Invisible Fish Poll

[Tyraa Rane]

I have fish, and an ATI Mobility Radeon X600. Drivers are apparently 6.14.10.6505.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I have an ATI on my laptop, but the info re fish would be useless as it only just about runs Uni, so to run OFB on it, I'd have to uninstall Uni first!

But, don't know if this will prove anything, I have just the base game with no hacks and virtually no downloads on my other PC, which is linked to this and used the same video card.  I could check and see what's happening on that, if you want me to.

[Nec]

Well so far no fish with the fx5200 seems to be the most popular. Next is fx5500. Have you 5200/5500 people tried the shaders code yet? It did fix it for me, as I said.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I'm a bit wary that it might be too much for my game to handle, and I sooooo hate crashing to the desktop  - I swear one day I'll just have a heart attack and that'll be the end of me!

[Nec]

I'm a bit wary that it might be too much for my game to handle, and I sooooo hate crashing to the desktop  - I swear one day I'll just have a heart attack and that'll be the end of me!

Why do you say that? I just posted my system specs in the first post, if you are worried about that on yours - for comparison.

[Hegelian]

We have fish:  Sapphire/ATi Radeon X800 GT AGP, 256 MB RAM. Drivers are the almost most recent set, ver. 6.4; I see that ver. 6.5 was released on 24 May, but I won't upgrade for a few more versions since I'm not having any problems . . . or maybe I will. It seems Catalyst 6.5 (display driver 8.252) has an interesting new feature:

Adaptive Anti-Aliasing for ATI Radeon® 9500 and above

Adaptive Anti-Aliasing smoothes out the surfaces in an entire scene unlike Multi-Sample which works only on edge surfaces. Adaptive AA has the ability to work on transparent or opaque texels, like those that comprise a surface texture. Previously this feature was available on the ATI Radeon® X1000 family products. Starting with Catalyst® 6.5, Adaptive AA support is now available to ATI Radeon® 9500 products and above.
© Copyright 2006 ATI Technologies Inc.

In any case, with Catalyst 6.4 (display driver 8.241), I have fish in patched OFB.   

 

[DrBeast]

If this piece of info is of any worth, I tried Catalyst 6.5 for a brief period of time, but I was getting poly spikes and such. At first I thought it was because of the recent mini-heatwave that swept over Greece, combined with my overclocked Radeon 9600 Pro. However, the poly spikes were there even when I lowered core and memory frequencies, so I decided to revert to Catalyst 6.3. No problems once again. Oh and I still have fish.

[Hegelian]

Thanks for the information. I guess I'll lay off the new drivers for a while.

[twistingsims]

  no little fishes here !!

I have a Sapphire Radeon 9200SE 128mb Driver Version (latest) 6.14.10.6517

I too have not turned on my shaders as I did that once b4 and my game started to lag!


soooo does this mean my graphic card must should be upgraded?

processor = AMD Athlon(tm) XP1700 + 1460.8
RAM        = 640.5mb
Memory   = System Total = 640.5
              = Virtual Total  = 2047.9
              = PageFile Total = 1532.1

I have Univ, NL, OFB latest patch for OFB no FFS stuff thou

** my fishes all showed b4 installing OFB and still did not appear after any patch! 

[Nec]

I wonder if it has to do with the 128MB cards as opposed to the 256MB cards. The ReadMe for OFB says 256MB card is required to run the game.

[akatonbo]

I wonder if it has to do with the 128MB cards as opposed to the 256MB cards. The ReadMe for OFB says 256MB card is required to run the game.

Er, no, it doesn't. It says that 256MB of system RAM is required, and 32MB of video RAM.

[Nec]

Heh...you are right. I read that all wrong

I still wonder if that has anything to do with it anyway

[RainbowTigress]

I have an MSI ATI Radeon 9250 128 MB card, which I just got recently to replace my old 64 MB nVidea card.  I didn't get cutscenes before but I do now.  But no fishies for me.  I haven't tried putting the useshaders line in because I can live without fishies.  I don't even use the fish tank, which is why I had to put one in a house and have the sim "restock" it (how can you restock if it's new and has never been stocked in the first place?)  I wonder what else might be missing, but I have to keep in mind the balance between speed and quality.  I am willing to take a few small hits in performance to have more detail, but not to the point that it lags insufferably.

I am using the drivers that came on the CD with the card, because when I tried using the drivers Windows installed for me, I got all kinds of weird graphical glitches, like little lines on the screen when sims would move and stuff.  I don't know if it's the same thing DrBeast describes, and I'm not sure what version of drivers were on the CD, but the weird stuff went away when I uninstalled the Windows drivers and reinstalled the ones off the CD.  It didn't mention Catalyst, so I was somewhat confused when I went to see if there were any new drivers at the ATI website.  Is that what ATI calls its basic drivers?  I put in my card, and that's what came up, but I just wanted regular drivers, not any extra fancy programs that I don't need.   

Maybe a new poll should be made to see if the people who have fish have more than 128 MB of video RAM?

[jrd]

(...) I just wanted regular drivers, not any extra fancy programs that I don't need.

Omega drivers are your friend.

And yes, Catalyst is what ATI calls their drivers+software package.

[Process Denied]

I have fish and I have a NVIDIA GeForce 6800 XT. 

[akatonbo]

I guess I should probably check out this Omega thing one of these days, since I have version 6.14 or something of the ATI Radeon drivers and I do intend to try upgrading if I continue to have issues with Body Shop.

I still haven't gotten around to checking whether I have fish. Don't use 'em.

[Hegelian]

I have a Sapphire Radeon 9200SE 128mb Driver Version (latest) 6.14.10.6517

soooo does this mean my graphic card must should be upgraded?

Must? Well no. You can play the game after all. But the 9200 was a budget part even when it was current a few years ago, and you can't hope to see probably half what the game has to offer visually with this board. For one thing, it supports only up to DirectX 8 in hardware, whereas TS2 is a DX 9 game. This means that some graphics features in the game need to be rendered by the CPU instead of the graphics board, significantly slowing down your game's performance (and some features won't be available at all). In addition, the image quality in "2D" (that is, Windows) probably isn't the best.

In the ATI line, the "lowest" you can go and have DX 9 in hardware is the 9500 series, but even those are now a few generations old and are not a good value for money. At this point, as AGP boards are phased out altogether, the best value for money in the ATI line (for an AGP part) is the X800 series. You can save a few tens of dollars and go for a 9600-series board, but the performance hit isn't worth the savings unless you're going to buy a whole new PC in the next few months, because whatever AGP board you buy now will probably be the last one you ever buy, so you'll be stuck with it for as long as you keep your current PC. In the U.S., you can get a Radeon X800 GT or  X800 GTO for under $180; Radeon 9600 boards are under $150 (but hold out for the XT model, as the "lesser" versions are underpowered). Not long ago, the Radeon 9800 Pro (once the fastest board you could buy) was a good value, but the newer X800 boards are the same price these days, and are about 25% faster.

HOWEVER . . .

processor = AMD Athlon(tm) XP1700 + 1460.8

The real bottleneck for TS2 is here. You may not be able to get nice shader effects with that graphics board, but game performance in TS2 depends mostly on CPU power, and by today's standards this is way underpowered. The XP 1700+ should have (according to AMD) the same performance as a 1.7-GHz Pentium 4, and I can tell you from personal experience that the slower P4s don't cut it for TS2. Heck, the 2.8 GHz P4 I have now isn't really fast enough.

Problem is, the Athlon XP series is obsolete (they are no longer being made—the XP 1700+ was the slowest chip in the line . . . in 2003), having been supplanted by first the Atlhon 64 and now the new dual-core Athlons, so you may be hard-pressed to find a replacement CPU that will fit your motherboard and be enough faster to make it worth the cost; and current processors won't fit your motherboard. Quite frankly, at this stage it's probably not cost-effective to upgrade your PC. For not much more than you would pay for replacement parts, you can get a whole new PC from HP, Dell, or Gateway that will be way faster than anything you could build up from what you have now, with current technology (CPU and motherboard, RAM type and speed, hard-drive capacity and speed). You already have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, so you just need the PC itself. For $600 shipped, you can get a new PC that will make your current PC seem like a slide rule by comparison.   

I guess I should probably check out this Omega thing one of these days, since I have version 6.14 or something of the ATI Radeon drivers

Keep in mind that the Omega drivers are just tweaked versions of older ATI driver sets (he's usually a couple versions behind the current ATI release). They aren't anything magical or radically different.

[akatonbo]

I guess I should probably check out this Omega thing one of these days, since I have version 6.14 or something of the ATI Radeon drivers

Keep in mind that the Omega drivers are just tweaked versions of older ATI driver sets (he's usually a couple versions behind the current ATI release). They aren't anything magical or radically different.

Well, apparently I have driver version 6.14.10.6476 (which dates back to late 2004 according to the control panel). What I'm wondering is whether I have any real reason to upgrade at all, why I would or would not want to have this Catalyst software in addition to ordinary drivers, and what driver version I ought to be using if it's not the one I've got.

...actually, out of curiosity... 3.0GHz processor, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon X300 (128MB RAM). I am largely very happy with game performance and graphics and am not sure if I won't just spend any money I allocate to upgrades on a big fat second hard drive for music and video, but I've never been in a discussion of hardware and game performance before where I was at all convinced that anybody else involved was likely to have a better idea of the answer than me. In what areas of game performance would I notice a difference if I got a video card with 256MB of RAM? In what areas would I notice a difference if I jumped up to 2GB of system RAM? I'd never in a million years spend $180 on a video card when there's nothing wrong with the one I already have, so how far down the series can I go from the X800 and still get 256MB of RAM and an upgrade over what I already have that's worth paying anything for at all?

[jsalemi]

Keep in mind that the Omega drivers are just tweaked versions of older ATI driver sets (he's usually a couple versions behind the current ATI release). They aren't anything magical or radically different.

He's actually up-to-date now -- he just released his version based on the 6.5 ATI drivers.

[jsalemi]

In what areas of game performance would I notice a difference if I got a video card with 256MB of RAM? In what areas would I notice a difference if I jumped up to 2GB of system RAM? I'd never in a million years spend $180 on a video card when there's nothing wrong with the one I already have, so how far down the series can I go from the X800 and still get 256MB of RAM and an upgrade over what I already have that's worth paying anything for at all?

I went from the base X300 that came with my Dell to an X700 (about $150 at the time) with 256MB Ram, and it improved graphic performance considerably.  I already have a gig of RAM and a high-speed processor (3.x gighertz Intel). I may go up another gig of RAM one of these days, but for now I'm much happier with how the game performs.

[Nec]

Well, apparently I have driver version 6.14.10.6476 (which dates back to late 2004 according to the control panel). What I'm wondering is whether I have any real reason to upgrade at all, why I would or would not want to have this Catalyst software in addition to ordinary drivers, and what driver version I ought to be using if it's not the one I've got.

ATI calls their basic drivers Catalyst. Here is a link to the main drivers page to select your OS if you want it.

I personally noticed a difference switching from 128 to 256, but my computer is not as fast as yours so I can't say much beyond the fact that I can run all graphics on high, even with my pokey processor.

[Hegelian]

Well, apparently I have driver version 6.14.10.6476 (which dates back to late 2004 according to the control panel). What I'm wondering is whether I have any real reason to upgrade at all, why I would or would not want to have this Catalyst software in addition to ordinary drivers, and what driver version I ought to be using if it's not the one I've got.

Well, what the manufacturers will usually tell you is not to upgrade drivers unless you're having a problem or you need a new feature, but this may be more typical for chipset drivers than for video drivers. ATI for one generally adds features, eliminates bugs, and/or tweaks performance with each driver release (go to the Web site and read the Release Notes to see the changes and bug fixes in the current driver set), so there is often good reason to upgrade drivers if you haven't done so in a while. Of course, sometimes a new driver release introduces new bugs or has other issues which can make it unstable with certain applications (usually games), as evidenced by the problem with the 8x-series drivers from nVidia and TS2 (and ATI has had similar episodes in the past). These days, driver sets are of the omnibus variety, in that one download includes the drivers for all supported models. While there may be no compelling reason to upgrade to every release, it makes sense to upgrade two or three times a year, or perhaps quarterly; and with a driver set from 2004, I would definitely upgrade, although perhaps not to the 6.5 set given what Dr. Beast reports about that set earlier in this thread. You can find the 6.4 driver set on ATI's Web site.

There are two components to the ATI driver installation. One is the actual video drivers, and one is the Control Panel or Control Center, which is the applet that gives you access to the various driver settings. Each can be downloaded separately, or you can get it as a package. The Control Center is rather controversial, as it installs a couple services that run in the background, requires .NET Framework to run, and takes up about 100 MB of RAM for no good reason. Mostly it offers a fancy user interface and a 3D animation so you can see the results of various 3D settings; and on X1000-series boards and XT versions of some earlier boards, it allows for overclocking from within the driver software. The older Control Panel doesn't have the 3D interface and doesn't support the  "Overdrive" overclocking function, but it also doesn't require .NET or take up an additional 100 MB of RAM. Although ATI claims that the Control Panel isn't supported by more recent driver sets (6.xx), I've been using the last released version (which I think is from Catalyst 5.8 ) with the 6.4 drivers with no problem.

TweakGuides's ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide offers ways you can tweak the Control Center (basically by disabling some functions and preventing others from loading on startup) that will get you back to pre-CC memory-usage levels, but unless you have a board that supports Overdrive and you want to overclock it, I don't see any reason to mess with that when you can use the old Control Panel. 

...actually, out of curiosity... 3.0GHz processor, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon X300 (128MB RAM). I am largely very happy with game performance and graphics. . . .  In what areas of game performance would I notice a difference if I got a video card with 256MB of RAM? In what areas would I notice a difference if I jumped up to 2GB of system RAM?

To be honest, I can't give you a firm answer regarding video RAM. In terms of TS2, I suspect if you switched to a 256-MB version of the X300, you would be able to enable some of the graphics features or increase their settings. Basically, the on-board RAM is the "frame buffer," where the board stores 3D information like textures, so the number of textures and other stuff the board can keep in its frame buffer will depend on how much RAM it has. Increasing the video RAM may improve the look of your game, but it probably wouldn't make it run any more smoothly. OTOH, it would depend on how much of the game's 3D data is kept in the frame buffer; if it will all fit in a 128-MB frame buffer, going to 256 MB won't necessarily speed up the game, but if it can use more than 128 MB, then going to 256 MB could result in a noticeable increase in frame rates as well as more visual detail, since otherwise some video data will be swapped out to system RAM over the comparatively slow PCI bus.

However, in real life and upgrade of video RAM would accompany an upgrade of the GPU itself. The X300 was pretty much a budget part to begin with, with only four pixel pipelines, comparted to 16 pipes for the top-of-the-line X850 models and some versions of the X800. Not long ago, some ATI partners were offering X800 GTO boards with a 16-pipeline GPU for less than 200 USD (Powercolor is known to have done this) although these usually have 12 pipes; and for a little over 200 USD you can get an X850 XT with 16 pipes. If you shop carefully you can get an X800 GTO for under 140 USD after rebate, or under 125 USD for an open-box model. Some of these X800 GTO boards can be flashed with the BIOS for the X800 XL to unlock the four remaining pipelines (for a total of 16), if you're the adventurous type.   

As an aside, note that ExtremeTech.com is reporting that TS2 runs without problems on the Vista beta, and ATI has released a Catalyst driver set for Vista.   

Adding system RAM up to the point where the game can load all its data into RAM will increase performance by eliminating the need for data to be fetched from the hard drive; beyond that there will be no performance benefit. If you look at the screens I posted above, on my PC the game maxes out at around 1350 MB RAM and 7 MB in the paging file (this with Cacheman XP and Firefox also running), so you may not see any noticeable improvement with more than 1.5 GB RAM. The important thing is to reduce the size of the paging file and disable Executive Paging to force WinXP you use all your RAM instead of paging tons of data to the hard drive when half your RAM is still available.

[RainbowTigress]

Can anyone tell me what this means?  I got this error when installing the new Catalyst drivers from ATI's website.

(Click for larger immage)


I don't know if the drivers were installed successfully or not.

[Nec]

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33698123

That is one article I found on it.

Also you could try uninstalling your card and drivers then reinstall. Apparently this happens with some ATI cards, from my search results.

[RainbowTigress]

Thanks, I will give it a shot.