sunglare effect missing on radeon cards..

[R3D]

is there still no fix for this bug? ive tried every radeon driver for the last 2 yearrs and nothing brings back the sun glare that the nvidia cards seem to have no troubles with, im running an x1900xtx.

the sun looks like an egg yoke in the sky at dawn when the glare is missing, really ugly.

[Torps]

Most games are designed around NVidia so us poor ATI users will not have those effects. I do not know if the latest ATI cards will produce those effects. However the soon to be released Nvidia 9800 series will be out soon so, you can consider that . They will support DX9,DX10 and DX10.1. It is rumored to perform 1 TERRAFLOP of computational performance, oh about 3x better then the current 8800ultras.

[-Pv-]

I disagree. I have had all ATI cards for years and I play many games with sun glare with no problems (Flight Simulator, WWII Fighters and Falcon 4 to name three.) It just so happens our SH devs did not code this effect to be compatable with ATI. Oh well.

You can load drivers until Hillery becomes president and drivers will not solve this problem.
-Pv-

[mrbeast]

The problem is that Nvidia are at the top of the game at the moment so most new games are optimised for Nvidia cards with ATI cards coming second I'm afraid. I used to have an ATI card but recently changed to an Nvidia 8800GTS so now I get all the goodies!

No doubt ATI will fight back and in a couple of years the situation will be the opposite of that now and Nvidia users will be complaining that they don't get all the effects etc etc

[AVGWarhawk]

I was able to get the halo effect in the morning and evening on my X1300. It was a file made by Leovampire. Since the new textures was released the halo is gone. I strongly believe it has something to do with the textures and how the card renders them. I tried to mix and match the original game files with what Leo created but it only worked with a certain halo file and texture.

[MONOLITH]

I've been an ATI guy for the last 5 years or so. I'm getting ready to switch back to Nvidia.

I have an entire shelf full of games. When they load up, most of them have that Nvidia screen... "The way it's meant to be played". Publishers and devs are clearly favoring Nvidia, and are willing to publically announce it.

I have found only one game that says "best viewed with ATI", and that is Valve's Half Life 2 stuff (The Orange Box).

In the ugly underworld of game development and PC hardware, it even goes as far as some developers intentionally compromising one brand over the other, in terms of how it will run their game code.


My next card will be Nvidia, until the pendulum swings the other way again.

[Seeadler]

The sun object must be in a certain distance (in game units) of the camera position and the boundary of the sky object. A change of position of these objects or reflection angle in mods effect on some graphics cards in a false rendering without sunhalo or the sun itself.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Seeadler

The sun object must be in a certain distance (in game units) of the camera position and the boundary of the sky object. A change of position of these objects or reflection angle in mods effect on some graphics cards in a false rendering without sunhalo or the sun itself.

OK then. What file, if any, can the sun be changed in distance perhaps allowing the ATI guys the halo?

To Monolith, I'm going Nvidia next card also. This is the first ATI card I have owned and I'm ok with it but Nvidia seems to be leading the way.

[Seeadler]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

OK then. What file, if any, can the sun be changed in distance perhaps allowing the ATI guys the halo?

The 3D model of the sun, a flat box, is stored in the scene.dat file and must be placed by the 3D engine in the gap between the 3D model of the cloud and the sky dome. The sun texture is also stored in the scene.dat, the halo texture in a game folder (don't remember where, my SHIV is uninstalled) both are rendered on this flat box.

If now the horizon value and/or skyobject radius values in the scene.dat are manipulate by a mod, the sun object can overlap in parts with the cloud object or the sky object and it comes to render errors (z-fighting, clipping errors ) - GWX user maybe know this flickering of the sun with the 16km mod at sunrise/sunset on some cards, just put the sun three/four game units nearer to the player cam and this flickering is gone.

[AVGWarhawk]

Perhaps that is the problem. Many said the sun is much to big so the sun was moved back to make it look smaller....as a result the ATI cards can not render the halo. Is this possible?

[-Pv-]

"... I have found only one game that says "best viewed with ATI"..."

So you only use IE because the site has "best viewed with" notices?
-Pv-

[DrBeast]

You can add The Sims 2 to the games that performed better with ATIs

*DrBeast expects a hail of rotten tomatoes flying his way for mentioning that game

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Seeadler

The 3D model of the sun, a flat box, is stored in the scene.dat file and must be placed by the 3D engine in the gap between the 3D model of the cloud and the sky dome. The sun texture is also stored in the scene.dat, the halo texture in a game folder (don't remember where, my SHIV is uninstalled) both are rendered on this flat box.

If now the horizon value and/or skyobject radius values in the scene.dat are manipulate by a mod, the sun object can overlap in parts with the cloud object or the sky object and it comes to render errors (z-fighting, clipping errors ) - GWX user maybe know this flickering of the sun with the 16km mod at sunrise/sunset on some cards, just put the sun three/four game units nearer to the player cam and this flickering is gone.

Leo and I did some testing last night with the scene.dat file but with no effect on the halo. I had it once before. At any rate, the original scene.dat file seems to render the halo a bit better than a tweaked file. I'm not sure where to go with it at this point.

[maerean_m]

Originally Posted by MONOLITH

I have an entire shelf full of games. When they load up, most of them have that Nvidia screen... "The way it's meant to be played". Publishers and devs are clearly favoring Nvidia, and are willing to publically announce it.

No, it's just a marketing decision. The game company receives money from nVidia to play that video.

The media center editions of Blazing Angels and King Kong had an intro movie with Intel processors, but Intel didn't provide any help in optimizing the game for their processors. They didn't even required it to be optimized.

[MONOLITH]

Originally Posted by -Pv-

"... I have found only one game that says "best viewed with ATI"..."

So you only use IE because the site has "best viewed with" notices?
-Pv-

Easy now. That almost feels like you're poking me with a stick. My perspective on the issue was perfectly reasonable when you think it through.

Temporarily setting aside Maerean_m's assertion that the loading screen is merely advertising space;

If 98% of the games you buy, all promote Nvidia as opposed to ATI, if you see things like ATI does not get the sun glare, and Nvidia does, as well as a few other games that have feature discrepencies based on GPU chipset or drivers, it's not unreasonable to be steered into thinking you may be better off with one over the other.

I'm personally not a fanboy of either brand, I've used both. It's not unreasonable to feel at this very moment that Nvidia may have the upper hand. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. And as one who usually roots for the underdog, I'd be perfectly happy to see ATI release a driver tomorrow that gave me sunglare, and have them start buying advertising space on loading screens as well.