6600 Gt 256Mb issue

[woody2]

I have just upgraded my computer by putting in a gt6600 instead of using the onboard ati200 card on my Athlon 3400. Previously, the graphics were fantastic, but it struggled somewhat with all my addons. Now the performance is superb, but the cloud textures are naff. Rather than the colour blending, they (and the light around the sun) seem to be made up of bands of different shades rather than blended and smoothed. I normally run on 16 bit, but have tried 32bit and had the card set on maximum quality but it doesn't cure the problem.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get the blending as good as my previous card ?

[ctjoyce]

This sounds like you installed and setup the card wrong. Did you disable your onboard card in the BIOS, uninstall all ATi drivers and software, and install the latest nVidia driver? If not then try that and it should fix your problems.

Cheers
Cameron

[woody2]

I haven't uninstalled the card in the bios. How do I do that ?

[congo]

The graphics driver set 16bit colour or less when it installed, or doesn't have the correct driver installed.

The banding is because the colour pallette isn't large enough for the "infinite" smooth blending of one shade into the next.

Right click desktop, go to properties/settings and set the screen resolution you desire and 32 bit colour pallette, then click advanced, go to the monitor tab and set 85hz refresh rate if you have a CRT monitor that supports it, goto the GF6600 device tab for your advanced driver settings and remove application control and set anti-aliasing to manual - 2Qx and anisotropic filtering to 4x or 8x (I use 4x).

Set the graphics quality to very high and turn off the vertical sync. Nothing else need be touched and this will apply the settigs globally for all apps and displays.

If you don't find the above options it's because the driver is not correctly installed.

Within windows services you'll find the nVidia display driver service which can be disabled and in your system startup, any nvidia applications can be disabled, the driver settings you set using the method described above will work fine without the background apps running. It's ridiculous that driver install programs must always seem to install applications and run them as default in the background when they are not at all required or desirable. Again, this will only be required after the correct driver installation and after every subsequent driver installation. (Because nVidia just keeps installing all this crap with every driver release).

Cheers.

[ctjoyce]

I haven't uninstalled the card in the bios. How do I do that ?

When you start up your computer press F2, and then scroll through all the menus and find the onboard GPU, and disable it.

Cheers
Cameron

[woody2]

Now sorted.

I changed the display to 32 bit, but not the game. The game is now running 32 bit and looking and scrolling great. My onboard card was running at 16 bit previously with smooth colour transitions, so not sure why this one couldn't do the same.

I can now appreciate my airfield and scenery addons without juddering. Off to get another 1Gb of Ram later.

Thanks for your help. I figured out how to deactivate the onboard card in the bios so that's now done.

[FridayChild]

congo, can you elaborate on why you suggest to turn off vsync? normally i leave it on, since i'm not trying to get a high frame rate but a consistent one (about 25 fps) and a flowing animation. i'm open to suggestions though.

[congo]

Simply because it's not required unless screen tearing is apparent, which it rarely ever is. It can interfere with benchtest accuracy, as it locks the framerate to a max value of the screen refresh rate on a CRT monitor, not sure what it does on other displays.

To be quite honest, I didn't even think of why when I stated it as I've been doing it for so long it just became habitual.

I do try for a high frame rate, 25fps is NOT acceptable to my eyes, and I don't like anything under 45fps myself. I'm sensitive to FPS up to very high values, and to me, high fps represents a major part of "as real as it gets".
My preference for high frame rates is personal. Different folks have different priorities.

[FridayChild]

I found an interesting read here:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_c ... ns_see.htm