Vertex Corruption on Old Graphics Cards

[Kromaatikse]

This thread is just for information. I'm already sending a bug report to RSC about this, though of course further reports of the same thing always help to raise awareness among their staff.

If you have a very old graphics card at the bottom end of Railworks' minimum requirements, supporting only Shader Model 2, you are likely to see problems like those in the attached screenshots. Cards known to be affected are the Radeon 9600 and X300, and the Geforce FX series. These cards are in any case limited to Legacy Mode, ie. with TSX switched off.

First some reference screenshots from Hatchet Hill, showing what you should be seeing - these are from RW2 on the same hardware, showing that it is *not* a hardware fault:

And now some examples of what you get with RW3 on a Radeon 9600:

Worth noting that even a non-Pro Radeon 9600 can keep up quite nicely when TSX is off and the route built efficiently. In this case it's being driven by a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 HT from the office scrap pile - new circa 2004.

[antonyperks]

My old card radeon ATI fire GL5600 used to occasionally do this with Rw2, usually when route building and sat still at a busy point for a while pondering plans or something.

[Tankski]

I would occasionally get these vertex problems on my old ATi HD4850. They would happen sometimes when I open FRAPS while I'm driving in RWs.

[Kromaatikse]

The same type of corruption used to appear in RW2 if you minimised and then restored it. However, that's not the problem here.

[chrisiveson]

I have an old Pentium D 3.20 Ghz. with 3 Gb. RAM and an ATI X850XT with 512 Mb. running XP Pro.
It won't run TSX as it says the card doesn't support pixel shader 3 but i get these white shapes with legacy mode but not with RW2.
I've the latest drivers for the card installed.

The machine is only used as a back-up file server these days so I'm not too worried about the graphics but it would be nice to know if it could be fixed.

Chris.

[Kromaatikse]

Okay, that's useful information - as the X850XT has the F-Buffer which expands at least one of the limits on shaders compared to the 9600. That means it must be one of the *other* limits involved in this. (Or a shader which simply relies on a SM3-only instruction or something.)

Anyone who has this problem under RW3, please do report it to support@rsc.

[philspace]

Good morning all

For what it's worth, I reported this exact problem with my Radeon 9800 Pro card, along with dump file, system info and very similar screen-shots on October 18th.

I have not had a reply, apart from the usual "Verify Cache" auto-reply.

Best wishes

Phil

[Kromaatikse]

Every extra report helps - they are noted even if they are not replied to.

[haddock1000]

I'm currently getting a few instances of vertex corruption, but on a much newer laptop. It's got a GT555M in it, and the loco that comes with IOW seems to show the vertex corruption, along with a few (unkown, since they are barely regognisable) scenery items. Could certain items cause this vertex corruption on older machines, and what makes them so vunerable? Also, why is this being shown on a more modern laptop. I have a few more things to sort out, but one could be the corruption of the geo files, but I'm not really sure how this could happen on such a widespread basis.

just a few notes to put down.

thanks,

haddock1000