Issues with my graphic card...

[CocoT]

Hello everyone... I know this is going to be somewhat of a technical post, and only relates indirectly to Quake, but since I'm not super familiar with other forums and I know many of you are technology-savvy, I thought I'd give it a try...

This is the story: I've upgraded to Windows 7 (64bits) a little while ago and, since then, I have had a very hard time running my games fullscreen. My graphic card is a ATI Mobility Radeon 4670 (I know, I know, it's old) and used to work perfectly fine before I switched to Win7. Basically, what happens is that most games might be able to run in a window, but will turn my screen black (and leave me with no other alternative than having to turn my computer off) as soon as I want to switch to fullscreen. One of the problems, of course, is that some games seem to want to switch to fullscreen at start up (who can blame them, right), which means that I don't even have a chance to ask for the game to be windowed anyway, as I am directly led to a black screen. This, by the way, also happens with Darkplaces, which I am not able to run fullscreen anymore.
It is very frustrating, not only because I have a good amount of games on an external hard drive which are now just collecting dust, but also because I frankly feel like giving up on trying to play anything since every time it fails,it takes me another 5 minutes to restart my whole system...

Any ideas about what could cause this? My graphic card drivers are up to date, so is DirectX and, of course, Windows 7 itself.

[Spike]

just because your drivers are up to date does not mean that they are not buggy. try downgrading them too perhaps?
if you can't get back to windows then windows itself has b0rked somehow. its supposed to be capable of sandboxing video drivers well enough to reset them if they fail.

Try a d3d-rendering engine? directq, fte, and dp all have d3d renderers nowadays.

[CocoT]

Thanks Spike, it did help. I installed the oldest Win7 driver I could find and - while this didn't seem to help - reinstalling the newest drivers afterwards actually partly fixed the issue: I can now get in and out of games without crashing.

I have another problem now, though: it looks like I can't get windows to go for a lower resolution without the entire working area shrinking. In other words, unless I choose the highest resolution in my settings, my desktop will shrink (with black areas around it). What it means for games is that, if I don't set their resolution to my highest setting (1920x1080), I also end up playing them on only part of my screen. There is nothing in my desktop configuration program that seems to fix this, and no option for me to enable/disable scaling.
Not ideal... It works okay for some games, but for some others I can't simply afford to set it that high without significant slowdown... Any ideas on how to fix this?

[ceriux]

try downgrading to a more modern version compared to the first. also you might want to try a program called ccleaner? i use it and it seems a lot of my problems are due to registry errors... (when i encounter something weird) also you should have a ati catalyst program or something it controls settings on some of your drivers or something (sorry very bad at explaining things.) also i found this? http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/26813 ... acer-h233h

[leileilol]

Tried turning off Aero?

[Spike]

lower res stuff appearing tiny in the middle of your screen sounds like a setting on your monitor's onscreen display thing, rather than a windows setting.

[negke]

Sounds like a problem with the refresh rate. Some default setting that's out of range for the monitor. This also happens to me with a few games. See if changing the the refresh rate in Windows helps, or if you can force the games to use a certain value either by editing the config/ini or command line, or by setting up a game profile in the ATI control center (or ATI Tray Tools <- recommended).

[mh]

This is a monitor/gfx card/video mode enumeration thing. D3D10 and 11 actually give you the ability to select between centered and stretched modes for various resolutions, where such a choice is available; D3D9 or lower, or OpenGL (assuming the commonly used ChangeDisplaySettings stuff) don't. But the modes that are available are not a function of the API used and nor are they a function of anything on the software side; they depend on your hardware.

D3D10 and 11 also explicitly forbid starting up in fullscreen modes and shutting down from fullscreen modes. If you want fullscreen you must start up in a windowed mode, the fullscreen mode that you switch to must be one that was enumerated (using the D3D10/11 enumeration functions), and you must switch back to a windowed mode before you can shut down.

This is a good thing.

Fullscreen modes are dangerous. A fullscreen mode has exclusive ownership of the display hardware, so if anything screws up you are in trouble. Any safeguard around that has got to be good.

So in summary - the way legacy 3D APIs (or APIs that keep a distance from the hardware) work isn't totally compatible with modern hardware. Sometimes weird crap happens. And you have to live with it.

[frag.machine]

While reading all this about old hardware I found where people is ressurecting really old hardware exactly to run old DOS games. You guys may find useful to check it and maybe drop a help request to grab old drivers installers and maybe even a spare 3Dfx card for a treat...

[leileilol]

I don't think you can grab a 3dfx card and shove it over an ATI Mobility in a laptop........




CocoT try installing the latest drivers, and check if you've got GPU scaling

btw Windows 7 doesn't get along with 8bit palettes well, some old games will look bad

[CocoT]

Well, it seems like, since my last post, Win7 has updated itself and I'm actually back to fullscreen automatically freezing everything...

I tried cclearner and, while it's a nifty little program and it might help a little bit with performance, the changes made to the registry didn't seem to fix the issue. Also tried deactivating Aero, but that it didn't help either, unfortunately.

I retried the same process I had done the day before (just to see if I could get it back to at least the state where it didn't crash) - without success.

Changing the refresh rate also didn't seem to help. I haven't yet looked into ini files, but I will. The ATI Tray Tools also looks nice, but I haven't yet been able to find a setting that would make a difference for the issue at hand - I'll keep on tinkling, though.

The weird thing is that, even when I manage to get into a game in windowed mode, switching to fullscreen within the game also makes mu computer freeze (well, actually, I don't know if it actually freezes, it seems like there is some activity going on, but it never leads to anything). The weird thing, again, is that those games worked fine before I switched to Win7, windowed or fullscreen, and with the same video card... And I'm talking old games but new stuff (from the last year or so).

About the ATI catalyst - it seems the older (XP, Vista) versions actually had more options to play with (including scaling) than the Win7 version, which lets me change, well, almost nothing. I've seen screenshots of other versions which enable people to change scaling (on threads about a similar issue as mine), but the various versions I tried didn't have it. Maybe I'll just go through all the Win7 version and check (what a pain in the butt, though! )

I really kind of wish I hadn't waited for my old computers to die before getting a new one because it is true I often lament the loss of an older computer with an older OS able to smoothly (and painlessly) run older games, though...

[Ace12GA]

[negke]

Fucking Telefragged hiccup ate my post yesterday. What I said is that ATT's refresh lock helped me get Quake to run on my old, faulty monitor which tends tends to stretch the screen on 60hz. You have to set the new refresh rate for each resolution you're going to use (or in this case the games in question may default to; probably best to force the rate for all available resolutions). Not guaranteed it solves your problem, but it's worth a try.

Even now I still run into the black screen/out of range issue occasionally. Sometimes I can get back to Windows with ctrl+alt+del, most times it requires me to reset. Lately, Fitzquake does it often - luckily Quakespasm makes up for it. DirectQ used to do it, too. To get Just Cause 2 to work, I had to delete the config file every time before starting the game, and then setting everything again from scratch. Prototype, on the other hand, seems to require a well-timed ctrl+alt+del press to make it work; otherwise there's sound but no picture and I can't return to the Desktop, either. It didn't occur with older drivers (assuming there isn't another thing playing into this), but with them I had poor performance. And to be able to run GZDoom a couple of weeks ago, I had to manually change the refresh rate in the ini (it defaulted to 0, which, I guess, either means auto detection or default screen setting, but it obviously didn't work as intended).

[leileilol]