Hi! I've been using ATT for some years now and it's an essential tool to me. I never had any problems, until Windows 7 came up. At first, everything ran fine. I have 5 PCs by the way and they are installed and updated as equally as possible. I use Win7 Pro x64 SP1 and the most recent Beta of ATT. Every one or two months I reinstall the PCs to get clean status again and the most recent updates. The problem with Steam and ATT's Force Triple Buffer came quiet suddenly. I spent some time to analyse this matter. If I have a profile in ATT for Steam.exe with activated Triple Buffers, Steam crashes soon after entering the password. It seems to came around after a certain patch level of Windows or so, because the old PCs run still fine with that settings and every fresh installation has that problem. But the really weird thing is that Steam even crashes if I start it directly without using ATT's profile! To get it working again, I have to deactivate Force Triple Buffer, delete the profile for Steam.exe or unload ATT. Thanks in advance for some advice.
Don't use Triple Buffers with the Steam client. Instead set profiles for each Steam game with Triple Buffers. Steam isn't a 3d application, and won't work properly with Triple Buffering.
Thanks for the tip, but I did that already. As you may not know, Steam games do not have extra executables. They are launched within Steam. So you have to apply whatever you want to the steam.exe, or create profiles for steam.exe + parameters to launch it "directly". I can imagine that a Steam client update brought the issue, but why does it still matter if I start Steam without ATT (if any profile for steam.exe is present)?
The Steam client still runs an EXE of the game when you launch it through Steam. Many of them are called "Launcher" or what not, but they each have their own EXE you can link an ATT Profile to.
I'm afraid you are wrong. Not a single game I have on Steam has a separate EXE to start. These include Half-Life 2, CS, Shogun 2, Duke Nukem Forever and many more. The idea behind Steam is that Steam has to be started before the game, so that no one can override it for cheating or piracy. You are right, that a separate profile for each game can be created as you can launch each game through steam.exe with parameters though.
The games in Steam do have separete EXEs that are ran along side of the Steam client, but you cannot go around Steam (You are correct on this point). You can link these EXEs to ATT Profiles. I've been doing it for years! For example Half-Life 2's EXE is found here: hardriveinstallpath\Steam\steamapps\steamprofilename\half-life 2\hl2.exe Just Cause 2's EXE is found here: hardriveinstallpath\Steam\steamapps\common\just cause 2\JustCause2.exe
Oh, how right you are they were not there some days ago lol I must have been blind all these years... Ok, interesting. I'll investigate on that. Thanks for the tip
It does not crash anymore by loading the separate EXE files. However it is quiet difficult to measure the benefits of triple buffering these days, at least with my games I'm used to play. No notable mouse lag with vsync only and the att fps meter shows no jumps which should only be the case with triple buffering enabled.
Interesting... on one of my four PCs Starcraft 2 (latest patch) crashes right after starting it, if I use an ATT profile with "Force to use Triple Buffers" enabled. On the other three it works perfectly. For example: Working PC: Gigabyte 890FX Mainboard, Phenom II X6, Sapphire 6850 Crashing PC: DFI 790FX Mainboard, Phenom II X4, Sapphire 6850 Both Win7 Pro x64, same patch- and software-level, newly installed, latest Catalyst 11.12 Any ideas?
Hm, another, newly installed machine has this problem now too. There must be a difference. Maybe I find it out and you'll know here.
Possibly a BIOS setting, like HPET (precision event timer)? And even that is a stretch and a large guess. It could be undetectable, I doubt it's something you will figure out unless by accident.
Actually I've managed to get it to work. On thing I found out is that since I've been using Win7 x64 instead of WinXP, on all four PCs, the game profiles won't start at all by clicking on them, or by clicking the generated links. Reason: I start ATT with Windows boot. After closing and opening ATT, games will start. Solution: Do not start ATT with Windows, but clicking the links will open and close it according to the game profile setting. By applying this solution, dumping and renewing some of the game profiles in ATT, it's OK now (starting as well as applying Triple Buffers without crashing apps).
