[redberg]

The Geforce 8800 GTX doesn't seem to work for FS2. Least it doesn't for me. The game looks like crap and is ridiculously dark. Even upping the brightness the animations look jagged.

I tried installing FS2 open 3.6.9 and the game still looks terrible if not worse. Any way around this.

(btw I am using the newest Nvidia drivers etc...)

[redberg]

to Update, using Open GL makes it look a bit better. but the game still looks a bit worse than usual.

[jr2]

What OS are you using?

[Admiral Nelson]

I have an 8800GTX, and Vista 32 bit.  No FSO troubles here.  I run it with 16x AA and 16x AF

[jr2]

Hmm, maybe you guys can figure out a solution... I dunno.  (Unless I get more info, then maybe.

[IceFire]

Sounds a bit like the drivers weren't installed...make sure you're using one of the more up to date Forceware drivers.  The windows default and provided drivers on a disc are almost never good.

[Nuke]

its them vista drivers again

see its stuff like this which will greatly delay my move to vista.

[redberg]

I'm using Windows XP Pro SP2 up to date to the date.

As I said I'm using the newest drives available for everything. Done some tweaking with the options and reinstall the VPs and things look proper now. However, the fonts in the menu and on the HUD are all messed up and the font fix hasn't worked.

As a side note I wouldn't touch Vista with a ten foot pole since A) drivers are still beta b) gaming performance is down 20% from XP (Read Tom's Hardware) c) It isn't stable and finally d) I don't know if it was a error in the minimum requirements, but it only lists Vista 32 bit for C&C 3 and not Vista 64 for some reason. *shrugs*

Also not too interested in this idea Microsoft has to eventually use Vista to run games straight off the cd or dvd like a console. It is as if Microsoft doesn't look at the trend in gaming and that people are buying hardrives for their PS2 or getting the PS3 that comes with one.

Back on topic: It is just the font that is messed up everything look great now that the VPs are reinstalled and can use Direct3D again, since for some reason when I used Direct3D before reinstalling It gave me a video card error.

Thanks btw

[redberg]

Solved the problem. It was Nvidia's network manager was also slowing my internet So its been uninstalled and everything is kosher once more. thanks.


SCP looks great

[neoterran]

It's not going to look good if you don't use OpenGL. Sheesh ! People are STILL using DirectX !!!! When will they learn ? 

[jr2]

But DirectX is Mickeysoft!  It must be good!

[miskat]

Microsoft will never succeed at making a successfull trend in making PC games that run off the CD like console games.  A: it's too limiting.  B: it's too slow, access speeds are what? 10% those of hard disks?  Performance would suffer.  Especially with the multi-tasking enviornment that is Windows.

No way that will ever catch on... period.

[Bob-san]

Microsoft will never succeed at making a successfull trend in making PC games that run off the CD like console games.  A: it's too limiting.  B: it's too slow, access speeds are what? 10% those of hard disks?  Performance would suffer.  Especially with the multi-tasking enviornment that is Windows.

No way that will ever catch on... period.

I thought it was 25% that of hard disks, but it regularly caches the data.

A 1x CD-ROM drive should be able to read a 650mb CD in 74 minutes.
A 2x ... in 37 minutes.
A 4x ... in 18.5 minutes.
A 8x ... in 9.3 minutes.
A 16x ... in 4.6 minutes.
A 32x ... in 2.4 minutes.
A 48x ... in about 1.5 minutes.
A 52x ... in about 1.4 minutes.

Its about 8.7mb/minute transfer speed at lowest speed. Remember sustained read and sustained write speeds are different. Your limiting factor is most people still have IDE drives, many people make the stupid move of putting a hard drive and a disc drive on the same IDE channel; you can only run one at a time. Normally, the drive will read information, put it on the disc cache (2mb?), load it to RAM, load it to HDD cache (8mb?), and write to the hard drive once you have ~8mb of data in cache. It slows it down, compared to being able to skip storage in RAM. Only one IDE drive can be active on a single channel. I myself have 3 IDE drives; one CD-ROM and two HDD. The HDDs are on the same channel; one is for Windows and one is for Ubuntu.

Still, its a grey area with copyright laws; who owns the disc and how many computers are they allowed to use it on?

[Grizzly]

But DirectX is Mickeysoft!  It must be good!

Yeah, right.

[jr2]

load it to HDD cache (8mb?),

Most nowadays have 16 MB or more
BTW, those disc reads are assuming you're not skipping places on the disc.  What really kills them is their access time.  I can look it up later if you want, but their access time sucks.  (when compared to a hard disk)

[Bob-san]

Well most standard hard drives are 8mb caches under about 320gb. At 320gb, most drives come with 8mb caches. The point is you have to either cache the entire disc or have long wait times. Caching the disc will make it faster but require installation. Also, compression (or rather decompression) requires cache space. Its basically required to use high-storage discs that are already uncompressed. I could do a thing like that for Freespace2 if I didn't care about storing my player file. of games don't need registry to run, though on the same note many do.

[jr2]

All of mine are 16MB caches... I only have like 5 of them.  (Then again, I use Maxtor...)

[Bob-san]

Well they're moving toward 16mb caches... it doesn't make much of a difference, however. My current hard drives are an old 8GB Maxtor with 2mb cache and a 5-year-old 80gb Western Digital with 8mb cache. I need an upgrade... perhaps SATA?

[jr2]

Yeah, that would work... there's not really that much of a performance gain between PATA 133 and SATA 150 though.  Which ever is cheaper, I guess...

[SadisticSid]

I thought it was 25% that of hard disks, but it regularly caches the data.

A 1x CD-ROM drive should be able to read a 650mb CD in 74 minutes.
A 2x ... in 37 minutes.
A 4x ... in 18.5 minutes.
A 8x ... in 9.3 minutes.
A 16x ... in 4.6 minutes.
A 32x ... in 2.4 minutes.
A 48x ... in about 1.5 minutes.

Not true. A 52x drive is not 52 times faster than a 1x drive because it's impossible to read data towards the centre of a disc at the same rate as data on the outside at a given rotation speed. It's why >4x drives spin up and down when reading. Drives that claim to be 52x can only read the outer edge of the disc at that speed, and use tricks like altering the disc's rotation axis slightly to increase data throughput from sectors towards the middle. So on average, the 10% figure is probably quite accurate.