Screen artefacts with ATI 4870 on ETQW.

[Fixxer_Linux]

Hi all,

I'm playing Ennemy Territory Quake Wars with a Radeon 4870 and I'm experiencing screen artefacts.
The pilots are "8.54.3" / Catalyst Control Center version 2.1 (Gentoo system) and I think that this is the fglrx 8.10 Gentoo version.

Those artefacts are like snow on the screen : white or black dots or even white squares appearing randomly on the screen. Those squares does appear on one frame, disappear for the next few frames and then reappear. It's not permanent on the frames. Also, those squares/dots are very small, just a few pixels sized.

However, the frame rate is good, the game doesn't crash, everything is fine except those artefacts, which are not really annoying to be honnest.

I'd just like to know if this corruption occurs to anyone else or is it my GFX card which could have some hardware related problem ??

I noticed that changing the anisotrop level from 12 to 8 in the game options made some squares appear in black sometimes. They were all white when set to 12.

Thanks for your answers

[mattmatteh]

i cant speak for 4870. i have ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AS [Radeon 9550] and most of the time i boot i get blue pixel noise. the noise is only 1 pixel in size, only blue, independent of X11. it will stop if there is nothing changing on the screen, like typing. the faster i type the more noise.

i am using radeonfb, the main reason i ditched nvidia, the only way i could get a modern console widescreen.

i asked alex d. on irc and he suggested it was either radeonfb using up resources, or the widescreen (1920 x 1200) was using too much bandwith on the card. the noise happens in console and x11. only noticable if there is a black background, like console, or playing movies when the screen has black or is dark.

i have not found a solution to fix this.

i know these are totally different cards, but similar problemsm, perhaps related.

matt

[legume]

If you've ever run it with indirect rendering you should check that the cvar in config or console.

seta r_useIndexBuffers is 1 not 0.

That used to mess things up for me on a HD3850.

The only other artifact I had was slipgates rendered as black squares if specular was on full, turning it down one fixed it.

[mattmatteh]

legume, how do i check that ?

[Fixxer_Linux]

It's Xgame !
I use xgame to launch ETQW in another X session, in order to be able to switch back to KDE if I need to change the sound volume for example.
By launching ETQW directly from KDE and not by using xgame, the artefacts are just disappearing !

It's really weard as I don't really see why the another X session is making artefacts...
Perhaps I don't have exactly the same config file for the two sessions. I'll check that later.

mattmatteh, you can check that parameter in $HOME/.etqwcl/base. There, you'll find a etqwconfig.cfg file which contains all the variables, among which there is the "r_useindexbuffers". Mine was already set to "1".

Hope this helps.

Cheers.