ATI Cards and new Catalyst drivers = No Dark Mod

[Dram]

I've recently been trying to get the Dark Mod up and running on my new laptop, which features an ATI card, and I was unable to start Doom 3, nor Dark Mod for that matter. I have windows 7 on the system, so I was concerned about compatibility, however a thorough, 6 hour search revealed the culprit - the ATI Catalyst drivers featuring the fix for Rage. This issue can be overcome, however, by placing atioglxx.dll from the Catalyst 11.9 drivers into the game's main directory.

 

Original post located on Doom3World.org:

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=234276&sid=16d835657e785970574c9ae64a39733f#p234276

 

It's just the rage/bf3 driver. it fucked up almost all my other OpenGL games (brink, doom3, quake live, eduke32, other q3-engine games etc.).

solution is to copy the "atioglxx.dll" from stable catalyst 11.9 to the affected games directory ("where the exe of the game is")

 

The download for the 11.9 atioglxx.dll is here:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=42da4136221e857d&sc=documents&id=42DA4136221E857D%21132#!/?cid=42DA4136221E857D&id=42DA4136221E857D%21174&sc=documents

 

 

Posting this in case anyone else runs into the same issue. I've not had time to play Dark Mod for about a year and a half now due to work, so now that things are finally starting to calm down, I'm looking forward to trying out a few missions that FM authors have made.

 

Hope this helps.

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=234276&sid=16d835657e785970574c9ae64a39733f#p234276

[Xarg]

Any idea which versions of the drivers are affected and require this fix? Another point, does disable surface format optimisation (the new version of disable catalyst ai) not work with the affected driver version, therefore requiring this fix?

[Bikerdude]

Dram, whats is actually happening because as far as I was aware the game would play you would just get the spinning sky issue..?

[PPoe]

I have catalyst ver 11.10 and TDM is running without problems (Vista).

[Dram]

Well this issue occurs, evidently, in specific systems (card I would assume). My card in particular is a mobile 6990M, where trying to start Doom 3 caused the display driver to crash. I did'nt even get into the menu nor into the loading screen.

 

I'm on win 7 with Catalyst 11.10. As I mentioned, it does not happen for everybody, just for a few unfortunate. So to save them the time of searching for several hours, as I did , I've posted it here.

 

As for which versions are affected, apparently it's anything above 11.9 I believe. But only worry about trying this if you have problems, otherwise if it runs fine then it's a better idea to leave it be.

[PPoe]

My card is ATI mobility radeon HD 4650.. I really dont understand that much to hardware problems, just wanted to let others know that not all ATI cards have problems with TDM. Unfortunalety, some of them have problems.

[Tels]

Would this still break if we'd had a stand-alone TDM? Or is this unrelated and just breaks any OpenGL game?

[Mortem Desino]

With the 1.08 executable, my Radeon HD 4850 works fine with the new Catalyst 11.10 drivers. I'm not certain that it'll be the same for everyone running an ATI GPU.

 

Everything gets typically Catalyst AI fubar'd under 1.07, of course.

 

Thanks for bringing this up, Dram. Strange things are happening starting with the HD 4XXX and higher series of cards.

[Narrator]

Fortunatly I don't have any problems either with my Radeon 6850 while using Catalyst 11.12 under Windows 7 64 Bit.

And with all the problems that seem to arise here and there with newer drivers I am very reluctant to change them ...

[lost_soul]

I wonder if video card companies still use game-specific hacks like this: http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/1

 

If anybody does, that could possibly cause trouble for a non-doom3 TDM. On the other hand a lot of indie devs and hobbiest projects use OpenGL, so I doubt they would get away with that.

 

What I'm talking about is something like:

if $GAME_exe_NAME=megaactiongame5.exe

do optimize

else behave normally.

[Trickster]

whats is actually happening because as far as I was aware the game would play you would just get the spinning sky issue..?

well, i myself never experienced spinning sky, but most of FMs never gets past the loading screen... then i get "Doom3 has stopped working" error. Strange thing, this happened with most of FMs, but not all of them.

 

But now everything works fine. Thanks for your research and posting, Dram. I just checked all missions which didn´t worked earlier and they load up properly.

For the record, i have Win7 x86, ATI HD5570, Catalyst 10.9

[SeriousToni]

It's amazing how new drivers can screw up a whole game experience Nice to have some solutions to pick, thank you Dram - master of the Disco Inferno!

[Bikerdude]

This is a shit arse situation, so now not only is Catalyst AI missing but now we have OpenGL mia. This is not good enough, when I can pickup a cheap HD6000 card I will be logging a support ticket and formal complaint with AMD.