I upgraded my vid card to a MSI 4850. Fantastic performance increase over my 8800 at a third the price. Something I noticed last week in my FVR league race I saw a car that was missing things..like tires. We all use custom skins in this league so I wasn't too concerned.
This week I had some other encounters with gfx anomalies, where cars were missing things... and then I saw this..





Since I was just using the drivers that came with the card when I bought it, I decided I should update. I got the latest off the ati site and installed them... but am still seeing anomalies, like this.




And even totally missing... Any IDEAS>?

Try different settings in Catalyst. For example I noticed that in BoBII I get transparent aircraft and cockpit with Adaptive Antialiasing enabled. Best to run with a totally "clean" profile and not trying to force anything in drivers, then work from there.

I run all my games using only the latest ATI driver and in-game settings. I have not had an issue for 3 or 4 years. Thing is, I do not play all the games -- so, that does not mean there are no problems to be had.

I've read articles that indicate most developers put all the "safe" video options in their in-game options page. If they leave something out of their own settings, its for a reason. AA is often left out. So, since I like how the games look using the in-game settings, I never feel like I have to use the Catalyst Control Center to over-ride in-game settings.

Still, some people like to do that a lot. I think because most games are developed on Nvidia hardware via TWIMTBP, Nvidia users have fewer issues overall when using a "control panel" to override the in-game settings. I think, in general, neither Nvidia nor ATI promise one can override every setting of every game and have it work. Also, it may work and be broken when a new driver arrives.

Anyhow, as RSC indicates, eliminate CCC overrides. That may help. To be sure they are eliminated, one could uninstall the CCC including any settings files -- while leaving the driver in place. If that worked, reinstall CCC.

Allen, while your approach is safe, it's unsatisfactory. For example FS2004 only has a "use Antialiasing" checkbox, no mention of 2x, 4x, 8x whatever. Unless your games are really nicely coded you leave a lot of GFX potential unused by defaulting the card settings.

I'm not familiar with that particular racing sim, but I see nothing "advanced" in the rendering.

The interesting thing to me is that it only happens to some cars, not others. That could mean the error is dependent either on certain MIPMAP settings (distance to camera) or on certain texture files.

rFactor has an "Auto Detail FPS" option and a "visible cars" option. The former will remove graphics from the game in an attempt to meet your target FPS (which I set a 40, because below this framerate you start to lose the cues you need to drive the car). Auto Detail FPS can easily cause the missing body elements shown in your second image, although the first one looks weird.

The Visible Cars option will make cars appear and disappear as necessary to maintain the appropriate visible number. In your third image it doesn't look there are more than 3 cars in view, however, so I'm surprised that you're seeing this. I see this in busy races, occasionally at the start, where the cars in front of you disappear sometimes (not a good feeling).

I don't think this a hardware issues - it just requires some interpretation and explanation about how rFactor deals with graphics settings. You need to find the right balance between performance and visible details.