[MP-Ryan]

After posting in a few of the "can I run SCP?" threads, I decided to take some action.

As such, I've got a configuration guide made up in PDF format to help new users with older systems configure them to run SCP - hopefully.

I'm attaching it to this post (zipped up).  I don't know if a mod wants to sticky this or what.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[fsi.scsi]

:gives MP-Ryan reputation points:

Let's all have a round of applause!  No, seriously.  I'm not being sarcastic - this will do a lot of people a lot of favors.

EDIT: I read your guide and must say that it's pretty thorough.  I've personally tried all of the tweaks you mentioned.  However, I have to disagree with your "Not Recommended" label for the Omega Radeon drivers.  These drivers have been tested significantly and boost performance - more so than CCC.  In fact, these are the only non-WHQL drivers recommended by ATI:

"ATI supports the enthusiast community wholly. Omega Drivers are in fact a good example of ATI’s user community at its best. What they are in principle are CATALYST drivers with different settings enabled via registry keys and other such methods. This provides users an alternative to ATI’s CATALYST default settings. While there are a few different modification drivers out in the community our relationship with the creator of the Omega Drivers is of the highest working standard. The author of these drivers is part of the CATALYST beta driver testing team, and also in direct contact with ATI. In fact we would go so far as to say that if a user chooses to go the mod driver route, they go with the Omega Drivers."

-from an interview with Ati's Terry Makedon by Nordic Hardware

One other nitpicky detail: Some people may not have the option to resize the AGP aperture in their BIOS, and some tool (I forget the name) included with the Omega drivers allows you to do this from within the OS.  But yeah, other than that, cool cool.

[Huggybaby]

Thanks, up to date documentation is always welcome and badly needed!

BTW, after falling behind for some time, Omega drivers are now caught up with the latest ATI drivers (7.1), beating NGO to the punch!

Still, it doesn't seem like my ATI card will ever have OpenGL performance like nVidia manages, even though AMD has taken over ATI. FreeSpace is the only OpenGL app I run, but that's enough to ensure that my next card is from nVidia, unless something changes soon.

[Kaine]

ATI have never really embraced OpenGL properly. When they started producing "performance" accelerators DirectX was the in-thing, so unfortunately they jumped right on that bandwagon, and have never really got off. AFAIK up until recently their cards still only had a software implementation, instead of the chip supporting all of OpenGL's functions natively. With OpenGL 2.0 well and truly out, ATI still don't have a card that supports it properly either.

The sadest part of ATI's OpenGL slackness is that it reflects badly on OpenGL as a standard through the general ignorance of consumers and the army of ATI fanboys that insist it is OpenGL's fault that ATI have trouble producing a card that supports it properly. ATI have done themselves no favors on this front, alienating themselves from the kings of OpenGL developers- id- with the Doom 3 leak fiasco. Had they not totally screwed up this crucial alliance they would've had a well established developer giving them direct support and direction to develop better architecture and drivers to support the format.

/end ATI idiocy rant

[MP-Ryan]

:gives MP-Ryan reputation points:

Let's all have a round of applause!  No, seriously.  I'm not being sarcastic - this will do a lot of people a lot of favors.

EDIT: I read your guide and must say that it's pretty thorough.  I've personally tried all of the tweaks you mentioned.  However, I have to disagree with your "Not Recommended" label for the Omega Radeon drivers.  These drivers have been tested significantly and boost performance - more so than CCC.  In fact, these are the only non-WHQL drivers recommended by ATI:

"ATI supports the enthusiast community wholly. Omega Drivers are in fact a good example of ATI’s user community at its best. What they are in principle are CATALYST drivers with different settings enabled via registry keys and other such methods. This provides users an alternative to ATI’s CATALYST default settings. While there are a few different modification drivers out in the community our relationship with the creator of the Omega Drivers is of the highest working standard. The author of these drivers is part of the CATALYST beta driver testing team, and also in direct contact with ATI. In fact we would go so far as to say that if a user chooses to go the mod driver route, they go with the Omega Drivers."

-from an interview with Ati's Terry Makedon by Nordic Hardware

One other nitpicky detail: Some people may not have the option to resize the AGP aperture in their BIOS, and some tool (I forget the name) included with the Omega drivers allows you to do this from within the OS.  But yeah, other than that, cool cool.

The majority of BIOS's allow AGP aperture adjustment - especially for onboard cards.  I've yet to encounter one that didn't, actually.

The reason I don't recommend the Catalyst drivers is this guide is written for the a computer user something above beginner and something less than advanced.  The Omega drivers are fairly stable, however I've also known various revisions to generate some problems.  I'm reluctant to recommend something that is not provided by a manufacturer for one reason:  no matter how many times I say be careful, do your research, this is your responsibility, some idiot is going to use my guide to royally screw up their PC.  The Omega drivers, in my experience, are tempermental.  Nobody with less than an advanced knowledge of hardware and software configurations should be using them.

In short, it's not that I'm not recommending them because they're trash, it's because I think their use is above the level of the user who this guide is written for.  You'll notice I've been vague about some of the BIOS and other more advanced settings as well - this is because if the user is not familiar with them, I don't want them reading a short summarizing guide and deciding they know how to overclock their PC.

[MP-Ryan]

Still, it doesn't seem like my ATI card will ever have OpenGL performance like nVidia manages, even though AMD has taken over ATI. FreeSpace is the only OpenGL app I run, but that's enough to ensure that my next card is from nVidia, unless something changes soon.

My old GF4 Ti4600 kicked the pants off my Radeon 9500Pro when it came to Freespace (despite several benchmarks that rank the 9500 above it).  Unfortunately, it died.

[Darth Sparky]

Why a PDF rather than on the Freespace Wiki?

[MP-Ryan]

Why a PDF rather than on the Freespace Wiki?

Because I didn't even think of the wiki when I was writing it?   Good point... I'm an idiot.

I was lazy and didn't write it in HTML in the first place... guess I may have just made myself more work, unless some other benevolent soul wishes to put it on there

[Huggybaby]

Plus, you can download and share the pdf (what is it, portable document format?).

I was in the store and noticed on the nVidia boxes that thir cards support OGL 2.0. I didn't see anything like that on the ATI boxes. I think they're at OGL 1.5.

Dang, I want a new card now. I need another job.

[fsi.scsi]

ATI have never really embraced OpenGL properly. When they started producing "performance" accelerators DirectX was the in-thing, so unfortunately they jumped right on that bandwagon, and have never really got off. AFAIK up until recently their cards still only had a software implementation, instead of the chip supporting all of OpenGL's functions natively. With OpenGL 2.0 well and truly out, ATI still don't have a card that supports it properly either.

The sadest part of ATI's OpenGL slackness is that it reflects badly on OpenGL as a standard through the general ignorance of consumers and the army of ATI fanboys that insist it is OpenGL's fault that ATI have trouble producing a card that supports it properly. ATI have done themselves no favors on this front, alienating themselves from the kings of OpenGL developers- id- with the Doom 3 leak fiasco. Had they not totally screwed up this crucial alliance they would've had a well established developer giving them direct support and direction to develop better architecture and drivers to support the format.

/end ATI idiocy rant

ATI does indeed suck balls, but their higher-end cards mysteriously make up for the "OpenGL slackness."

The majority of BIOS's allow AGP aperture adjustment - especially for onboard cards.  I've yet to encounter one that didn't, actually.

*raises hand* Mine don't  - it's a generic Toshiba ACPI BIOS that has ~2 pages of bare-bones configuration information.  It was a real shock to me to find out that the most advanced thing I could do in my laptop's BIOS was change the boot priority.

In short, it's not that I'm not recommending them because they're trash, it's because I think their use is above the level of the user who this guide is written for.  You'll notice I've been vague about some of the BIOS and other more advanced settings as well - this is because if the user is not familiar with them, I don't want them reading a short summarizing guide and deciding they know how to overclock their PC.

Good points.  I wasn't thinking about that   

[neoterran]

After posting in a few of the "can I run SCP?" threads, I decided to take some action.

As such, I've got a configuration guide made up in PDF format to help new users with older systems configure them to run SCP - hopefully.

I'm attaching it to this post (zipped up).  I don't know if a mod wants to sticky this or what.

Nice Work.

Plus, you can download and share the pdf (what is it, portable document format?).

I was in the store and noticed on the nVidia boxes that thir cards support OGL 2.0. I didn't see anything like that on the ATI boxes. I think they're at OGL 1.5.

Dang, I want a new card now. I need another job.

nvidia's opengl support and performance in their cards has always been superior.
I am hoping this will change with AMD's ATi acquisition, because nvidia have alienated me with their dropping of support for all their legacy products with the nvidia vista launch, even those these products work.

my geforce fx 5600 ultra, a card that will be replaced (with a whole new system) sometime later this year, sucks ass at directx (esp with 2.0 pixel shaders) but it's quite solid in opengl apps.

[CP5670]

Here is one piece of information I discovered last week. I have been using the 6.6 drivers for the last several months, but I switched to 7.1 recently (since the Supreme Commander demo wouldn't work on 6.6) and found that they caused a significant delay in displaying FS2 popups. Whenever a popup message came up, the game froze for two or three seconds before displaying it. I used to get this same problem in D3D mode some years ago, but haven't seen it in OGL until now. I don't know whether this is a problem with FS2 or the ATI drivers, but I'm back on 6.6.

It's hard to say exactly when this issue started, and I don't have the patience to try out all the driver releases between 6.6 and 7.1.

nvidia's opengl support and performance in their cards has always been superior.

This is generally true, although not so much among modern OpenGL games that are mostly based on the Doom 3 engine. ATI cards have become faster than equivalent Nvidia ones in Doom 3-based games. On the other hand, the FS2 engine is at the other extreme. I have found that my old 7800GT almost keeps up with the X1900XTX in FS2 (even on HQ mode), even though the latter is twice as fast in almost any other game. I'm not sure why there is such a big disparity in FS2. It doesn't particularly matter since I can max out the settings comfortably in either case, but it's worth keeping in mind.

[MP-Ryan]

Here is one piece of information I discovered last week. I have been using the 6.6 drivers for the last several months, but I switched to 7.1 recently (since the Supreme Commander demo wouldn't work on 6.6) and found that they caused a significant delay in displaying FS2 popups. Whenever a popup message came up, the game froze for two or three seconds before displaying it. I used to get this same problem in D3D mode some years ago, but haven't seen it in OGL until now. I don't know whether this is a problem with FS2 or the ATI drivers, but I'm back on 6.6.

It's hard to say exactly when this issue started, and I don't have the patience to try out all the driver releases between 6.6 and 7.1.

It's a performance issue with your install of 7.1 Catalyst drivers.  I've run into it too.

Clean out the old drivers before installing the new.  I originally dumped 7.1 for 6.something too, but I later reinstalled 7.1 after doing a thorough removal of the 6.x drivers, and have had nary a problem since.  It appears that they're moreprone to a corrupted install or 6.x leaves behind something that 7.1 doesn't like so much.  At any rate, the problem is resolvable.

I've always been an nVidia fan until this 9500Pro was forced on me by circumstance, and I have to say I've had more problems with ATIs drivers than I ever had with nVidia's.  But, the ATI hardware seems to be somewhat faster.

[Huggybaby]

The Driver Cleaner Pro utility is mandatory:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745

It's way too hard to uninstall video card drivers regardless. There always seems to be a start menu entry left behind or some other such foolishness. And if you don't uninstall properly before reinstalling, you'll never get the next uninstall to work cleanly, which means the not fun process of going into the registry.

I've always disliked the registry. Well, maybe the registry is OK, but the way it's used isn't. 

[CP5670]

Here is one piece of information I discovered last week. I have been using the 6.6 drivers for the last several months, but I switched to 7.1 recently (since the Supreme Commander demo wouldn't work on 6.6) and found that they caused a significant delay in displaying FS2 popups. Whenever a popup message came up, the game froze for two or three seconds before displaying it. I used to get this same problem in D3D mode some years ago, but haven't seen it in OGL until now. I don't know whether this is a problem with FS2 or the ATI drivers, but I'm back on 6.6.

It's hard to say exactly when this issue started, and I don't have the patience to try out all the driver releases between 6.6 and 7.1.

It's a performance issue with your install of 7.1 Catalyst drivers.  I've run into it too.

Clean out the old drivers before installing the new.  I originally dumped 7.1 for 6.something too, but I later reinstalled 7.1 after doing a thorough removal of the 6.x drivers, and have had nary a problem since.  It appears that they're moreprone to a corrupted install or 6.x leaves behind something that 7.1 doesn't like so much.  At any rate, the problem is resolvable.

I've always been an nVidia fan until this 9500Pro was forced on me by circumstance, and I have to say I've had more problems with ATIs drivers than I ever had with nVidia's.  But, the ATI hardware seems to be somewhat faster.

Interesting, I'll need to try that out. However, I didn't encounter any actual 3D performance problems. It was only this thing with the popups.

I have had roughly an equal amount of problems with ATI and Nvidia drivers. They both generally work well on recent games, but have odd issues with various (different) old games. Both driver teams also have an annoying tendency to remove obscure but useful features for no reason. One thing I do like about the ATI drivers is the greater variety of options and tweaks available.

[neoterran]

There was once a time when Nvidia was clearly the better choice in both hardware and in drivers. Then ATi's hardware leapt forward quite substantially, all starting with the 8500, and reached its nadir with the 9700. Since then, Nvidia has come back, but I can't shake the feeling their drivers have lost quality from the halcyon days of Geforce 3