-Servo|||Thank you for your lengthly reply GPG-Servo, however it seems that I already resolved the issue through some rigorous manual driver cleaning last night. There were apparently some catalyst leftovers that never got removed so I guess I should blame ATI instead. Before this, I could reproduce the issue with a 100% success rate. But now it is completely gone.
I should note that I am aware that these symptoms are usually heat-related (I seen it happen a couple times with a few friends).
With 25C (77F) ambient, I get the following reading from Everest Ultimate:
Idle (just seti@home running):
Motherboard - 39C(102F)
CPU - 41C(106F)
CPU1 - 45C(113F)
CPU2 - 45C(113F)
CPU3 - 44C(111F)
CPU4 - 48C(118F)
GPU - 45C(113F)
GPU Ambient - 38C(100F)
GPU VRM - 57C(135F)
Maxtor 6Y160P0 - 28C(82F)
Maxtor 6Y160P0 - 28C(82F)
While playing (1280x1024 max everything + seti@home, half our play):
Motherboard - 42C(108F)
CPU - 41C(106F)
CPU1 - 44C(111F)
CPU2 - 44C(111F)
CPU3 - 44C(111F)
CPU4 - 48C(118F)
GPU - 53C(127F)
GPU Ambient - 41C(106F)
GPU VRM - 84C(183F)
Maxtor 6Y160P0 - 28C(82F)
Maxtor 6Y160P0 - 29C(84F)
VRM is still a bit high but it beats going past 105C(221F).. failing point according to the datasheet is around 125C(257). Everything else is... not even "warm".
Hopefully that odd FSAA/mouse flicker issue gets resolved with some patch... this is a good game, albeit rather short.
And I dont suppose I could ask for some official words on "multicore usage"? Probably pushing my luck tho.|||Leftover Catalyst drivers... that's a pretty scary thought. Glad that you got it working better though. I am curious, did you completely uninstall your Catalyst drivers and reinstall fresh?
It doesn't look like your video card is running in the "insane" heat range, but that is still pretty high compared with the cards we run in-house.
To your mouse flicker problem, have you tried the solution in http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=30696? That is actually a separate issue awaiting updated drivers from the video manufacturers. Just a workaround for the time being.
- Servo
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