KyroII Artifacts and TNT2 support for DirectX8.0

[Fritz1970]

It's been a couple years since my head's been in the video card market, and everything has changed (nVidia bought VooDoo fer cryin' out loud!). Bought Max Payne, and installed DirectX8.0; my Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 (not ultra) stopped working. The drivers I found at Diamond's, SonicBlue's or fansites either didn't support DirectX8.0 or I didn't install them correctly. Regardless, it was clear I needed a new card. Bought a gForceMX400 card by PNY, worked well. Read up on the new cards, found out about KyroII; exchanged the Mx400 card for a Hercules Prophet III 4500 64mg KyroII card.

Problem is, I get artifacts in games and letterboxing. I can't figger this out. The KyroII seems to occasionally get confused about which graphics are supposed to be on top (although I get to see opponents that would otherwise be hidden) - has this been addressed by the KyroII people? Also, Max Payne is letterboxed; the top and bottom 1/4 of the screen isn't being used; the game is squeezed into a smaller area. The correct settings in the "settings" tab have been checked, and the newest drivers are on the machine. What gives?

I'd appreciate any advice; I have forgotten 1/2 of what I once knew, and the other 1/2 I didn't forget is obsolete. *sigh* The price of getting old, I guess. Reminds me, I better get prune juice . . .

Fritz1970

 

[jbirney]

Your not goona like this, but It sounds like left over drivers from the Matrox or TNT are on your system. I had a simular experince when I swaped a v3 out with a k2. I finally did a re-format and after that all the issues were solved. Maybe someone here can help better.

 

[Fritz1970]

I was a little concerned about leftover drivers, but when I took a look at the AnandTech articles, I saw that artifacts occurred in their testing as well (even though they raved about the KyroII).

Also, in reading the Radeon 7500/8000 preview, it seems that AnandTech has dropped its evaluation of the KyroII and the KyroII benchmarks have dropped significantly in their tests. Any idea what is going on with this?

Fritz1970

 

[Teasy]

<< I was a little concerned about leftover drivers, but when I took a look at the AnandTech articles, I saw that artifacts occurred in their testing as well (even though they raved about the KyroII). >>



That Anand review was when Kyro II was first released and there was a problem in MBTR which has since been fixed. This problem has never reoccured in any other game so I can assure you that if your Kyro II was working as it should you wouldn't get that problem, I recently completed Max Payne on a Kyro II and never saw that problem at any time and I've never heard anyone else mention this problem with Max Payne, so it looks like you should format and re-install the system.



<< Also, in reading the Radeon 7500/8000 preview, it seems that AnandTech has dropped its evaluation of the KyroII and the KyroII benchmarks have dropped significantly in their tests. Any idea what is going on with this? >>



The benchmarks that have dropped are the Serious Sam benches, the reason for this is all the sites now seem to use a uniform ini that forces exactly the same optimizations on all boards (I'm all for using exactly the same quality settings but why use all the same ops on each card?). I have a suspition that this ini doesn't have an optimization called ogl_bExclusive 1 (though I'm not sure as I don't currently have SS installed). That optimization gave Kyro II a 50% performance boost in SS so that would account for the large performance loss in recent benches, but until I check the ini used to see if that optimization is enabled this is speculation.

But at the end of the day if you have SS and you just start it up and play it then it'll be extremely fast on Kyro II as the SS engine will automatically optimise the engine for the card your using. I do understand why these sites use one ini for all instead of allowing the game to optimise for each card individually, because they want to test all cards on exactly the same footing and thats all very nice and scientific. But in the end aren't these benches supposed to show what people playing SS will get with different boards? In that case then the benches are sort of useless as no'one playing a game is going to use a custom benchmarking ini to play it. Their just going to start the game, allow the game to choose the best optimisations for their particular board, fiddle with the quality settings like trilinear filtering, resolution, TC etc and play the game.

 

[Fritz1970]

Thanks, Teasy. Everyone seems to agree that the hard drive needs formatted. *Argh.* Another thing I don't have time for. One thing I noticed is that the driver setup won't appear; I may be able to reinstall and get it right this time; they recommend going through the Install/Uninstall Hardware function in the Control Panel; I may see if I can do it another way.

Nothing like experimenting on my only computer. Oh, well. Thanks for your input; was well done.

Fritz1970