Problem with Cat. 3.9 and Unreal II

nofool

Now that I'm running the the Cat. 3.9's, about 80% of the time when I try to start up Unreal II I get this failure notice right on the desktop:

General protection fault!

History: WM_KILLFOCUS <- UWindowsViewport::ViewportWndProc <- WWindow::StaticProc <- UWindowsViewport::TryRenderDevice <- UWindowsViewport:

penWindow <- UGameEngine::Init <- InitEngine

Build: Jan 7 2003 18:16:21

I didn't have this failure when I had all settings in the Control Panel set to default, but I set AA up to 6X, Aniso to 4X, put on Truform, defeated vertical sync., etc. and now I get these failures! I have the "VPU" feature in control panel turned off.

Does anyone know what to make of this? I never had these failures before, and there's been no failures of any kind with Max Payne 2 or Unreal Tournament 2003 (!!!)

Thanks!

Drumphil · 11-09-2003, 06:54 | posts: 775 | Location: Australia

er, does it glitch with any other games at all??.. I suppose it could just be a glitch with the driver and just utII.. er, did you run drivercleaner before you installed the new drivers? And what is the VPU feature?? (do you mean the lockup recovery thing)..

er, does truform work with utII.. I'd try turning trurform off, but leave all the other options turned up high and see what happens. Why do you want trueform on anyway.. It only really works with a few games, and causes issues with others.. Also, trueform is done in software not hardware with r3x series cards.

nofool

After messing around with this situation I made these observations, and one change, and now Unreal II will open every time without failure.

1. This problem has occurred only with Cat. 3.9 driver.

2. AA settings, aniso settings, truform on or off -- none of that affects (or causes) the problem.

3. The "fix" seems to be in going into the Display tab of the control panel and then going into Monitor. See the little pull-down panel over toward the right that is identifed as "Refresh Rate Override"? With the other Catalyst control panels that have had this feature, I've always set this value to "Same as Desktop" -- and that must be what caused this problem with the Cat. 3.9's.

So, I changed the pull-down value to 85 Hz instead, which is what I want my refresh rate to be. After I did that, Unreal II would start up just fine every time. Weird.

But I still have no idea why this happened. It really would be better to have it locked to the same value as desktop, wouldn't it? So you don't have refresh rates flopping back and forth, and falling back down to 60 Hz in your games. Again, this never happened before I loaded the 3.9's.

Does this make any sense to anyone? Figured I'd better mention it because a lot of people like to lock the refresh rate to the desktop rate, and I'm sure a fair number of people are still playing and replaying Unreal II. Are there other games out that use this particular game engine?

I convinced that this probably is something peculiar to the 3.9's because nobody, not here or at Rage3D Forum had the "right answer". It wasn't that hard, I guess, but it was unfamiliar, and I'll bet I won't be the only person this happens to.

Good luck. It's never dull.

TheDigitalJedi · 11-13-2003, 04:14 | posts: 1,662

I had the exact same problem. I fixed the problem by setting the refresh rate override to disabled. My games are still synced at 100 hertz without visual tearing. I was experiencing some buggy effects with Omega's drivers which was quite unusual. I never had problems with his drivers before and I love his work. The more I troubleshoot my issues, the more I feel that my motherboard just does not want to get along with the XT. It didn't have problems with my 9800 Pro or the FX Ultra but for some reason it's telling the XT to take a hike.

TheDigitalJedi · 11-13-2003, 04:16 | posts: 1,662

I forgot to mention that I type this in the console of my game;

seta r_displayrefresh 100

nofool

I'll try your suggestions, DigitalJedi. My "fix" turned out not to be a reliable one. The crazy thing is that the game will start about 20% - 30% of the time, but the rest of the time I get the error mentioned above and have to start over. It's not an enormous inconvenience, but it doesn't make sense. At least once it does run it continues to run just fine with no further problems of any kind.

I've written an inquiry about this and sent it to ATI. My last series of questions regarding the Cat. 3.8's went completely unanswered, but maybe I'll have better luck this time....

TheDigitalJedi · 11-14-2003, 00:45 | posts: 1,662

Good luck Nofool,

I also disabled fast writes in the BIOS and the ATI control panel. I'll post the letter I received from ATI.