Snow effect in Doom 3

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Anyone else getting this?

Im running in medium settings with 4x AA on a radeon 9800 pro on an
xp3200+ with 512mb RAM.

Using drivers 4.8

Thanks

paul
 
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"me!!" <pwrberry@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:52dai012fodf7eofosj6ouf050nh9i33ka@4ax.com...
> Anyone else getting this?
>
> Im running in medium settings with 4x AA on a radeon 9800 pro on an
> xp3200+ with 512mb RAM.
>
> Using drivers 4.8
>
> Thanks
>
> paul


In the Hell levels and beyond, I'm getting white and red speckles on the
screen with my 9800 Pro with the 4.7 drivers. My video card has never been
overclocked either, nor has my CPU or any other component. I have a 2.8GHz
P4 with an Intel 865PE chipset-based motherboard.
 
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Me gladly offers solution; And this also improves greatly your performance.
Forgive me to simply cut'n paste this part from many previous attempts to
TIP people about this great item

Foreword:
I was also using drivers 4.9 and noticed this noisy edge effect. Kinda snow.
It's named by some as a specular defect. The Humus fix not only improves
the framerate of your Doom3 game; But will eliminate the specular glitch.

This has to do with, Humus changing the way the pixel shader computes
its value. This works for 9800Pro, but should fix also for the 9600/9700.
X800 families. Here it is in all its glory. I provide the ZIP link found in
europe, since the link on the original page does not work anymore, and
I don't have a WINRAR to open it.
--- Paste
THE Humus hotfix for ATI radeon renderer..
In case you missed the tweak. Here it is in ZIP format.
http://alexharis37.free.fr/doom/humusd3atitweak.zip
It's some sort of hotfix for the pixel shader to be ATI radeon friendly.
It does some float operations better, improves speed as well as
framerate. It also fixes specular glitches (pixies along some axis).
The speed gain to be expected is around 18%.. (Not on all ATI hardware)

To resume the principle; ATI 9800/X800 can compute things in
floating point mode much faster; as the original Doom3 methods
work well with NVIDIA cards; The original Doom3 pixel shader instruction
sequence is not friendly to the way ATI GPU works.. Humus noticed,
fixed it, and even talked to Carmack about it. Humus now works for ATI. :)
Not that ATI supports this fix, but damn IT WORKS !.. :)

Just unzip in your doom folder and it'll create a glprog folder in the base
folder with interaction.vfp in it ... So this is not gonna break anything.
Doom3 knows how to load these extensions.
Read more about it here:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=342441#342441

AND since I'm here;
Let me tip you further for performance settings.
Most of us gamers hate that Vsynch OFF tearing look.
What is necessary to get unsynch performance and rock solid image is
to enable Triple Buffering.. That is done in your Catalyst driver under
the OpenGL section. Click Compatibility and enable triple buffering.
Now ingame, make sure Vsynch is OFF.. I repeat. OFF.
This not only makes the game look great, but improves performance
by another margin; slightly better than Vsych OFF alone.

With Vsynch OFF and Triple buffering enabled; You can set a more convenient
refresh rate; Way better than 60Hz, WITHOUT impairing your game performance
at all. In cas you don't have already a 'autoexec.cfg' in your doom3 base folder;
Create one and add this to it: It's TEXT.
seta r_displayRefresh "70"
This is for 70Hz... I personally like 85Hz better, even though higher refresh rate
steal a little bandwith to the fillrate and you may drop a fraction of fps going higher.
ATI cards with slower than 9800 fillrate will see a bigger hit when pushing the
refreshrate; but it's still rather negligible.

Should I tip you further and recommend you take every possible action to make
use of that 16xAF (anisotropic filtering).. I personally force it to 16 within catalyst,
and in Doom as well... This is like the right arm of HQ setting.. On a radeon 9800Pro;
16xAF will not drop the framerate significantly using the famous humus fix..
The overall textures as then SO So much better... Don't leave home without it.

Best regards to everyone who contributed to my understanding of these issues.
I recommend you all go browse alt.games.doom for more.

CHEERS !
(apologies for top posting, but the context is right IMHO)
N³o

>me!! wrote in message <52dai012fodf7eofosj6ouf050nh9i33ka@4ax.com>...
>Anyone else getting this?
>
>Im running in medium settings with 4x AA on a radeon 9800 pro on an
>xp3200+ with 512mb RAM.
>
>Using drivers 4.8
>
>Thanks
>
>paul
 
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> Im running in medium settings with 4x AA on a radeon 9800 pro on an
> xp3200+ with 512mb RAM.
>
> Using drivers 4.8
>
I had the same problem with an overclocked Sapphire Radeon 9800pro/128mb.
Mine has the R360 core and Samsung ram, and would run stable in 3dMark 2003
and some other games with the clock/ram at 412/355. Doom3 made snow, so I
just put it back to standard 380/340. Doom3 still looks good.

Abit IC7 Max 3
3.0C P4
512mb Geil PC4000
Sapphire ATI Radeon Pro 128mb
Cat 4.8's, tempted to try the 4.9 Doom3 betas
2 x WD 37GB Raptor drives

Carl
 
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"me!!" <pwrberry@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:52dai012fodf7eofosj6ouf050nh9i33ka@4ax.com...
> Anyone else getting this?
>
> Im running in medium settings with 4x AA on a radeon 9800 pro on an
> xp3200+ with 512mb RAM.
>
> Using drivers 4.8


Yeah, I have it using almost any driver revision. AIW 9800 Pro, P4-3.2GHz
1GB RAM. I had red and white speckles (in different places) now and again
earlier in the game, but now it's everywhere and quite distracting. Usual
suggestions include better power supply, better cooling, changing from 8X
AGP to 4X AGP, turning Fastwrites on or off, and so on. None of those did
anything. One other supposed fix was to UNDERCLOCK the GPU... which for me
actually seems to work. Went from 378MHz to 373.5MHz and the speckles seem
to have completely gone.

Power problem? Doubt it, I've got a big Antec P/S and the game is 100%
stable. Heat problem? Perhaps, but it's NOT due to any undercooling on my
part.

Oh, and the Humus patch does NOT fix this, I've had that installed all
along.

- Daniel
 
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Daniel Tonks wrote in message <4125832d$0$65601$a1866201@authen.newsreader.visi.com>...
>Yeah, I have it using almost any driver revision. AIW 9800 Pro, P4-3.2GHz
>1GB RAM. I had red and white speckles (in different places) now and again
>earlier in the game, but now it's everywhere and quite distracting. Usual
>suggestions include better power supply, better cooling, changing from 8X
>AGP to 4X AGP, turning Fastwrites on or off, and so on. None of those did
>anything. One other supposed fix was to UNDERCLOCK the GPU... which for me
>actually seems to work. Went from 378MHz to 373.5MHz and the speckles seem
>to have completely gone.
>
>Power problem? Doubt it, I've got a big Antec P/S and the game is 100%
>stable. Heat problem? Perhaps, but it's NOT due to any undercooling on my
>part.
>
>Oh, and the Humus patch does NOT fix this, I've had that installed all
>along.
>
>- Daniel

Looks like you saw artefact, caused by a overheating AIW 9800 card.
Which is not quite the same as specular defect. Your artefacts are likely
caused by the Vid card getting damn close to overheating.

The Humus patch does fix specular defect; Which is never coloured pixies !
Thereforeyours is another kind of glitch.
You chose to underclock to remove these 'EXTRA' glitches. You could
also consider a piggyback cooling solution.

The AIW9800 hardware may generate more heat than standard 9800Pro.
It's a hardware thing.
N³o
 
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Hi

I tried what you suggested and the problem is still there although to
a lesser extent. Ive upped my drivers to 4.9 did the hotfix thing.

My card has never been overclocked and itrs running at stock speeds


paul
 
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>me!! wrote in message ...
>Hi
>
>I tried what you suggested and the problem is still there although to
>a lesser extent. Ive upped my drivers to 4.9 did the hotfix thing.
>
>My card has never been overclocked and itrs running at stock speeds
>
>
>paul

You could then be seeng glitches caused by a close to overheating card.
Unfortunately, this is also possible. Daniel Twonk offered his solution.

Try also opening your Computer casing for better ventilation and see
if it improves things further.. If you see the glitches dissapear; You could
consider improving the internal ventilation, or add a vid card cooler.

To me; This seems like a hardware glitch.
Otherwise; The Humus would fix specular glitch, by using float calculations.

It's always difficult to distinguish one kind from another;
Except that specular glitches fixed by Humus tend to show along verious
AXIS, and not at random; and all white, never coloured.

Overheating GPU will display glitches in various degrees colors and shapes.
Glitches, snow.

You are on the right path paul.
N³o
 
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On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 00:50:26 -0400, "Daniel Tonks"
<dtonks@sunstormADD-DOT-COM> wrote:


>Yeah, I have it using almost any driver revision. AIW 9800 Pro, P4-3.2GHz
>1GB RAM. I had red and white speckles (in different places) now and again
>earlier in the game, but now it's everywhere and quite distracting. Usual
>suggestions include better power supply, better cooling, changing from 8X
>AGP to 4X AGP, turning Fastwrites on or off, and so on. None of those did
>anything. One other supposed fix was to UNDERCLOCK the GPU... which for me
>actually seems to work. Went from 378MHz to 373.5MHz and the speckles seem
>to have completely gone.
>
>Power problem? Doubt it, I've got a big Antec P/S and the game is 100%
>stable. Heat problem? Perhaps, but it's NOT due to any undercooling on my
>part.
>
>Oh, and the Humus patch does NOT fix this, I've had that installed all
>along.
>
>- Daniel
>

I've heard of people fixing this issue by making sure their Radeon is
not sharing any molex power connectors.
 
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"me!!" <pwrberry@yahoo.co.uk> skrev i en meddelelse
news:njfbi0dmbj9mntt6jo8gr6qccrsbrsnco4@4ax.com...
> Hi
>
> I tried what you suggested and the problem is still there although to
> a lesser extent. Ive upped my drivers to 4.9 did the hotfix thing.
>
> My card has never been overclocked and itrs running at stock speeds

Do you have any other devices on the cards power cable?
I ask this because the card has to have the cable by itself, if it is shared
with other devices, you risk having artifacts due to interference with these
devices.

I have personally experienced this, and it looks quite like an overheating
card.
(In my case it was in Far Cry.)

Others have had these snowy artifacts in Doom because of this too.

/Henrik
 
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>
>I have personally experienced this, and it looks quite like an overheating
>card.
>(In my case it was in Far Cry.)
>
>Others have had these snowy artifacts in Doom because of this too.
>
> /Henrik

Im not sure if its sharing a psu, i will check next time i power down
my pc.

I only have this problem with doom 3 though.

paul
>
 
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I installed radlink and reduced my core speed to 327mhz,

problem has now gone away