Greetings Everyone, Brand new to the forums so if this is entirely the wrong place I apologize; I posted here as my issue is related to AMD graphics cards and a specific game, but I wanted to see if this was an isolated case or if others may of experienced it. Currently, I've been trying to get back into an old game called "Freelancer", but my issue is since I got an R9 270x and now a RX 480 (8gb). I noticed that, in this game some textures are extremely blurry, while others are not; at times there's rare occurrences where some textures are "white". I asked some of the game's specific community forums and users have reported to it being an issue exclusive to AMD and they brought up the issue that it could be with the more recent drivers and Catalyst AI. My current rig has an AMD Rx 480 using 16.12 drivers but I have noticed this since 15.x.x but it was not always like this on my R9 270x. Until I suppose after a specific drivers update and since then I have not been able to fix it. I have re-installed the game, re-installed windows (for an unrelated issue), also used Radeon Mod to disable Catalyst AI and force High quality Mip texture, I have used RadeonPro as well to do the same and yet it persists. So my question is, has anyone ever encountered this issue before whether it be Freelancer or other older games, using an AMD graphics card with the latest driver updates and found a fix? How did you solve it? Thanks! Some shots https://imgur.com/a/n6niM
In the Radeon Control Panel setting there's a Texture Filter Quality option, you could try to set that to "High" instead of "Standard" which is otherwise the default, I prefer to force anisotropic filtering as well but some games don't take too well to that although it's pretty rare and AF doesn't cause much of a performance hit in most games although there's some exceptions. (The compatibility option for "Surface Format Optimization" and setting that to "Off" could help too in a few games.)
Try DX9 and DX11 wrapper. It will convert DX8 that Freelancer uses and maybe this solve blurry/white textures. Download - ReShade.zip Copy d3d8.dll and ReShade.fx from archive to Freelancer\EXE\ folder Run game and check blurry/white textures. If it still occurs, then remove d3d8.dll and ReShade.fx from Freelancer\EXE\ folder and try another wrapper: Download - dgVoodoo2_53.zip Run dgVoodooSetup.exe Navigate to "DirectX" tab, uncheck "dgVoodoo Watermark", setup 1024 MB VRAM and select 8x MSAA Copy d3d8.dll from dgVoodoo2_53\MS\ archive to Freelancer\EXE\ folder
Thank you guys for the responses, I apologize that I did not respond any sooner. I will respond to you both Unfortunately I had done this prior, one of the game's community fan forum boards also told me to try a similar approach but nothing successful So With the first Option ,it did remove a graphics flicker that happened during the game's load up screen (it's more of a werid flickering of the screen with a mod I play where during the boot screen it flickered black and white) and I saw the "reshader compilation complete" text , but the textures still remained blurry and/or missing. As for the second option, it skipped my game's boot screen but unfortunately it did not really change anything either. Thank you guys both for the advice so far!
Did you try downloading Radeon Pro app from this website (guru3d.com) and setting the LOD Bias to -1 for the game? I'm not even sure if RP still works on post 7xxx series AMD GPUs. Seriously wished AMD hired John to be part of their driver team instead of having him work on Raptr.
Not necessarily to -1, but I tried -3 to see if it did anything, and I did not even notice a change, using RadeonPro.
+1 to all the other suggestions as well The best thing to do for old games or any as I own a Polaris 11 GPU. Is to go into WHQL 16.9.2 Settings and crank out all the tabs to the max... VSR Res 3840x2160 with all the Settings Cranked... Heck, setup a youtube Channel for Old School Games At 4k... I'd save your channel and watch all the time. I like watching videos of old games cranked to excessive new tech levels on high end new tech hardware... HAHAHA You might try this QuickLOD for AMD/ATI Open Source... I'll give it a shot... might need Restart64.exe via CRU but maybe not. http://hwbot.org/newsflash/2368_adjust_lod_on_amdati_graphics_cards_on_the_fly_with_quicklod
Does blurred/white textures appear on vanilla game? Or only on modded game? Can you upload save game where immediately will be seen blurred/white textures?
Both, modded and vanilla. And since I mostly play the mod, there is not a "save-game" for me to upload here unfortunately, all I can do is provide more screenshots.
Did you always have blurred texture map as on this screenshot? - https://i.imgur.com/d5lrDPg.jpg Or it blurred only sometimes? Did you try apply these hacks from flconfigdatabase.txt? Code: // SceneRenderer // Scene based renderer (eg: PowerVR, Kyro etc...) // NoAlphaTest // Disable alpha test (conflicts with other modes) // oTriLinear // Do not attempt trilinear filtering // NoTripleBuffer // Do not attempt triple buffering // DefaultBltNotFlip // In full screen mode, use BLT // NoFog // Do not attempt fog // TextureOffset // Texel offset for fonts is done on x,y's not u,v (eg: Riva128) // BrokenAlphaTest // Cards that cannot do Alpha test without ALPHABLEND being enabled (eg: ATI Rage) // RenderEqualZ // Render bit depth must equal Z bit depth (eg: nVidia cards) // NoParallelism // Lock the back buffer after rendering (eg: Voodoo3 - queueing up too many blits) // BadMouse // Card can never use GDI mouse (eg: Voodoo) // NoMipMap // Disable mipmaps // Bad4444 // Disable 4444 textures (eg: Chromatic Mpact) // NoDisablePerspective // Disable disabling perspective correct texturing (eg: Voodoo cards) // LimitTextureSize // Limit texture size to 256*256 to correct bad caps // ForceSquareTextures // Do not allow non-square textures // NoStretchTexture // Force system memory stretch blit to square up textures // SlowDisplayModeChange // Prevent video drivers that take a while before sending the WM_DISPLAYCHANGE msg from getting stuck in an endless loop of display mode changes (eg: Savage 4) // Bad8888 // Disable 32 bit textures (eg: Voodoo) // // Disable1600x1200 // Freelancer specific: // FL_BAD_WFOG // card doesnt work well w/ freelancer's w-fog // FL_BAD_ENVMAP // card doesnt work well w/ freelancer's envmapping // FL_BAD_MOD2X // card doesnt work well w/ freelancer's detail mapping // FL_BAD_DXTN // card doesnt work well w/ freelancer's dtxn texture loader
For the first part, No, I noticed this back on my R9 270x after some time. Originally I had thought it was some texture back I used that was to reskin in HD, that caused the issue at first, but then I had to reformat my computer due to some failure and when I re-installed, the issue persisted. So that ruled out the texture pack being the cause of it, after looking into it and visitng some of the game's community forums, they told me it seemed to be a common issue with mipmaps with Catalyst AI being the culprit when it came to this specific game. Although no matter what I did to change those values with tools mentioned above, nothing changed. These are my configurations in my flconfigdatabase.txt which seem very much similar I am curious if the NoMipMap is an issue?
None of these hack-setting doesn't activated yet. To activate it, you should add your videocard id and needed options. Try this one - flconfigdatabase.zip Play a bit with it, to test white/blurred texture. Code: 0x67df = "Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics" SceneRenderer NoTriLinear NoTripleBuffer DefaultBltNotFlip NoFog TextureOffset BrokenAlphaTest RenderEqualZ NoParallelism BadMouse NoMipMap Bad4444 NoDisablePerspective LimitTextureSize ForceSquareTextures NoStretchTexture Bad8888 FL_BAD_WFOG FL_BAD_ENVMAP FL_BAD_MOD2X FL_BAD_DXTN break