Dual graphics card display problem in Dark Mod

[Fidcal]

My new PC came pre-installed with twin GTX580 graphics cards. Using just one, Dark Mod plays fine with excellent performance. When I checked Nividia's control panel I see only one card was enabled so I enabled both. Now in Dark Mod, in-game I see what I think is normal res but low colour, perhaps only 256 colours is my guess. I took a screenshot but as I pressed the key, the display showed correctly for a moment then went back to low colours and, of course, the saved screen looks OK.

 

The only colour settings I can find are for the desktop and video playing.

 

I got the latest Nvidia drivers yesterday.

 

Any suggestions where I might look to fix this?

[Bikerdude]

When you installed the latest driver, did you thoroughly uninstall (i suggest using driver cleaner) the previous driver..?

 

If you havent done so already create a profile for the Darkmod, you'll need to copy the settings from the doom3 profile as it will have sli specific and other settings you'll need.

[Fidcal]

Where will I find the doom3 profile?

[Bikerdude]

Right click on the desktop, then select nVidia control panel, then from the '3D settings' in the r/h pane select 'Manage 3D settings' and then in the l/h pane select 'Program settings' tab and then in the ' Select a program to customise' section is where you will add the new profile for "Darkmod.exe" and it is where there should be a profile for "Doom3.exe"

 

I found this little tool "SLI profile tool" for exporting your profile once you have created it (so you dont have to go through creating again in the future etc.

[Bikerdude]

FFS, I'm getting fed up of the forum freezes causing double posting..

[Bikerdude]

Is it all sorted now Fids..?

[Fidcal]

Er.. no. I've still got lots of things to sort out and I took a quick look at this. I see it already has doom listed and I think it has the darkmod icon so presumably it read that when I played it because I've not typed anything in - unless it was pre-primed with doom3. Anyway, where does that leave me. I've no idea what the profile means or how to change it or what is wrong. All I know is that in Dark Mod all the display is a mess. It might even be 16 colours for all I know. Lots of speckles - you know like when you substitute mixed color pixels to simulate more colors. This is just blind guesswork and it might not be what Im seeing. Maybe it's to do with the Dark Mod enhancements. Tomorrow I'll try running raw doom3.

 

Hang on - just had an idea and tried it in window mode to try to get a screenshot but it looks OK so it's just full screen where it goes weird. Does that mean anything?

[Bikerdude]

Its hard for me to diagnose this via the forum, if I was sat in front of your PC I would have a much better chance of figuring out what it is. In fact if you second PC is still working and you have a webcam, and have skype installed I could visually try to diagnose it...

 

So do me a favour, so we can rule out that one of the cards isnt faulty I need to to try a few things -

• Firstly make of a note of which card is in which PCI_E slot (why will become clear shortly).
  
• Then pull the second card (the one nearest the PSU) and check TDM runs ok.
  
• Then swap them over and check again.
  
• Then swap the slots the card WERE in and try and run TDM with SLI enabled and come back here with the results.
  

Otherwise I suggest editing the doom3 profile in the nv control panel so TDM dosent use SLI. To be frank 1x GTX580 is way more than capable of playing even even the biggest TDM fm (even the campaign ones you and I are working on...)

[Fidcal]

You mean to check if one of the cards is faulty? Well, I can disable sli in the control panel easily - that's how it came installed. Then I might try plugging the monitor into the output of the other card to test it. It's only chance that I plugged it into the one I did as there is no clue with the machine. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe with sli, one card is the master and I'm plugged into the wrong one?

 

Yes, one card plays TDM very well. I tried Manor Royale and got maxed out at 60fps everywhere. I then attracted about 15 guards inside onto the stairs and got it fluttering down to 45fps. I'm just curious as to whether two cards will deal with that better.

 

I want minimum hassle right now as I'm having to re-install and reconfigure loads of software. In addition, my broadband connection is now playing up - most of yesterday, all last night, all this morning. It's just started working again.

 

What more can go wrong?

[Bikerdude]

You mean to check if one of the cards is faulty? Well, I can disable sli in the control panel easily

To be 101% sure we need to test each card separately, that means only having one of them in the machine at a time.

[Fidcal]

Seems to be working now. It was to do with the Texture Anisotropy setting. If I reduced it then the graphic fault disappeared. But even when I then put the setting back to full it was still OK!

 

Anyway, performance was not noticeably improved in my one test (compared with one card I mean) - probably because the rendering performance was maxed out but it was the multiple AI that slowed it down and probably that's more affected by the main processor than graphics processing.

 

That screen error might be nothing to do with dual cards but simply that I bumped all the settings up full to see what it could do. Maybe the error would show with one card anyway.

[AluminumHaste]

When you get those weird colors have you tried doing a "tdm_updatecookedmathdata 1"?

This sounds like the issues I've had with SLI/Crossfire + bloom renderer causing crazy colours until I update the math data.

[Fidcal]

The colors seemed to have fixed themselves I don't know why but the visual indicator, which used to have green fluctuating between two white vertical bars and a green square now has no green between the bars and the square is gone. No idea what that means. I had no idea what it meant even when it showed green! Settings are unchanged - just the default doom3 profile.

 

I've now put in the tdm_updatecookedmathdata 1 but I can't see any difference.

 

I still can't really detect any performance change between sli enabled or disabled.

[Bikerdude]

yeah, I forgot to mention having SLi enabled would probably not get you much extra perf on tdm.

[Bikerdude]

yeah, I forgot to mention having SLi enabled would probably not get you much extra perf on tdm.