Display & Other Problems

[Johan K]

Dominions II was not developed with any special graphics card in mind and does not use any non-standard OpenGL commands. So I would blame ATI for not producing decent OpenGL drivers. But I guess they don't care much whether Dominions runs well or not .

[archaeolept]

oh sorry johan. I had heard that the basic graphics engine used in Dom II was taken over from somewhere else, and so thought that the original engine (if such there is) might have used those extensions.

while its true ATI hasn't put out the best OGL drivers, its almost comical how poorly the radeons do w/ dominions.

luckily, not being able to run high quality doesn't seem to have affected it's allure

[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Target.gif[/img] [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Target.gif[/img] [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Target.gif[/img]

[deccan]

archaeolept said:
while its true ATI hasn't put out the best OGL drivers, its almost comical how poorly the radeons do w/ dominions.

I've heard people complain about how Dom2 performs poorly on Radeon machines, but I have a laptop with a Radeon Mobility 9600 and it runs very well with fairly high graphics settings. I've ran Omega drivers since first buying the machine though. Just thought I'd point that out.

[Arryn]

A few months ago I upgraded from a GF4 4400 to an ASUS Radeon 9600XT and I've seen a very nice performance improvement in every game I play -- except Dom 2. Probably because the only OpenGL game I play is Dom. And cruising the ATI website will quickly show that ATI hasn't given a damn about OpenGL performance -- until the frenzied outcries of Doom 3 players well nigh forced them to do something. (Likely for fear of finally losing the PR battle against nVidia.) Thus the beta 4.9 Catalyst drivers, which ostensibly fix Doom 3's OpenGL performance. As a general rule, I don't install beta drivers, so someone else will have to say whether the 4.9 drivers improve anything, or not. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Hammer.gif[/img] [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/WinLogo.gif[/img] [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon13.gif[/img] [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon45.gif[/img]

[reverend]

Btw. Omega website is back up. They're based on 4.8 catalysts, so most likely no improvement yet.

Yes, ATI is slower under OpenGL. But still. I don't get why a GeForce from Last generation or earlier gets FPS in the 60 range, while an X800Pro gets less than 15 on the same setting...

Let's just wait for "proper" 4.9 drivers...

[Arryn]

reverend said:
Btw. Omega website is back up.

Not for me. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Envy.gif[/img] I still cannot get a response from that site. Do you know of any alternate site that has up-to-date Omega drivers? All the alt sites I've found have files no newer than based upon 4.5.

[Arralen]

May take some time until all Internet Routers have updated their routing tables (from the omegadrives site):

SITE NEWS(08/31/04)
Again, for those who tried to access my site between Sunday and Wednesday, sorry for the downtime, there was a hosting issue again that prevented the site from working, the issue was NEVER fixed by GlobalServers.com, so I changed to a new hosting company.

[reverend]

Johan K said:
Dominions II was not developed with any special graphics card in mind and does not use any non-standard OpenGL commands. So I would blame ATI for not producing decent OpenGL drivers. But I guess they don't care much whether Dominions runs well or not .

Given the nature of Dom2, it isn't a high priority for most players either. But I wouldn't place ALL the blame on ATI. Sure, their OpenGL sucks. Nevertheless, I get better FPS on other OpenGL games like Il2 Sturmovik and Doom 3. (and I'm speaking full details at max. res here). So there definately are ways to produce a decent OpenGL result even on ATI cards. But then, those games had a larger budget than Dom2 I guess.

Don't take this as a criticism, no one plays Dom2 for the flashy graphics and stunning action. Although the battles are very entertaining to watch.