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On my X1650 card, 9.1 are broken, same issues with any other 8.X drivers, the game just hangs entering in weapon loadout or a second after starting the mission.
The drivers will NEVER get fixed, i have NO idea of why OpenGL is broken on older cards with newer drivers... I bet it has something to do when shadder tech changed from VP/SP to unified shadders...
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Zacam found the exact reason and posted it. Read this thread (
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,58371.0.html) or just this post (
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,58317.msg1181101.html#msg1181101)
It's something about X1XXX not having proper hardware support for some kind of transformation although they were supposed to have it as a SM3.0 capable GPU. This transformation is done by software (ie. atioglxx.dll). This way of working has been dropped in newer drivers and then, as FS2 shaders use it, the game cannot work. Nevertheless because of that lack of hardware support, shaders and normal mapping can have a great performance impact in X1XXX cards. So even working, maybe you can be forced to use -no_glsl anyway.
Newest cards are
fixed. You can't use old drivers with them because you need a driver which DOES recognize your card. But as these cards are not affected by the issue, why should you want to use an old Atioglxx.dll?
The only problem, (which I don't know if it is already solved), arises with Vista (new OS which needs a more or less recent driver) and these cards, because maybe the available drivers have dropped the old software method. Then you could be in a blind alley.
First post updated.
I'm on a Radeon 9800 Pro, that's even older than you...but know that you are not alone. The ATI official forums have a ton of angry users right now...
I'm using the 7.11 OpenGL's on a 32-bit system - just updated the first post with a download link to the 64-bit version. I have not, however, tested 7.11 with FreeSpace Open yet.
Hey 9800 is not SM3.0 capable so you won't be able to use glsl (and normal mapping). Maybe it's support has been completely dropped in current Catalyst.
So:
Xxxx or older cards. You cannot use glsl in any way because they are SM2.0 cards, not SM3.0.
X1xxx. They should have been working fine, but they don't. Blame ATI and use the Atioglxx.dll trick.
HD 2xxx or newer. IIRC they are fixed and working fine.