Hardware Acceleration Skews Graphics

[Rum Baron]

Hi,

Unfortunately the search engine refuses to behave no matter how I go about it. I know this has been mentioned before, that certain nVidia cards seem to have issues properly rendering the images (and I have this too - a 7600GT put into Hardware on Tropico gets all messed and I have to use Software ).

What I was wondering, though, is if anyone has comprehensively documented which cards do work properly with Hardware mode and which ones do not, as well as whether or not certain driver patches do this?

I could begin testing several AGP cards I have here, as well as a couple of PCI-E... I already know a 7600GT with the latest beta drivers doesn't do Hardware properly, I will try my 7100GS and then move on to the several ATI cards I have.

[pirate jenny]

I could begin testing several AGP cards I have here, as well as a couple of PCI-E... I already know a 7600GT with the latest beta drivers doesn't do Hardware properly, I will try my 7100GS and then move on to the several ATI cards I have.

I will volunteer that it works great on my ATI Radeon X600 256MB HyperMemory.  If one of your ATI cards is similar, I'd recommend starting with that.

Good luck!   

[Coconut Kid]

While my memory is by no means perfect, I believe that you are the first poster with a current (or nearly current) machine with access to several video cards to change out to determine which cards work in hardware mode. Perhaps there were/are others, but they never mentioned it -- probably because they didn't care to mess with it for this old game.

I am fairly certain that almost everyone who persisted in playing the game has been satisfied with using software mode when they had a problem and shifting to software mode fixed it.

Naturally, if someone (other than the moderators & me) had a video card that worked in hardware mode, they did not become involved in the discussion about hardware vs software mode. It seems that none of the moderators and other helpers on the Technical Questions / Troubleshooting board have had a video card that worked in hardware mode. Brf might be an exception. In any case, I believe that board has most of the discussions, rather than this BUG board.

I suspect 99% of the posters here do not (did not) poke around in the hardware guts of their machines.

[Coconut Kid]

Sorry! 

I should have mentioned "Weeds" as one who could comment on this.

I guess that I was thinking that he has made more comments on getting the most out of some really old machinery.

Also, his interest seems to be more in audio (music) applications.

[Rum Baron]

For starters, I can verify that even modern Intel integrated video works with Hardware mode turned on:

Test system - Pentium D 945 on an i945 chipset with latest necessary drivers. Installed Tropico PI, put on patches, changed modes. Worked. Surprisingly swift considering the bad reputation Intel's integrated video has gotten due to being quite lightweight on gaming even compared to the Geforce 6100 series.

[Rum Baron]

Update (ish):

My radeon 6950 hopelessly skews the graphics when I try hardware. But the software mode is amazing quality now!

Has anyone made the list I mentioned in the 5 years or so I wasn't here?