Hi all !
I've just switched from an ATI radeon HD 5770 to nvidia GTX 460. Everything was ok with ATI and patch 1.28d1024, but now, with GTX 460 (and 258.96 drivers under winXP) i get back the "screen tearing" issue. I've reinstalled the game (copy files from CD and patched it to 1.28c then 1.28d), tried d3dwindower and so on, no way to avoid screen-tearing. And I'm really interested in playing the campaign game, no single missions...so is there any workaround for the latest nvidia graphic cards ? Or just waiting for a future patch ? Thank you for any help.

Tacks

3d windower. See this thread for a link

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3059449/You_Guys_keeping_up_with_d3dWi.html#Post3059449

He has already IM

Until there is some progress made by the people who are working on this there will be no new solutions unfortunately. I'm beginning to wonder if both ATI and nVidia are dropping support for 16 bit in their latest drivers.

Jel

Try reinstalling DirectX, it solved a few things in the past.

VonBeerhofen

Thank you to help me !
I tried d3d windower and it didn't work...
I think i only have to wait for a patch...
I will try reinstalling directX but I don't want to create new issue with other softwares ! So I won't do it in a hurry.
Greetings
Tacks

I'm reading that the GTX 460 is nVidia's latest flagship using directX11. This may well be part of your problem as the card may have a number of accelleration features which aren't recognised by EAW, which was written for DirectX 6.
You can first try to change the acceleration level setting in the video hardware options (control panel --> Display --> slider). If the card has PhysX, try turning it off. Also you can try to experiment with the acceleration features like Anisotropic filtering, double or triple buffering, Vsync (this was the main culprit in the past and should be off!), Anti aliasing etc. Just make sure you save your settings into a game profile first, so you can easily restore what you have now, or write down what you have changed. No pain, no gain. Good luck!

VonBeerhofen

Ok i will try to play with my card settings and I will report here the results.
Greetings
Tacks

Hi VB,

He is using WinXP so there are no DirectX drivers for higher than DX9 for his video card. His card is downwards compatible.

The tearing is a 2D image sync problem within the video driver. Since 2D has been scrapped under Win 7 (everything is now 3D accelerated) we can expect more and more 2D rendering problems to happen under the drivers for WinXP.

Basically the menu screens should not be updated at such a high rate and preferably only updated when there is actually a change to be applied to the menu display (eg: mouse moves etc). The same sort of implementation that is used for all normal windows applications.

The required fix is too large an undertaking for the current active code group members.

Regards Syd

I'm sorry to hear that Sydbod. Sadly I have no expertise on this besides having learned that I will not have enough time to get the required expertise. One thing I do remember which was about sprites using windowed mode to prevent memory defragmentation and I've allways had the idea that the screen tearing had something to do with storing a 640*480 screen onto a 1024*768 or other size desktop without addapting line width and height pointers resulting in an interleaved display.
At one point I had this effect happening to the groundobjects too but I can't remember what the test conditions were or what I did to make that happen, except that it was in the era of UHR experiments and must have had something to do with that.
I doubt you can do anything with this information but it's all I can give.

VonBeerhofen

Hi VB,

I appreciate what you are saying and can understand your reasoning behind it.
You may have possibly not seen the tearing effect and most people who do get it do not give a full description of the most important part of that tearing effect.

If a menu is consistantly tearing all over and one happens to get the mouse over a menu hotspot and clicks the mouse button, then the menu screen suddenly displays perfectly (it is visible) for that screen until the next menu screen loads (about 0.1 seconds). Basically that screen stops being updated while the computer is preprocessing the next menu screen and the tearing stops because the screen stops being updated at a ridiculous rate.

It is a driver problem dealing with DirectDraw 2D.

It is amazing how Nvidia have dropped the ball again for EAW and ATI appears to be the card of choice.
I chuckle when I think back a few short years and it was the other way round.

Nice to talk to you again.

Regards Syd.