AO Video Card Detection.

[jorricane]

Bump - I know the guys at FC are very busy at the moment fixing some serious stuff, but when you guys get a chance, look into detection, pretty please?

[benhari]

I am grateful for the community trying to solve this problem. I am not going to start whining about the company, as others already do enough of that, but I paid in advance for a year last summer and I am pretty sure the client performed much better then as well. As of now, the game is virtually unplayable for me.

I have formatted and re-installed XP Pro. All important Windows Updates are installed. CPU is Intel P4 3.0Ghz and the system has 4GB of RAM (I was going to upgrade to Vista, but never did, so XP detects 3.12GB). But these details don't really matter, as AO worked just fine for me before, on this very same system.

My GeForce 7800GT card is not detected by the AO client. I've tried at least six different drivers today, re-installed the client, downloaded RivaTuner and tried some recommended settings e.t.c. It remains undetectable.

Yesterday I was invited to a city raid team with my doc. I went there, bothered by the FPS, but decided to try.

The ground raid was not a problem; I could heal and buff the team. When we entered the ship, FPS dropped to 1-3 and it was Game Over. After the first two aliens I told the guys that I could not do this due to the FPS drop, despite 12% viewing distance at that point. I have done lots of city raids incl. entering the ships before, and it was never this bad. This was with everything on "Low".

It is of some comfort to see that I am not alone having this problem, and I will keep checking this thread. I find the information posted here so far, interesting and useful. I get the same GUID as everybody else here (the default one), by the way.

Chili nuts and chocolate is good medicine right now, although I have to keep my friends on a safe distance.

[jorricane]

From what I'm noticing in my still ongoing trials of various moribund graphics cards, the nVidia 7000 series is seeming to be the oddest of the lot in terms of playability. My old 7900GS used to run fine (not great, but the minimum accepeted standard of 24fps in most zones), but it seems to be getting worse over time. To be honest, I doubt that there have been significant changes in AOs engine over that time, but some other changing factors either in Windows/DirectX or nVidias driver structure seem to be affecting it. The 5000 and 6000 series cards I have running are still running AO surprisingly well.

On the other hand, I recently had a friend retry AO on his old ATI Radeon 9800 Pro - which never ran AO well back in the cards heyday for him, but he was getting some really decent FPS in Borealis on a crowded day - nearly 35fps.... So maybe something IS going on in AOs engine - maybe some unannounced tweaks or unintentional modifications, although I don't see why they would be touching the rendering system at this point.

The fact still remains that the detection is broken, and really, if we are going to be waiting until summer (or beyond...) for the new engine, at least a quick look (set a time budget for the devs on it, even a day or 2 of snooping around in the code could be very enlightening) into the detection could wring some more life out of the lagfest slideshow that many people see in AO. Even on some of the recent indy youtube reviews you can see the fps bogging down in the character creation screen - done by the same reviewers who are doing cheap Korean MMO reviews with perfectly smooth FPS. Something has to give, either really push the engine release as much as is feasible, or throw us a freaking bone and AT LEAST say it can't be fixed at this point.

[Polmansol]

nVidia cards actually seem to be the most likely to detect, altho the 7900s don't seem to want to. Have you set up the new rig yet? And if so, any difference, is it detecting?

Yes, got my new system and AO detects my card, oh joy

Vista64
Core i7 920
GTX260 core216 with latest nVidia drivers

Last time i had such smooth AO gameplay was with my good ol' Geforce 3 Ti500, go figure ^^

[Fekal]

Yes, got my new system and AO detects my card, oh joy

Vista64
Core i7 920
GTX260 core216 with latest nVidia drivers

Last time i had such smooth AO gameplay was with my good ol' Geforce 3 Ti500, go figure ^^

Gratz

I remember the huge boost I got going from Gforce 2mx to TI4000 (not sure about the names, it's been a while since I gave those away...)

[Khalem]

I was experiencing the same problem on my GF's machine. WinXP, nVidia Geforce 7600 GS.

The sympthoms was that dxdiag would not even run the directx 7 rendering tests. After some digging around i discovered that certain programs/drivers can interfere with the video driver. Apparently netmeeting is notorious for this, and i also discovered that UltraVNC experienced the same issue.

To make it short, something was causing dxdiag/directx to not be able to read how much memory was on the card, causing the directx7 test to fail, causing it to report to AO that directx7 wasnt working, leaving AO unable to detect the card.

Disabling the netmeeting service and uninstalling the UltraVNC video driver allowed AO to detect everything just fine.

Not sure if this is related, but it's worth mentioning.

[Polmansol]

I was experiencing the same problem on my GF's machine. WinXP, nVidia Geforce 7600 GS.

The sympthoms was that dxdiag would not even run the directx 7 rendering tests. After some digging around i discovered that certain programs/drivers can interfere with the video driver. Apparently netmeeting is notorious for this, and i also discovered that UltraVNC experienced the same issue.

To make it short, something was causing dxdiag/directx to not be able to read how much memory was on the card, causing the directx7 test to fail, causing it to report to AO that directx7 wasnt working, leaving AO unable to detect the card.

Disabling the netmeeting service and uninstalling the UltraVNC video driver allowed AO to detect everything just fine.

Not sure if this is related, but it's worth mentioning.

Hmm interesting, gonna try and disable netmeeting service on my old machine (don't think it has ultravnc installed). I'll let you guys know if it did anything.

[ArilianII]

I have read this entire thread and tried everything that seemed applicable to try and make the video of AO show on my new Gateway T-Series computer. I have started another post but I am hoping that posting my info here might get me some help.

The first time I started Anarchy I got a message saying it did not find a 3d card. The video in this laptop is an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator x3100 with up to 384 MB of Dynamic Video. I decided against the Vista OS and used XP home instead. Game sees this card "Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset family - Direct3D HAL"

The game starts, but there is no Video. I have changed the settings to 16bit on Windows and the Game, but still no Video. I'm at a lost what to do next. Anyone got an Idea on how to fix this problem it would be much appreciated.

[jorricane]

Back to page one, we don't want people missing this.

[Deschanic]

I have the same issue, client doesnt show the graphics driver so i switched it to run in windows 95 compatibility mode and now it says i have directx 4 lol so i downloaded directx9 which my system already had and it say the same crap

Heres a Pic of the message http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w...g?t=1242134553

[ArilianII]

Thanks for the advise,

Tested everything and everything works, however there were 3 unknown devises with 3 big yellow "?". I disabled them and the game video works perfectly. Stiill had to use 16 bit, doesnt like 32 bit yet, But wll figure it out.

The devices were all Vista drivers that were no longer being used since I am back to using XP Home. Once they were disabled I have had no more problems.

Thanks again to ALL.

[Deschanic]

still nothing?

[jorricane]

Still nothing. I've made no progress getting detection to work on the machines its failing on. At wits end tbh.

[Kaitlain]

I can see both [ATI Mobility X1600]

However, I see no difference in FPS between selecting primary & named cards.


So, remind me - why all this effort if it isn't having an effect? I do notice people reporting massive upswings in performance, so I'll assume that:

a) If your card is showing, selecting it or primary means you get the same results
b) If your card is not showing, your performance suffers.

Correct me if I'm wrong? Otherwise, not seeing the point?

[jorricane]

I see a huge difference in SOME zones when changing between named and primary - and the fact remains, if you don't see a named card, its not being detected properly, which is the primary issue - whichever you select, the fact remains that people with detected cards get better performace, which was the whole point really.

[Khalem]

I can see both [ATI Mobility X1600]

However, I see no difference in FPS between selecting primary & named cards.


So, remind me - why all this effort if it isn't having an effect? I do notice people reporting massive upswings in performance, so I'll assume that:

a) If your card is showing, selecting it or primary means you get the same results
b) If your card is not showing, your performance suffers.

Correct me if I'm wrong? Otherwise, not seeing the point?

There should be no difference between using primary or named card. However if you do not have a named card, it indicates that directx and AO does not properly detect your GFX card, which also means you will not have accelerated features available such as Hardware T&L which DO make a difference in performance.
Simply because it means that some things like particle effects are done in hardware instead of software (GPU instead of CPU).

[wormx]

And as I've said before, my card used to show up but not since the patch where we couldnt save our passwords. And yes, the game did run smoother before that patch.

On another note, I was pleased to see the game was really smooth just after the patch that got rolled back. I didnt lag in the T shaped room in reets where I always lag, even when reets is empty. After rollback, FC somehow managed to patch the lag back in... And its back to lagging in that room and many many many other places...

[gcfmathew]

seriously? how can FC totally ignore this issue. i honestly done understand why a 9600gt, the OP, and my brother, who has a 9800gt, are recognized as video cards for AO and not mine.

my current rig is

evga 750i ftw mobo
e8500 wolfdale @ 3.8ghz
gtx260 core 216
2gb ddr2 800
win xp

though i am unable to select my video card from the video list, and have to use the BS primary crap.

i can pull 60-80 fps in crysis all on high in directx9, as i dont have vista/7 for dx10. i also play tf2 with everything on high 16x aa and 16x as getting 125+ fps always

but anarchy online runs anywhere between 10 and 100+ fps.

if i stare at nothing, or open land its fine, but as soon as building/players/cities are in my los, it drops to 25-35 fps, playable, but ridiclous for 2009. 25 fps is back in the days of ps1 and n64, when people werent acclimated to 60+ fps fluidness.

after playing AO for 2-3 hours, my eyes burn and want to fall out, due to the excessive choppyness of this game

plus, it seems like as if this issue is very secluded, as we only have 5 pages here, and google-ing the issue finds very few/useful results...none actually

my 2nd rig is

asus a8n-sli
amd4000 san diego @ 2.6
8500gt
2gb ddr400
win xp

neither of my machines will have their video cards recognize...how does FC expect to get more people playing their game, when it runs on backwards ass technology.

worst of all, FC does not have a clue these issues even exist

the only troubleshooting ive done is reinstalling my nvidia drivers, while properly uninstalling them, and running a driver sweeper.

[zerorate]

AO now detects my card geforce 7950gt since I installed Windows 7.

[mozaix]

I think it might be a driver related problem. Also, didn't ATI/AMD and nVidia stop supporting directX7 on their new cards since 2 years ago? Might explain why some can't get their gfx card properly detected since there are no directx7 support for it. I might be wrong, but since Windows Vista / 7 emulates the older directx versions through dx10, and moving from XP to Vista / 7 has solved the issue for them, I think it's related to their drivers not supporting dx7.

Btw. I remember my GT6600 (500MHz) card running AO smoother than my GT6800 (350MHz) simply because of the higher gpu clock. AO's graphic engine is old, doesn't care if your card can handle multi texturing+++. It just likes MHz.

Nowdays I play AO on my laptop. All runs perfectly and smooth.

2.2GHz C2D (T7500)
2GB DDR2 (667MHz)
GT 8600m (version 7.15.0011.5669)
Windows Vista