ATI Drivers question

[Paddington]

Because I didn't receive an answer in my last thread to this question, I'm asking it in a new topic. The question goes:

I read at this forum that there may be problems problems playing Emperor when using some certain ATI Catalyst drivers. I have now the newest Omega drivers but I may have to change back to the Catalyst drivers because one of my games isn't working properly. The only version of catalysts I can use is the newest 6.11 or something like that. So, can I play Emperor with these newest Catalyst drivers or will it crash? Does anyone play Emperor with the newest Catalysts and do they have any problems?

[Nuvollari]

Why dont u just try...?  :O If you dont try you ll never know if it work s or not..

[eid]

the catalyst 6.11 drivers < work fine, although there seems to be a graphical glitch with catalyst 5.1x and above.

intermitent flickering can be noticed at default detail levels (application controlled anisotropic filtering/antialiasing) but the game is playable, catalyst 5.1 has no graphical problems at all but is horribly slow and barely playable(possibly good if you have older hardware)..

i've found that if i force adaptive antialiasing+aa with a program called

'ati tray tools' the problem seems to fix itself , the only problem with this 'fix' is it can be very unforgiving on your system performance,especially if you dont have at least mid end specs..

[erjin999]

Do you need to use the forced fix on the 6.11 ?

Or was that only for the older ones between 5.1 which worked and upto 6.11 ?  ???

[Paddington]

Thanks again for the answers!

And btw I managed to play through the Emperor game with house Atreides and it was quite fun :). Imagine; I have had this game about since it was published and until now I played it through. The bad Emperor worm in the end was quite frightening :D.

Oh, couple more things yet. When I played this game through with the Atreides, I attacked only the house Ordos territory and conquered their main base and capital city. I didn't even touch the Harkonnen areas. If I had conquered the Harkonnen area instead would the Atreides campaign have a differend end?

And for the last: Do all three houses have a different end in the Emperor game when playing the campaign?

Thanks.

[erjin999]

You would probably see different missions if you attacked the harks. The endings tend to be identical.

You should play the other houses, if only to learn and enjoy the difference between the houses.

[eid]

erj catalyst 5.1 are old drivers that work fine,

but are very slow (possibly intended for older hardware pre 'x'/9000 series that may be)..

anything  5.10 or above will result in the above mentioned texture flickering problem..

forcing antialiasing through the control centre or ati tray tool has fixed this problem for me,on any driver over 5.10..

the last two versions i tested this with are catalyst 6.2 and catalyst 6.11

so, if you use 5.1x or higher, force 2x antialiasing, and that 'may' fix the problem, at the cost of some performance..

if this works, for anyone else, perhaps it should be added to the support threads for future reference..

[Megashrap]

Because I didn't receive an answer in my last thread to this question, I'm asking it in a new topic. The question goes:

I read at this forum that there may be problems problems playing Emperor when using some certain ATI Catalyst drivers. I have now the newest Omega drivers but I may have to change back to the Catalyst drivers because one of my games isn't working properly. The only version of catalysts I can use is the newest 6.11 or something like that. So, can I play Emperor with these newest Catalyst drivers or will it crash? Does anyone play Emperor with the newest Catalysts and do they have any problems?

Just curious have you tried using the compatabillity modes for Emp?

[Paddington]

Just curious have you tried using the compatabillity modes for Emp?

No I haven't 'cause I just installed this game a week ago and I haven't had any problems with the Omega drivers.

One new thing guys. I have noticed that the game slows down sometimes quite much. It cannot be my computers fault because it has new hardware compared to the publishing year of the Emperor. And sometimes the game freezes when my DVD drive starts to read the Emperor CD in the middle of the game. Could this occasional game slow down occur because of my DVD ROM? I know the freezing happens because of the DVD ROM but I'm not sure about the slow down. The slow down comes at times but otherwise the game works properly. My hardware can handle easily all the big fights and so on. Does anyone else had this slowing down sometimes?

[erjin999]

You could open Task Manager (CTRL + ALT + DEL) in the background and play, when you see the slowdown, just go to desktop (windows key, or Task Manager again) and then see if the CPU was around 100% when the slowdown occurred to verify it is/isn't the CPU.

[alchemi2]

If your playing with everything on high graphics and shadow etc on and then move large amounts of troops you can get a bit of slow down even with a high grade modern computer but it doesn't normally effect game play.