That's interesting information Sydbod, I'll have a look at how this relates to my own experiences from the past. I've seen this behaviour regularly, occasionally with cards which normally don't tear and even in the year 2000 with my TNT card I temporarily had it untill my OEM drivers changed.
Previous drivers for this card gave me a 7217 error, so perhaps this thing happens in the D3D.DLL code.
I still think there must be an easy workaround for this, there are more ways then one to skin a cat as the rocketbug has shown me.

VonBeerhofen

Well ! I'm back and after reading the last post, I think the only solution is to get back to my ATI card ! I will do it when i change my computer...
Thank you again

Greetings

Tacks

Hi,

i've made a post days ago concerning ATI cards, Try it out, it may work anyway. Also there's a post about a registry change to make for the active video driver which will only work for Nvidia cards.

XenonS

ATI cards are usually pretty good with EAW.

The reg hack is for Win98 and XP, no other op systems. It should be at Talley-Ho under Max188's no fixed pitch http://www.sandbagger.uk.com/LF/toolsutils/regedit.zip

G'day,



I could certainly imagine a mistake such as you describe causing something that looks like the screen tearing!

Another potential cause is all the bytes used to store the screen's contents not being contiguous, and the code not adapting to that. For example, on my nVidia 6200, with screen width 1680 and with 32 bits (4 bytes) per pixel, each screen row requires 1680*4 = 6720 bytes of storage, but DirectX reports the "pitch" of the surface to be 7168. Microsoft's web site says the extra bytes are "cache", but since 7168 = 1024 * 7 I'm guessing that DirectX is aligning each screen row on a 1 kilobyte boundaries for performance reasons. EAW certainly has some code which assumes that the pitch is equal to the size in bytes of a row, and I'm assuming that code might be used in cases where it is not appropriate and is actually the cause of the issues we're seeing. I'd like to see if I can verify this assumption by finding out if someone who is experiencing this problem actually has DirectX reporting a pitch value that doesn't meet the code's expectations, hence this post.

The fact that the EAW menus now have a width of 1024 is probably preventing me from seeing screen tearing, but perhaps newer/better video cards have drivers which request alignment to larger boundaries. (I'm just assuming here that the driver tells DirectX what alignment it prefers)

[Edit: Also, I note that the "registry hack" iron mike refers to in the post immediately above this refers to a "NoAdjustedPitch" setting for the driver]

Regards,
David

The "NoAdjustedPitch" reg edit works in 2 flavors. Win98 and XP only and is for Nvidia cards only. I have a MX440 in my PII machine with XP and the registry fix works like a charm in that machine. It was a bit scary but after backing up the reg and making the NAP edits it has run without a hitch. I also have an old Win98 system with a MX300 card and it runs straight out of the box. I often fly older campaigns on those machines and used the base install from the Win98 system as my plain vanilla setup.

I do all of my painting and testing on a 2005 HP P4 dual core processor with XP, service pack 3 and an ATI 4800 Saphire. So far everything works without a problem on that machine. One thing I learned early on is that each PC is its' own little world based on the programs, parts and personal preferences. A very similar system to mine can and sometimes runs like a slug. Go figure, eh?