DX 9 support

[flaminghotsauce]

I bought a laptop to replace the one I sold, and it has a dedicated ATI radeon 7500 gpu. I was reading that it supported DX8 or 8.1, whatever, and I am wondering if I load FS9 upon it, will adding DX9 work? Will it recognize the '9 and support it? IF it does, my new laptop will be a nice FS9 machine, though it's a bit older.

[justpassingthrough]

Nope

If the card is not DX9, the game wont run the DX9 features

[flaminghotsauce]

Okay, well good news it does support dx9. It was already installed, so I loaded up fs9 and let it go. Works fine, I only tested medium settings.

[ctjoyce]

Not surprising. DX9 is DX8 backwards computable. So you can play DX9 games, but you can't get all the DX9 special effects.

Cheers
Cameron

[DizZa]

The Radeon 7500 is not a Direct X 9 videocard, BUT, as Direct X 9 is backward compatible, it will work fine with a large amount of DX9 applications, BUT, It dosn't support all Direct X 9 features, SO, it cannot run SOME Direct X 9 applications, SUCH AS, Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. THE SLOWEST direct X9 videocard is the Geforce 5 series followed by the Radeon 9 series.

[ctjoyce]

Lol, I think we just had three people give exactly the same answer, only elaborating just a bit off of the previous one.

Cheers
Cameron

[justpassingthrough]

Okay, well good news it does support dx9. It was already installed, so I loaded up fs9 and let it go. Works fine, I only tested medium settings.

Crank the water up to HIGH

If you do not see water display a glass like reflection, you are not getting DX9 support.


The card will run FS9 fine but you just wont get the DX9 features such as high water reflections and other things that make FS9 look much better with DX9.

[flaminghotsauce]

Just for perspective, it's running FS9 better than my desktop "gamer" system ever did. My desktop had the Radeon 9800pro 128 video card, but an AMD 1.1 ghz processor. The lappy has a 2gig p4 and I'm seeing way better frame rates with the same or slightly higher settings.

I will try the high water test, but it's something I've never run before on my desktop. When I ran the DXDIAG, it showed DX9. Does this mean I have DX9 functioning correctly, but the video card only does what it's able?

[flaminghotsauce]

Okay, I did the water test, and there is no glassy reflection, just Microsoft dull blue water. Too bad. But I'm still happy, it runs great.

[Nick N]

Okay, I did the water test, and there is no glassy reflection, just Microsoft dull blue water. Too bad. But I'm still happy, it runs great.

The reason you are getting the better frames is because of a combination of the better CPU and the DX9 features will not enable so the shader loads on the card are not there.

DX9c should be installed and that is what DXDIAG reports, not the card ability. DX9 is backwards compatible to DX7 and 8 hardware so you get the features the hardware will produce but no more.