[Tahna Los]

Hello

I have the "flickering white triangles" issue.  While looking for a solution, I noticed a shader vp pack which was supposed to fix the problem which I downloaded a .rar file for it and extracted the VP.  It does not appear to have fixed the problem.  Someone mentioned that the pack was likely damaged during packaging so am wondering if anyone has the actual pack that is confirmed to be working.  Can someone post a link to it?

Thanks.

(And in case anyone was wondering, I have a Radeon 6850 and I just updated to the latest drivers today.  No dice)

[Zacam]

(sarcasm)Ah. ATI. How I love thee.(/sarcasm)

It's not likely that the package was damaged in any way, though I can repackage it without a problem.

Depending on which build you are using, there are two packages that can be used. If you're using the 3.6.12 EXE, then you need one based on the 3.6.12 shaders, which I presume is the package you downloaded. Nightly Builds have different shader defines in them, and can use the shaders (and should) in the above Shaders thread (Reply #53 by me).

Should nether of those options suffice to remove the issue and if no older drivers are available, then you'll have to wait for ATI to release an updated driver that doesn't break ****, as 90% of the time it is due to driver/OpenGL interaction issues.

[The E]

*Sigh*

Yeah, ATI has a habit of regularly breaking their OGL support in some way or another.

[Tahna Los]

I did download 3.6.12.  I got my shader pack from here: http://koti.mbnet.fi/reiler/FunkyFreeSpaceStuff/ma-sdrvfix.rar

[Snail]

And what's this about ATI being cutting edge and forward field and everything? Their drivers are always borked.

[CaptJosh]

Cutting edge of a rusty blade, if you ask me...

[The E]

If you to think that nvidia drivers are any better, I'd like to invite you to rewrite the current shaders without the use of the #unroll all pragma.....

[CaptJosh]

At least nVidia actually has support for CURRENT versions of OpenGL. How far behind is ATi on that again?

[The E]

They aren't. Current OGL version is 4.1, which is supported on, I think, on every GPU in the 5k series and later.

[CaptJosh]

Huh. They never used to keep up that well. It's welcome news that they've changed that.

[Rodo]

So If I'm about to change my video card, should I go Nvidia or ATI?, thinking about freespace of course.
I don't want to enter in the hole price/performance speculation.

[The E]

5k series Radeons with a pre-11.3 (or 11.2? Not sure) driver should be OK (In terms of power, you should be able to play WiH with acceptable framerates even on cheap hardware like a 54xx card; I use a 5470 Mobile, and it works just fine).

I am unaware of any current issue with nvidia hardware.

EDIT: Note that the issues with Radeons are highly specific to some Driver/card combos; the 5470 I am using shows no errors with the 11.4 drivers.

[Zacam]

For nVidia's side of the fence, anything 8800GT 512 or later should be reasonably decent. Pre-8800 GT will still likely do well, (indeed, my old 7600 GT still holds decent frame rates) there is more complexity involved that pretty much require the concept test shaders to really work out well, but those still have issues as well so it's kind of a "6 of one, half dozen of the other" deal. And it only really works out at all thanks to the aformentioned "#pragma unroll" option we are using.

Driver wise, there are currently only 3 drivers that I know of that don't have issues with FSO: 257.21, 260.99, 270.61. Anything else is either suspect or confirmed as having issues with how they decided to handle "deprecating" older features for reasons I'm still trying to understand.