Cloud Problems

[groundloop]

I’m having problems with clouds intermittently looking like trapezoidal spider webs that swirl around and obscure visibility.  This occurs at all altitudes and is more frequent when onboard a ship.  The flak puffs are also involved.  The size of the disturbed area varies from right in your face to small areas on the horizon.  I have a Dell Dimension 8250 Pentium 2.8GHz, 512MB ram, with ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 MB ram video.  Windows XP OS.  I’ve tried every setting I can think about with no effect.  The only thing that works is to enable Hardware Vertex Processing, which then causes all radar targets to be black.  

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Skuzzy]

1)  Install the Catalyst 4.12 drivers from ATI.  These drivers do not suffer the 'black' dot problem which is in all the later drivers from ATI for your card.
2)  Then enable hardware vertext processing.

That should take care of the problems.

[groundloop]

Downloaded 5.1 (all that was available).  Worked like a charm.  Thanks!

[CRASH -CAF-]

Originally posted by groundloop
I'm having problems with clouds intermittently looking like trapezoidal spider webs that swirl around and obscure visibility.  This occurs at all altitudes and is more frequent when onboard a ship.  The flak puffs are also involved.  The size of the disturbed area varies from right in your face to small areas on the horizon.  I have a Dell Dimension 8250 Pentium 2.8GHz, 512MB ram, with ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 MB ram video.  Windows XP OS.  I've tried every setting I can think about with no effect.  The only thing that works is to enable Hardware Vertex Processing, which then causes all radar targets to be black.  
Does anyone have any ideas?

Skuzzy-

I'm having the same problems with the following system:

Asus A8N32-SLI mobo
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Dual Core cpu
EVGA GeForce7800GT (2 cards)
4GB Corsair CMX1024-3200Pro RAM (the mobo only sees 2, it sees all 4 only with Win64 installed - wish I knew that before I bought it)
WD Caviar SE16 250GB SATA hd
Antec Truepower2 550W ps
WinMCE2005 os
TM Cougar HOTAS

I've tried 4 or 5 different versions of graphics drivers, ranging from 77.72 to 81.98 (60-series drivers install OK but are not found by Windows), and have tried enabling and disabling SLI on the video cards - all with the same results.

When I enable Vertex Processing in the game, so many things get screwed up I can't list it all, but here are a few: the clipboard page that opens for selecting aircraft in the hangar, viewing E6B info, etc. just spins round & round & round, even at the main page when I first launch AH2; flight controls are unusable and, while the calibration routine runs OK, it has no effect; when I go online, the computer simply locks up hard as soon as I reach the tower in any arena (occasionally I can launch Task Mgr and End AH2, but I typically have to reboot the machine entirely). With HVP enabled and with Optimize Objects and/or Optimize Terrain selected, the machine often locks up as soon as I launch the game and get to the main screen.

So Vertex Processing is completely unusable for me. With it turned off, I can run things OK but see the same graphics anomolies noted in Groundloop's original post.

Oh and something else, although I don't know if it's somehow related... the Tilde (expand text buffer) and Quote (check 6 call) keys do not work. They're mapped properly but don't work from the HOTAS or from the keyboard.

[Skuzzy]

Disable one of the AMD cores, enable hardware vertex processing and it should work fine then.

There is some type of bug in the combination of the 7800 and dual core AMD systems which is either in the OS or in a driver.

You may want to hit the "Hardware and Software" forums about this.  It has been discussed in great length.

[The Fugitive]

Where would I find this "hardware vertext processing"?

[CRASH -CAF-]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Disable one of the AMD cores, enable hardware vertex processing and it should work fine then.

There is some type of bug in the combination of the 7800 and dual core AMD systems which is either in the OS or in a driver.

You may want to hit the "Hardware and Software" forums about this.  It has been discussed in great length.

Thanks, Skuzzy, for pointing me to the info I needed. I edited my boot.ini file as mentioned in the thread over in Hardware and Software and that seems to have done the trick.

[CRASH -CAF-]

Originally posted by The Fugitive
Where would I find this "hardware vertext processing"?

Fugitve, it's a check box in the video settings. It's not accessible in the video settings when you're already in the game, you have to go to Video Settings from the main page's clipboard when you first launch the game. (It's the same page that runs automatically when you launch the game for the first time after installation.)

[maddog]

I read where microsoft has a fix for this.... Go to MS and ...I think it was under..."lower performance on dual core processors" .... Have to have them send it to you but you can download fix .... Got it at hardforum.com

[The Fugitive]

Thanks Crash