Never a problem -- now Dom2 crashes to desktop

PDF · #1 September 22nd, 2004, 10:23 AM

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tinkthank said:
Wow, thanks so very much! That helped, the game can run now. Thanks to all!
PDF, you have amazing divination skills! Yes, I truly have an ATI card, how did you know? This "command line" is what is in the shortcut window, right? I put a space and then -w (so: "... dom2.exe -w") and that worked perfectly, and deleting that file did too. Thanks so much!

Thanks ! Ya know, I'm an Astral-3 guy ...

For the ATI card, I happen to have one since I've changed my rig on Last Xmas - before I had a GF2, 0 problem with Dom2, and with the ATI I've had to use the -w switch to prevent a systematic graphic "crash" when trying to minimize/alt-tab the game ... And several peoples complained of issues with the ATI drivers ,also.

And yes I was referring to the shortcut command line

Glad to help

.

Arryn · #2 September 22nd, 2004, 10:34 AM

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PDF said:
For the ATI card, I happen to have one since I've changed my rig on Last Xmas - before I had a GF2, 0 problem with Dom2, and with the ATI I've had to use the -w switch to prevent a systematic graphic "crash" when trying to minimize/alt-tab the game ... And several peoples complained of issues with the ATI drivers ,also.

Aha! Thanks. I was wondering what the deal was with the ALT-TAB bugginess, since I never had the problem with my old GF4 4400 prior to upgrading Last month to a Radeon 9600XT. I, too, had resorted to the -w without having read about others having similar problems. Has anyone reported the Dom 2 problems to ATI so that they might (wishful thinking, I know) provide a fix in some upcoming Catalyst release?

Arralen · #3 September 22nd, 2004, 11:37 AM

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Arryn said:Has anyone reported the Dom 2 problems to ATI so that they might (wishful thinking, I know) provide a fix in some upcoming Catalyst release?

It's still not quite clear, if it's a DOM2 problem, or a problem with the SDL library, or with OpenGL on ATI cards in general. Maybe it's related to the perfomance problems with those cards, maybe not. But the devs never gave any comment, so it wouldn't make sense to tell ATI about it.

After all, maybe it's just broken code in Dom2 which the devs cannot correct because they don't know better

On the other hand, ATIs OpenGl support sucks ... but they promised to work on it as .. what was it .. Doom3(?) runs with OpenGl as well

Arryn · #4 September 22nd, 2004, 12:14 PM

Arralen: Good points you've made. Having recently tried Doom 3 on my allegedly inferior-performing ATI card, I can say that it's OGL performance is more than acceptable. I get great graphics and decent frame rates (and that's with all the bells & whistles turned to max). So I'm left to ponder why Dom 2 (and only Dom 2) sucks on ATI? You just may be right in your hypothesis regarding bad code ...

Johan K · #5 September 22nd, 2004, 03:15 PM

Illwinter has just ordered a computer with an ATI graphics card. So soon we'll be able to see for ourselves what the deal with ATI and Dom2 is. The crash could be a bug in dom2, SDL, Windows or the ATI drivers, I have no idea really.

Regarding performance my guess is that dom2 uses some OpenGL commands or modes that ATI has not optimized their drivers for and then everything gets real slow. So no matter how much more they optimize for doom3, dom2 will still run slow unless they optimize those slow commands dom2 uses but doom3 doesn't. I'm pretty sure they could make dom2 run faster if they wanted to, but I'm also pretty sure they don't want to.