Ships don't vanish quite right.

The Crank

Captain
Hey there,

I absolutely love Saga, but after a graphics card upgrade the capships have gone a tad weird. The capships explode and split into two whole seperate models before disappearing completely. Something also occurs when ships jump in/out, they fly through the jump portal and the model pops out of existence as soon as the very back of the ship passes through.
This isn't a game breaker of course, just slightly annoying. Has anyone else had this problem? And if so has anyone figured out how to get around it aside from buying an Nvidia card?

If anyone can help me I would be very grateful :)
 
Only once in recent years did I buy an ATI card, after I foolishly believed the salesperson's opinion that ATI has greatly improved their drivers and there are now far fewer issues. This in spite of the fact that working in the games industry, I should have known better ;).

The simple reality is that while ATI actually makes good graphics cards which offer many advantages, there are always issues with them. This isn't ATI's fault, strictly speaking. It's rather that the industry has never made the effort to be fully compatible with both. But as far as the end user is concerned, what it comes down to is that if you want less problems. buy NVidia.
 
Only once in recent years did I buy an ATI card, after I foolishly believed the salesperson's opinion that ATI has greatly improved their drivers and there are now far fewer issues. This in spite of the fact that working in the games industry, I should have known better ;).

The simple reality is that while ATI actually makes good graphics cards which offer many advantages, there are always issues with them. This isn't ATI's fault, strictly speaking. It's rather that the industry has never made the effort to be fully compatible with both. But as far as the end user is concerned, what it comes down to is that if you want less problems. buy NVidia.

I have to disagree. I've been running a Radeon HD 6850 for the past four years, and I've never experienced this issue or had any trouble getting games to work properly. I'm even playing Star Citizen on it, albeit on low settings.

AMD gets a lot of bad rap in these situations, and most of unfairly, from what I've seen.
 
Most issues arise with ATI used on "exotic cards";
I had issues with:
- ATI All-in-wonder 128 AGP 64mb (Desktop leaking through games, could not be resolved)
- ATI Rage Fury MAXX(performance was crippled in windows 2000 and later)
- Asus ATI AH340 512mb AGP(OpenGL games would cause crashes, Direct3D games had display issues, no drivers available except the release drivers, could not be resolved)
- Asus ATI HD 4670 2,5 GB PCIe(Crashes in games, took manually configuring and mix-matching of drivers to run properly in win7 64bit)
- ATI R5 250 MXM mobile hybrid card(Gets recognized as HD8500 by Catalyst drivers)

I had no issues at all with
- ATI Rage 128 fury GL AGP 32mb
- ASUS 9550 AGP 256mb
- Gigabyte 9800 Pro AGP 256mb
- Gigabyte ATI X800 PCIe 512mb
- Gigabyte ATI HD 7770 PCIe 2gb

In general Quarto is right about Nvidia cards having less configuration issues, and a longer life in them when it comes to supported standards for gaming.

However, ATI cards in general are cheaper, less power-hungry, and I don't mind fiddling with settings, it keeps my general understanding of tweaking up-to-date.
 
Last edited:
And there's higher chance o backward compatibility when it comes to ATI cards. I decided for ATI in order to play older games like Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance and Star Trek: Armada, which have issues with newer NVidia cards.
 
I have to disagree. I've been running a Radeon HD 6850 for the past four years, and I've never experienced this issue or had any trouble getting games to work properly. I'm even playing Star Citizen on it, albeit on low settings.

AMD gets a lot of bad rap in these situations, and most of unfairly, from what I've seen.
Well, I've experienced trouble in many cases with ATI cards - however, I'm not referring to difficulty with commercially available games (that hasn't happened for years), but rather with games in the course of development. When working on Dogfight 1942, each time we produced a build with any new graphical features, the programmers had to produce a special alternate executable and DLLs for me because of my ATI card. It goes without saying that the final release version was able to handle both NVidia and ATI, but in development, this wasn't a given. Most of the team used NVidia cards because that's what's most common. So every new feature was coded on an NVidia, and would either work or not work on ATI, we usually wouldn't know until somebody actually tried it. And of course, our graphics programmer was very experienced, and the moment a problem came up, he would usually figure out a solution very rapidly. This is not necessarily the case with something like Saga, which relies on a technology repeatedly modified by a multitude of programmers. Some of them will be very skilled and experienced, others will be well-meaning amateurs. And then, even the skilled ones, might not necessarily have time to address issues, particularly issues that come up years after they're done.

But again, it isn't a case of ATI making bad cards. The Xbox 360 had an ATI card inside, and obviously there were no issues there. But when making a game for a console, you only ever deal with one hardware configuration, one set of drivers, one everything. On the PC... well, it's just like it is with browsers - in theory, they all support the same HTML standards, in practice... they don't. Sometimes a website will look slightly different in IE and in Chrome, Firefox, et cetera. Sometimes it won't look slightly different, but rather it will be a total mess. So, what happens then? Well, the developers pay the most attention to the most common browser on the market, and only in second place do they do their best to ensure full compatibility with other browsers. Even so, there's less potential for screw-ups with browsers than there is with graphics cards, particularly when it's not just the difference between the two companies, but also small differences in functionality between individual products (and of course, the whole point of having unified drivers, and DirectX or OpenGL and all that is to mitigate such issues - and yet, they're there).

If ATI had most of the graphics card market, I have no doubt that I would now be complaining about NVidia cards having constant compatibility issues...
 
Hi

I absolutely love Saga, but after a graphics card upgrade the capships have gone a tad weird. The capships explode and split into two whole seperate models before disappearing completely. Something also occurs when ships jump in/out, they fly through the jump portal and the model pops out of existence as soon as the very back of the ship passes through.
This isn't a game breaker of course, just slightly annoying. Has anyone else had this problem? And if so has anyone figured out how to get around it aside from buying an Nvidia card?

The most of our team (WCSD Project) have NVIDIA, but there also ATI users and we never seen an issue like this during our development and betatest since summer 2013.

Is this occurring in every mission?
Which windows version do you have?
Which graphic card do you have?
 
And there's higher chance o backward compatibility when it comes to ATI cards. I decided for ATI in order to play older games like Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance and Star Trek: Armada, which have issues with newer NVidia cards.

All those issues van be adressed too, but you need to dive deep into the configuration with tools like MSI afterburner. Not everybody wants to spent the time figuring all those settings out, but just play the game.
 
Hi



The most of our team (WCSD Project) have NVIDIA, but there also ATI users and we never seen an issue like this during our development and betatest since summer 2013.

Is this occurring in every mission?
Which windows version do you have?
Which graphic card do you have?


Yes, it occurs in all missions that involve a capship exploding or jumping. I'm running Windows 7 with an AMD/ATI R9 290 though my previous HD 7850 didnt have this trouble, probably newer drivers that are the problem.
 
Thx for the info. We have two coders in the WCSD team, i will point MajorSpawn to your thread here. Maybe my colleague have an idea. But i can not promise anything. We have not the experience like other WCS (original) coders. Our major focus is the translation project.

A bit off topic:

If i read Mace's first answer here, it seems that it is a bit of "luck" to have the right combination of hardware and driver. And i have "nearly" the same point of view like Quarto. In our company (software development) we had lot of problems in house with ATI cards and the same problems on the customers computers. After we replaced all cards with NVIDIA, all problems are gone. My experience is, that the hardware is not the problem, but the software (drivers) is.
 
Last edited:
My driver's version is 8.970.100.7000 (11/16/2012).
My card is a Radeon HD 4570 (laptop version).

If there's a new version, I could attempt to update the driver to see if that fixes the issue on my system.
Crank, what about you?
 
Update:

MajorSpawn (with a ATI Radeon HD 5670) has done several tests and now he can reproduce this issue with your driver version. He will do further tests but at the moment it seems this is a driver specific issue. Stand by.
 
Update:

MajorSpawn (with a ATI Radeon HD 5670) has done several tests and now he can reproduce this issue with your driver version. He will do further tests but at the moment it seems this is a driver specific issue. Stand by.

Farkleyrtarg is using a 4000 series. There are drivers with a late 2014 build, released as beta, but only 32-bits, so invalid for his operating system.

Some years back we could always use the omega drivers to get a bit more performance out of your card(either ATi/AMD or Nvidia, but the guy had to stop his activities.
 
Update #2:

@Mace

Long long ago i used also this omega drivers.

@The Crank

MajorSpawn has done a lot more tests and now it is very clear: this is indipendently from the hardware, it's a driver issue.

Results:

With Catalyst 13.1 until 13.9 this issue will NOT happen.
With Catalyst 14.4, 14.12 we have the two-model-issue. He assume this issue will also happen with 14.9
With Catalyst 15.4 Beta the issue is still present.

Truly: we have simply not enough knowhow to fix problems on driver level. The only "solution" i see is to downgrade to 13.9. Not perfect, yes i know.
 
Hi folks,

a little correction to Lukes reply:
i've been testing Catalyst 13.12, not 13.9, but i assume, since 13.1 and 13.12 don't have the problem, that 13.9 should work also

@FekLeyrTarg:
when searching for drivers for Radeon Mobility HD 4xxx Series i get the result that Catalyst 13.9 x64 should be suitable

Edit: hm, the Release Notes of Catalyst 13.9 don't list der Radeon 4000 Series, but searching for a driver for this Card gets this result.... :( ... maybe a database-error??
 
Last edited:
@Luke
AMD has actually been using the term "AMD Catalyst Omega Software Suite " for a while now. Google it, and You'll find it on top.

Omegadrivers.net is still up, but he just links to current nvidia and AMD/ATi releases these days....
 
Back
Top