Atomic Systems

Hello all,

Have any of you any experience with using ATI Radeon 9600XT video cards with MSTS. I had to buy a new PC last week because my old one 'died'. The new one is a P4-3.0G, 1GB RAM, 80GB 7200 rpm HD and 128MB 9600XT video card.

Everything works OK, except as soon as I select Snow in explore mode or in an Activity, MSTS crashes instantly. I have set the 'snow' checkbox in the Troubleshooting launcher, but it makes no difference; I also downloaded and installed the latest driver from the ATI website, but it makes no difference either.

My old PC had a 64MB Ti-4200 and it ran falling snow activities perfectly OK. I haven't changed any of the MSTS settings from the old system, except for profiling the new video card and resetting the MSTS settings to the same as the old card; everything is maxed out (and has been for the last year or so, and working fine under the Ti-4200 card), except for no Overhead Wires or no Dynamic Shadows.

I can have falling rain in any activity or Explore mode, but not falling snow.

At present these experiments with the new card are being done with the Thames-Mersey route (which is pretty heavy on system resources).

Anybody got any ideas? Looks like I might have to live a snow-free existence (which I already do anyway, in sunny Brisbane, Queensland, Australia).

BrianB

BrianB - in anticipation of Bala4, I increased my Ram to 1Gb, and "invested" in a Radeon 128b 9600XT. I found it extremely awkward to get configured, and in many cases my fps rate has actually dropped slightly. However it does seem to perform OK in falling snow. Sorry to be of no help to you, but can only suggest play about with the settings again.
All the best.

Have you tried the drivers from this site. I bought a new motherboard recently, & then had trouble with my sapphire Radeon 9500 Pro. The drivers from this site seemed to fix it.

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

I have not had any problems at all with MSTS with my 9600XT

I did have problems with Snow on my GF4 Ti 4200 though i did find a fix for that, i can't rmember what it was.



Niall

Fixed

I had been using a desktop Icon linked to the main MSTS file Train.exe. When you use the Troubleshooting button in the Launcher mode to 'fix' the snow, it is bypassed if you run MSTS direct from Train.exe.

For snow to work on these cards you need to set the 'Snow causes game to crash or does not display' to ticked and you HAVE to click the 'Play Train Simulator' button in the Launcher.exe file not the Train.exe file. It's an extra step, but what the heck, it now works !!! My desktop Icon now points to Launcher.exe.

BrianB

BrianB wrote:Fixed

I had been using a desktop Icon linked to the main MSTS file Train.exe. When you use the Troubleshooting button in the Launcher mode to 'fix' the snow, it is bypassed if you run MSTS direct from Train.exe.

For snow to work on these cards you need to set the 'Snow causes game to crash or does not display' to ticked and you HAVE to click the 'Play Train Simulator' button in the Launcher.exe file not the Train.exe file. It's an extra step, but what the heck, it now works !!! My desktop Icon now points to Launcher.exe.

BrianB

I don't and i have "one of these cards"

Glad you found the fix for your particular set up.

The Ge-Force or Radeon debate has been raging in some PC magazines for a while now but an independent PC review site "a1 electronics" (that seems to be down at the moment - so no link I'm afraid) published performance tables showing little to choose.

The big criticism that I've read in a number of places is that Radeon's drivers are generally in need of updating. The insinuation was that Radeon made great hardware but lousy drivers!

My advice would be to download the latest driver for your card. A search on Google usually brings up any issues about drivers as it's an ongoing problem for just about every hi-tech bit of kit.

Even the dreadful ATi cards in my work machine kick over the traces if the right driver is not installed.

A bit of lateral thinking.....you could always put the Ti4200 back. My 128Mb Ti4600 has been no problem at all.

Geoff

ATI have allways been slow at updating their drivers.
However the rate at which NVidia kick out drvers suggests that their driver team aren't that good at getting it right first time.

Glad you seem to be sorted.

As this sort of query keeps coming up I thought I'd post the link. Found it as I had address wrong. I'm not saying these guys are any ultimate authority but they do compare makes of hardware and give a review and any problems encountered with it.

http://www.a1-electronics.net/Graphics_ ... 00XT.shtml

Hope some of you will find this helpful.

Geoff