ATI Users anyone getting opengl issues???

[Waycool]

Hi All


Is anyone else having issues with opengl specifically atioglxx.dll crashing on various offsets? I have a XFX 4770 (new ATI Radeon) and do get crashes with reference to the dll file. Apparently you can use Catalyst drivers 9.4 but my card is not able to install these, to new I guess.

My video card has been stress tested with furmark opengl benchmarking and stressing utility for 2 hours and is solid. Temps seem good power supply solid 750watt Corsair.

I have tried Catalyst drivers 9.5 through 9.7 and various atioglxx.dll files with newer builds the 9.4 included atioglxx.dll will not load the game. Sometimes I can make it through a quick battle or scenarion but more often it seems to crash 5-10 minutes in.

Anyone ???

[Roman9441]

IF u use Vista 32/64 Try ATI 9.8 Beta it work for me play 2 hour without crash or something but i'm not Sure hope u can play it

[Waycool]

Thanks for the heads up Roman I am running XP so the 9.8 beta should be along soon for XP.

[LukeFF]

If all else fails, stay with the 9.3 drivers. They are AFAIK the latest drivers which will run the game without crashes on XP.

[kenjara]

I am playing on CMSF with the british module and keep getting atioglxx.dll (open gl driver) as the faulting module when the game crashes. Mine also crashes in about 5-10 minutes. I have a 4870 1GB on Vista 64bit 9.7 drivers.

[Waycool]

same here kenjara

[Smaragdadler]

I have an ATI R4870 with driver version 9.3. In game goes mostly well except for the known fps slow downs on certein maps. But since v1.20 CMSF likes to crash with out-of-memory when I alt-tab on desktop and have other programms running in the background. Also, when I want to switch on vertical sync. in the option menu, CMSF crashes. At start-up I get sometimes strange negative graphics from other programms I have run before, as long the battlefront intro movie loads.

[kenjara]

I have an ATI R4870 with driver version 9.3. In game goes mostly well except for the known fps slow downs on certein maps. But since v1.20 CMSF likes to crash with out-of-memory when I alt-tab on desktop and have other programms running in the background. Also, when I want to switch on vertical sync. in the option menu, CMSF crashes. At start-up I get sometimes strange negative graphics from other programms I have run before, as long the battlefront intro movie loads.

You do realise by running the 9.3 drivers you missing out on numerous performance increases for the 4870 right? Sounds like you may have some other issues with your pc, you should post your specs. If I tick vertical sync on my menu it locks the main menu when I come out of options.

Tried the 9.8 beta drivers, they made no difference at all. :(

[LukeFF]

It sure would be nice to hear a word from Battlefront about whether a fix for this is in the works. How long has it been since the 9.3 drivers were released?

[kenjara]

It sure would be nice to hear a word from Battlefront about whether a fix for this is in the works. How long has it been since the 9.3 drivers were released?

Perhaps the best part of a year at a guess. So its not a viable solution, im pretty sure they predate the 4870 itself.

[MrWombat]

Yeah, it's frustrating. I bought the British module and now can't play CMSF at all, without downgrading to 9.3 and screwing up my other games. It's weird that the Vista patched CMAK works fine (once you fix the text issue) but CMSF now is inoperable.

I sympathize with Battlefront on having to keep up with the changes in PC video card technology, but blaming ATI seems a bit daft, too. You have to assume that PC hardware manufacturers are going to improve their products over time. You have to assume that your development cycle is going to span several of those product improvement cycles in regards to things like drivers for video cards. And you have to try at least to make sure your game will work on your best guess of the hardware/software available when it comes out, not when it started development. As this seems to be the only real issue with ATI drivers, it's hard not to wonder whether the fault is more on this end than on ATIs.

But truly, I don't care about "fault," I just want a functioning game.

[Waycool]

ATI has become more entrenched in the once highend stomping grounds of Nvidia. Therefore ATI are making up a larger share of gaming rigs. BF we need further info on this even a sticky with workarounds as well as what is causing the atioglxx.dll crashes.

[Schrullenhaft]

Blaming ATI is actually quite valid. The 9.3 Catalysts were released sometime in March 2009; approximately 5 months ago. ATI has broken something in their OpenGL driver and hasn't fixed it yet. To go from 9.3 to 9.4 and have something not work, would put the driver to blame, not the game. ATI is not fully supporting OpenGL as they should. OpenGL hasn't been a strength of ATI's, which is strange since they hired some SGI engineers a few years ago.

DirectX 10/11 is probably dominating ATI's attention and their OpenGL team seems to be dropping the ball. I don't think it would be fair to say that Battlefront needs to re-engineer the graphics engine in CMSF just to fix a problem with ATI's driver. Nvidia's OpenGL driver works fine (generally speaking), what would they have to change to make ATI's work ? If your local gas station started supplying only diesel fuel and you drove a vehicle that operated only with unleaded gasoline, would you blame the vehicle manufacturer ?

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any easy answer/fix for this issue at the moment. Until ATI's OpenGL team addresses this issue, the 9.3 Catalysts are the only answer. Battlefront doesn't get the immediate attention of ATI's developers since they are a "boutique" game company that has a small customer base compared to a game like Crysis or some other large commercial release.

The only thing I think that may help to push this issue along with ATI/AMD is to submit some feedback to them. One method is their Catalyst Crew Feedback (http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D27E29B0E3) or their Cusomter Care email form (http://emailcustomercare.amd.com/). I have no idea if either method will get you any decent feedback from ATI/AMD or make a long term difference in addressing this problem. It is possible that if they get enough complaints from different users regarding this problem that they may look into it. Still, we could be months away from a solution from ATI.

[kenjara]

thats not likely to happen, and besides the problem if it is atis driver is between them and battlefront not us. If battlefront cant support a mainstream graphics card make they should not be selling their game or warn people before buying it. Which brings me onto the question why is the no direct x mode anyway, I cant even remember the last time I ran a game in open gl, it was probably quake 3 or something.

So far I have spent £30-£40 on something not playable. :mad:

[Schrullenhaft]

This problem has only been occurring since the 9.4 Catalyst release. This isn't a long time and the issue can disappear as suddenly as it appeared. There's no time table on this.

As an additional note on what Battlefront has done to support ATI, there's a specific mode for the 3D mouse functions that ATI doesn't support properly that Battlefront had to create. They used some slightly different calls to perform these mouse functions, which cause lag, but prevent the game from crashing. However not all ATI users had this problem.

The only people for whom this game would be "unplayable" are those who have graphics cards not supported in the 9.3 Catalysts (Radeon 4770's and possibly some others). While using an older driver is not desirable, it is a very common solution for when the graphic driver developers screw something up - which occurs very often. Ask other game developers and you'll probably find that this sort of thing happens more often than not.

Yes this problem is between Battlefront and ATI/AMD, but since Battlefront is a small boutique game company ATI can pretty much ignore them with little side effect on their overall sales. I'm sure Battlefront has notified ATI that they have problems with their drivers, but ATI isn't necessarily going to respond back to them in a timely manner (if at all). It is pretty much luck that some issues get addressed or even looked at, unless your the developer of the hottest game in commercial release, in which case ATI will probably assign some developers to work with your programming staff. If enough customers complain about issues, then ATI may allocate development resources to look further into the problems. With more customer input, you may be able to slightly change the chances of this issue getting addressed.

There is no "DirectX Mode" in CMSF since that would involve another two years of development time in making a DirectX engine. Then every fix to the graphics engine would require a DirectX version and an OpenGL version. Battlefront isn't Electronic Arts (EA) - there's only one programmer. OpenGL was a bit more universal than DirectX (i.e. - OpenGL is used within MacOS X.x, whereas DirectX isn't) at the time the graphics API was considered during development six years ago.

[kenjara]

Well using 9.3 drivers is no solution therefore the game is still unplayable. All I can say is the programmer better be working around the clock to get this fixed or I want my money back. The shop states the game supports ati cards and says nothing about forcing you to gimp your card with out of date drivers. I could not care less about the feud between battlefront and ati, the bottom line is people have paid for this and expect it to work. Also it would be nice to hear something official from an actual developer. At work I have my own software project that will be used in multiple countries and on multiple platforms, if one of those platforms was to change it would be my responsiblity to ensure my software worked for it not the other way around.

[Waycool]

Agree Schrullehaft but we do have is an issue that is effecting some portion of the player base BF should compile and sticky this posthaste and some sort of notice from the developer to ATI must fan the fire. Furthermore I have tried other opengl games without crashing IL 1946 opengl, so I am at a loss. Battlefronts helpdesk database has zero info on the ATI issue that is a game breaker for users who wish to enjoy the game fully. A formal request was made to BF tech via the helpdesk where they asked some probing questions but that is as far it went. Hoping to get a reply from them soon in regards to sending some crash data which BF said might be helpful. The long and the short of it we BF ATI users want to play:)

[MrWombat]

This would be more valid if there were other significant products not working with the newer drivers. So far, this is the only one I've seen, so it does I think call into question the technical decisions Battlefront made in coding their grpahics. Using OpenGL might not have been the good idea it seemed at the time--DirectX gets a lot more support these days and OpenGL is soooo 20th century :)

Blaming ATI is actually quite valid. The 9.3 Catalysts were released sometime in March 2009; approximately 5 months ago. ATI has broken something in their OpenGL driver and hasn't fixed it yet. To go from 9.3 to 9.4 and have something not work, would put the driver to blame, not the game. ATI is not fully supporting OpenGL as they should. OpenGL hasn't been a strength of ATI's, which is strange since they hired some SGI engineers a few years ago.

DirectX 10/11 is probably dominating ATI's attention and their OpenGL team seems to be dropping the ball. I don't think it would be fair to say that Battlefront needs to re-engineer the graphics engine in CMSF just to fix a problem with ATI's driver. Nvidia's OpenGL driver works fine (generally speaking), what would they have to change to make ATI's work ? If your local gas station started supplying only diesel fuel and you drove a vehicle that operated only with unleaded gasoline, would you blame the vehicle manufacturer ?

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any easy answer/fix for this issue at the moment. Until ATI's OpenGL team addresses this issue, the 9.3 Catalysts are the only answer. Battlefront doesn't get the immediate attention of ATI's developers since they are a "boutique" game company that has a small customer base compared to a game like Crysis or some other large commercial release.

The only thing I think that may help to push this issue along with ATI/AMD is to submit some feedback to them. One method is their Catalyst Crew Feedback (http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D27E29B0E3) or their Cusomter Care email form (http://emailcustomercare.amd.com/). I have no idea if either method will get you any decent feedback from ATI/AMD or make a long term difference in addressing this problem. It is possible that if they get enough complaints from different users regarding this problem that they may look into it. Still, we could be months away from a solution from ATI.

[Battlefront.com]

We're looking into what's going on and seeing if there is anything we can do to "influence" the new drivers. There have been no significant changes to the graphics code for v1.20 so it's probable that v1.11 won't work either.

Look, we're as ticked off about this as you guys are. We've also been through this dozens of times before. So have lots of other companies, including very big ones. It's a simple fact of life that each new driver release is like Russian Roulette for existing games. We can't force them to NOT break things which are working fine, we can't force them to FIX things that they have broken. And unfortunately we can rarely work around the problems because the bugs in the drivers are very low level.

For those of you who don't understand how things work, it's supposedly very simple. There is an API which tells us what to do to get certain things to work on the card. The drivers, in turn, take those API calls and get them to do what they are supposed to do. In theory if we do what we're told is "legal" then everything should work fine. But the card companies constantly, and consistently, break things and cause API calls to not function as advertised.

If the driver has a bug in it then the guy making the call is usually screwed. It's like taking a German language course, going to Germany and speaking perfect German only to find that the guy you're talking to at the train station ticket window doesn't know the German word for "ticket". By trial and error you might figure out that he only knows the Chinese word for "ticket", and once established you can work around the problem.

The worst thing about this is 9 times out of 10 the driver is fixed before we can even figure out what the problem is. So we waste all kinds of time trying to fix someone else's problem only to have them fix it on their own anyway. Very frustrating and very bad for customers in general.

BTW, saying "this game or that game doesn't have a problem with the new drivers" means absolutely zero. There are thousands of games out there and unless you have at least a few hundred of them then your sample size is too small. With the infamous ATI mouse bug that bit us badly... it was absolutely, 100% a driver bug. We found the bug in two places and submitted the information to ATI. What was it, a year and a half later before they put in the fix? Something like that anyway. And why was that? Because Quake and the other games that are ATI's bread and butter don't use a mouse cursor in a their 3D environments. So they never got bit by the bug because they didn't need the buggy calls we absolutely had to work with.

We'll do what we can to work around the problems, but customers MUST understand that we're not the ones you should be bitching to about the problems. It's not us who screwed you.

Steve

[theFightingSeabee]

Steve,
In your professional opinion, what is the BEST video card, type, or company in regards to cmsf? I'll assume it's not ATI. (Ofcourse I have an x850!).
The reason I ask is that I'll have to upgrade in a year or so, and since I'm a cmsf junkie, that would be a consideration.

[Battlefront.com]

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. At some points in time ATI seems to be putting out a more stable product, other times it is nVidia. The GeForce 8800 fiasco of 2007 seems to be behind us at least!

One of the problems is that the card makers make a lot of silent changes to their hardware and they don't advertise them. With the GeForce product line, they had literally dozens of different versions out for their then current lineup (IIRC 4 different primary card families). Different revisions, different sub-components, different tweaks to work with specific motherboards, etc. But to the customer it was the "same" 8600 or 8800 their friend down the street had, even though that was absolutely not the case.

The result of this sort of crap is that some people with Card Model XYZ will have no problems, but another person with Card Model XYZ will. Obviously Combat Mission is making the same API calls for both, so it's obvious that something low level is at work and we're very unlikely to figure out what it is unless the customer ships us his exactly system. That's not practical ;)

nVidia got a new CEO around the time that CM:SF was having such problems with its hardware. The new CEO promised to stop making so many flippin variations of its cards because it was causing so many problems. It appears he's managed to do that since nVidia, up until the latest release, has been pretty darned good over the last year and a half.

Steve

[Waycool]

Steve

The fact is the big video card players are Nvidia and ATI and these are what BF recommended specs say are needed to function with your software, we as users have little control over the BF design and API relationship. We are gamers, end users who merely want a working product; on both a hardware and software level. If there is a change perhaps BF should ask ATI what was changed between the various iterations of ATI catalyst drivers 9.3 through 9.7.

Immediately upon getting the error I posted a tech helpdesk request which was responded to from Matt I replied in kind to his requests and have as of yet not received further requests from BF for error logs etc. We appreciate that you will do what you can and I trust you can appreciate the end user dilemma with wanting cards that are noted as being functional with the game actually work with said game. Trying to figure out workarounds here with various versions is indeed Russian Roulette and I am hoping we find a method that will allow us all to enjoy the game fully.

Taking the stance that users afflicted with this are bitching when they voice issue with the error and that ATI is screwing us and not BF, I have never purported in any of my posts a bitch and by you using these words IMHO minimizes the actual priority this issue will receive. I truly hope it doesn't as I and many other users have been loyal BF customers for years.

Hoping we get something rolling for all concerned.


Cheers.

Waycool-Michael

[theFightingSeabee]

I'll be the first to say that Steve and the rest of BFC care an extreme amount for the end user. Where have you ever seen a game maker post replies to nearly every single issue requested or complained about? I have never. I'm not one to brown nose too much, I just think this is the truth.

What I got from his post was that he, too, is frustrated because he cannot do anything about it. The happiest I've seen him is when the end user is happy. Out of all the game makers out there, BFC is NOT the one that lets down its customers. As long as BFC is in business, we are going to be their bread and butter.

[kenjara]

We'll do what we can to work around the problems, but customers MUST understand that we're not the ones you should be bitching to about the problems. It's not us who screwed you.

Steve

Not a good attitude for a company to have. At the end of the day, we have brought something from YOU that doesnt function, so its YOU that gets the bitching (Its how it always has and always will work). Thats like buying a rotten bunch of apples from the supermarket and them saying, well your'll have to see the farmers about that. And no ones bitching without reason, people have spend their money on something that should work, which doesnt regardless of who the fingers being pointed at.

And Wombat is right when he says theres been no major problems with other games on ati card because I have had none either. I buy most of the good pc games that come out. When your talking about hundreds of realeses your including all the cheap crap that is churned out too. I currently have 110 games installed on my computer with 109 of them working. Thats quite a high percentage if you ask me.

Either way I hope its fixed soon I just want to play the British module. :(

[Battlefront.com]

What I got from his post was that he, too, is frustrated because he cannot do anything about it.

Yup, theFightingSeabee hit the nail on the head. I'm not frustrated with you guys, our customers, but with the damned video card guys who constantly make us look bad when, almost always, it's something they screwed up. In fact I am sure that I'm MORE frustrated with these video card companies than you guys are because I'm caught in the middle. And they keep putting me there, over and over and over again. Therefore, many apologies for using the word "bitching" since that didn't come out sonuding the way I intended it to come out.

Customers are absolutely right to want their games to work with their hardware, and their hardware to work with their OS, and their OS to work with their games, and their games to work with their OS, etc. Any weak link in the chain produces a problem and that problem affects the end user who has plunked down his money and has a reasonable expectation that what he bought will work. Unfortunately, that often doesn't happen. As an end user myself I have to work through these problems just like you guys. I have no hotline to the people making any of this stuff either. I wasted about 2 days on a bug in FileMaker Pro that I eventually figured out and found the only solution was to pay $320 to get a new version. So trust me when I say I feel your pain.

Kenjara,

And Wombat is right when he says theres been no major problems with other games on ati card because I have had none either. I buy most of the good pc games that come out. When your talking about hundreds of realeses your including all the cheap crap that is churned out too. I currently have 110 games installed on my computer with 109 of them working. Thats quite a high percentage if you ask me.

It is, but it isn't really relevant. All of our customers have either ATI or nVidia cards, yet only a very small percentage of them are having problems with the latest drivers. Right there that tells us that the most likely cause is a bug in the driver and not a bug in our code. Provided our code doesn't optimize for a specific card feature (which it doesn't) it shouldn't matter what card or what OS you have as long as it is within our specs. That's because we code for one API and one API only, no matter what the hardware or OS is. Therefore, in theory our game should either run on everybody's cards (because we coded the game correctly) or nobody's (because we didn't). It should never, ever be something inbetween. The reason reality is different is because drivers are notoriously buggy.

As for your observations about CM being the only game not running therefore concluding our code is the problem, that is the standard line of reasoning I see and it just doesn't hold up to reality. Even assuming you have just played all 110 games you own for a couple hours each with the new drivers (which I would be surprised if you have), you have to remember that any of the games you have which use DirectX are irrelevant since they use completely different drivers. Of the games that remain the only ones that are relevant to compare against are the ones using the same exact API call, in the same way, that CM:SF is failing on. Who knows which games fit that category.

Why is the latter important? Well, I'll give you a direct example.

Nobody we ever had contact with (that I can recall) has ever had a mouse lag problem with any other game other than CM:SF. Yet for some with certain ATI cards in certain configurations CM:SF was unplayable. Using your logic the problem would have to be ours since nobody else experienced problems with other games. However, it was absolutely a bug in the drivers and not with our code.

After much time on the mouse issue we figured out that our 100% to spec calls to the API were being mishandled by some ATI configurations. We managed to isolate the problem to two very specific bugs in the ATI drivers of the day. We contacted them directly with the technical evidence (very low level debugging stuff), yet we never heard back from them. Because of that we had to make a really ugly hack because, unfortunately, they didn't give a flying fig about fixing the problem since it was obviously not a big problem from their perspective. The hack we made produces some pretty bad side effects, however that's the only solution we could come up with. Then eventually ATI released a fix that worked for most people but not all. So even the very belated fix wasn't a complete fix for CM customers.

Obviously we are caught in the middle. We always do our best to see if there is any way around the problems, but as I've said very often there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for the drivers to be fixed. And they always, always need to be fixed. Sometimes within weeks of a release.

Either way I hope its fixed soon I just want to play the British module.

Obviously that's what we want too. Hopefully I'll have some sort of information for you soon.

Steve

P.S. Oh, and of course remember that drivers are often released to fix specific bugs in specific big selling games. More evidence of their sloppy quality controls and the fact that they pay attention to the squeakier wheels. Customer comments like "my version of Quake 4 and World of Warcraft work fine" is not a surprise for us to see. If a driver screws up one of those games, they have a couple million people potentially breathing down their necks. Screwing up a portion of our customer base? Hardly enough noise to register as a complaint in our experience :(

[kenjara]

OK well good luck, I can see it being nearly impossible to catch the error from the drivers and know how to act upon it so I see while it would be a struggle.

One thing I did think of is as this is the only game I am ever likely to run in open gl is there anyway to run the latest drivers with the old opengl driver?

What if you were to say past the old dll in the place of the new one?

P.S. Have sent an email to ATI on the off chance it might do something.

[MrWombat]

Heh, I'm not angry at Battlefront; far from it. I sympathize--it's nasty trying to manage all the crap necessary to get games to run on PCs, and the brave new world promised by all these wonderful APIs has never really materialized. Not Battlefront's fault, necessarily, even though as customers that's who got the money from us. But it's PC gaming, so yeah, we have to understand that things aren't always peachy. And I also agree that it's not that relevant to discuss other games working or not working, though I will say that it could actually help if we found other games with similar problems (the more problems the better likelihood of getting ATI cracking on the issues I think).

It's just that I was going to spend some time getting back into CMSF and now I can't for the moment. Not a huge deal--I have enough work to do, goodness knows--but a bit annoying.

I'll keep watching this space and the ATI drivers to see what happens at any rate.

[pute01]

There's your problem. Use the 9-3 catalyst instead of 9-5. I had crashes all the time with the 9-5 catalyst. Hope it helps.

[kenjara]

There's your problem. Use the 9-3 catalyst instead of 9-5. I had crashes all the time with the 9-5 catalyst. Hope it helps.

No using out of date drivers is not an option, especially when we are either on 9.7 or 9.8 beta now.

[Tuomio]

Steve, if there is any way i can help i will. I can replicate this issue like a clockwork with 2 cards, 3800 and 4800 series. If it were not the licencing hassle, i could do it with 2 completely different computers.

It has something to do with memory leak as it will leak all available RAM 5mb per second once in the game.

It is not a problem now, but there isnt any promise that ATI will eventually do something about it. 9.3 -> 9.8 i can live, how about 9.3 -> 10.5 next year?

[kenjara]

Well I got my response from ATI using the catalyst feedback thing. It was a waste of time, just a generic email giving 23 steps to try that either do nothing or gamers are bound to try before taking it to the internets.
No denial or acceptance that their driver is faulty.

[spyre]

You wont get a human reply from the Catalyst Crew feedback form, its not designed that way. Every bug submission is read though (as I know the people who read them), obviously the more details you submit the better really as it aids in replication of issues.

I should know I have been a beta tester for AMD for 5+ years.

This isn't a game I own though so its not something I have tested.

The more people who report an issue the higher a priority it gets which is why higher selling games get better support since more people report issues with them etc.

[kenjara]

You wont get a human reply from the Catalyst Crew feedback form, its not designed that way. Every bug submission is read though (as I know the people who read them), obviously the more details you submit the better really as it aids in replication of issues.

I should know I have been a beta tester for AMD for 5+ years.

This isn't a game I own though so its not something I have tested.

The more people who report an issue the higher a priority it gets which is why higher selling games get better support since more people report issues with them etc.

Well its our lucky day, about an hour after the generic response I got an email from an ATI agent saying they will look into the issue.

[spyre]

You mean the reply I gave you on game.amd.com?

[kenjara]

oh yeah my mistake, its been a long day. ;)

Just worked out why I was confused. You come from the forum right? Where as the other reply come from the support.

Programming for 8 hours melts your mind lol.

[Moon]

Thanks guys for bringing this to ATI's attention. We are happy to provide ATI with whatever further information they might need. Contact support@battlefront.com or me directly at martin@battlefront.com.

[kenjara]

Good news, I think I solved it. Obviously the issue still needs to be fixed properly but I have managed to stop my game crashing and played through the whole first mission!

I had a thought that if I put the old dll in the games folder it might use that instead.

So I put the 9.3 drivers opengl dll in the games folder and it works!

[Phillip Culliton]

Good job, kenjara!

[kenjara]

Yep looks like its solved.

This is what you do.

Download 9.3 from Atis old drivers page.

Let them extract to C:\ATI or wherever and cancel afterwards.

go to C:\ATI\SUPPORT\9_3_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\ Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\B_76557

(of course will be different for xp and 32bit.)

open cmd and navigate to the folder.

e.g.

cd C:\ATI\SUPPORT\9_3_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\ Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\B_76557

then enter Expand atioglxx.dl_ atioglxx.dll into cmd and press enter.

This will expand atioglxx.dll in the current folder.

copy atioglxx.dll and paste in cmsf's main folder.

I did also put it in modules just in case as I saw a dll in there.

Hope this works for everyone I am way into mission 2 with no probs now.

P.S. Love the fact my game files are in german lol

[Waycool]

Hi Kenjara I too have been trying this with my XFX 4770 card and found that the 9.3 opengl atioglxx.dll just will not load CMSF. When the 9.3 dll is in the system32 sub dir or the CMSF suuub dir the exe does not launch. My OS is XP sp3 and the ATI 4770 radeon chipset is relatively new so perhaps 9.3 does not work with this card. However I have been using the atioglxx.dll version 6.14.10.8673 I will test further on my end but I have been playing quick battles and they seem to make it through.

[Waycool]

Negative on mission 1 of Brit Campaign crash about 5 minutes in

AppName: cm shock force.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: atioglxx.dll
ModVer: 6.14.10.8673 Offset: 007dfebf boom ;)

[kenjara]

Im using a 4870 1GB so it shouldnt be your card is too new. upload some screenshots of exactly where you have the files. By system32 are you on about the drivers folder as I did nothing there just with the shock force folder.

Dont give up, it should work. I was planning this solution at work today lol. make sure you didnt actually install 9.3 and the files are in the right place. Also by the game refusing to run what happens exactly.

It certainly works at least for my system as I have now played though the entire second mission without a crash! :cool:

[spyre]

I have replicated the crashing as it crashed after about 10 mins for me, I will see what the AMD driver engineers say. I cannot really say much after this point as I am under NDA.

[Waycool]

Thanks Spyre looking forward to isolate it.

[Waycool]

Hi Kenjara I placed the dll directly in the CMSF dir as you noted. It seems with that 9.3 atioglxx.dll when executing the cmsf executable I get no launch of cmsf and no error. The system32 dir I was refering to was the windows/system32 where the actual atioglxx is.

[Battlefront.com]

Thanks for all the follow ups, especially for the attention of Spyre. Sorry if my frustration with driver issues gets me making rather pointed posts. But... we've had to waste many, many, MANY hours of our time dealing with driver issues over the years and also suffering some rifts with our customers because of misunderstandings about where the problems really are.

As I said earlier, when we make an API call it should always work or never work. The particular computer it's on shouldn't matter. The particular card that's in that computer shouldn't matter. Which of the dozen or so versions and sub versions of Windows is running that computer shouldn't matter. It should be always works or never works. But at any given time there is someone out there with a Battlefront product that isn't working right and there's nothing we can do about it.

Very frustrating!

For those who are experiencing problems, what we're going to do is try and figure out what calls we're making are causing the problems. If we can figure that out we can explore the possibility of a work around. Sometimes this is possible, usually it isn't because the API calls we're making aren't chosen at random.

More info from us, or perhaps spyre, as we can muster it! Otherwise kenjar's solution might work for some of you in the meantime.

Steve

[kenjara]

Hi Kenjara I placed the dll directly in the CMSF dir as you noted. It seems with that 9.3 atioglxx.dll when executing the cmsf executable I get no launch of cmsf and no error. The system32 dir I was refering to was the windows/system32 where the actual atioglxx is.

Hmm not sure whats going on there then. All I can think of suggesting is make sure you havent moved the original one. Maybe try an earlier dll if they are still there. You could be right its something your card doesnt like.

Would be strange if its to do with you using xp because if anything I would of though vista would be more fussy about that kind of thing.

That reminds me you didnt download either 64bit xp drivers or anything by accident did you because I nearly downloaded 32bit drivers when looking for the 9.3 drivers.
That was before I noticed they had a whole list of old drivers on ATI's site.

[Schrullenhaft]

Waycool - it's possible that your Radeon 4770 will not work with the Catalyst 9.3 OpenGL DLL file. That particular Radeon was released after Cataslyst 9.3, so it's possible that some of the code within the OpenGL DLL file doesn't recognize/work with the Radeon 4770. I don't know what could be so unique about the 4770, but it is possible that it is different enough not to work without an updated OpenGL DLL.

So to double-check what you've done. You've downloaded the appropriate Windows version of the Catalyst 9.3/9.3.1 driver (I assume it is Windows XP 32-bit). You've done an "install" and cancelled it so that the files would extract (but not install). You've then "expanded" the ATIOGLXX.DL_ file to the ATIOGLXX.DLL file and then placed this file in the CMSF directory (and/or the MODULES subdirectory of CMSF). You've left the original Catalyst 9.7 ATIOGLXX.DLL file in the Windows\System32 directory. With this setup you are unable to launch CMSF at all ? Do you get any particular error/blue screen when you do this or does it just "crash to the desktop" with no further error reporting (or just doesn't appear to launch at all) ?

It sounds like you've also copied the Catalyst 9.3 ATIOGLXX.DLL file to the Windows\System32 directory. If this is the only thing you've tried (copying the 9.3 OpenGL DLL file to both CMSF and Windows\System32 directories), you may want to try it with the original 9.7 (or whatever version of Catalyst driver you have installed for your videocard) OpenGL DLL file in the Windows\System32 directory and the 9.3 OpenGL DLL file in the CMSF directories. However it is quite possible that what you've run into may still be true - the 9.3 OpenGL DLL file can't "setup" with the Radeon 4770 since it is too new.

[kenjara]

Im using a 4800 series so its weird that it would be too new. But yes the mention of the system 32 directory does make me think the problem may be with the dll in there being modified. Might be worth checking the log viewer in windows to see if anything appears there when you try to run the game.

[Waycool]

Hi all I have done a complete uninstall of my ATI drivers and re-installed Catalyst 9.7 my os is win xp sp3, video card XFX 4770.

Crash with stock 9.7 see below

AppName: cm shock force.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: atioglxx.dll
ModVer: 6.14.10.8787 Offset: 0062c8d8

Tried using the 9.3 atioglxx.dll in the cmsf dir per Kenjara instructions as well as modules and the game will not launch it just sits at desktop with no error but no cmsf. No joy. Not sure.

[Lethaface]

Ok will try the fix Kenjara, if it works your the man! :D

[Lethaface]

Ok seems to work :)

Will check more this weekend!

Glad to be able to play again without those old pesky drivers.

I can advise this fix to anyone, running a 4870x2 myself.

[Waycool]

Is there anyone playing with this workaround 9.3 atioglxx.dll and a 4770???

[Zatoichi]

I just tried it on my XP SP3 system which has an ATI 4850. I installed 9.7 and then expanded and copied the atioglxx.dll from the 9.3 driver installation to both my Combat Mission main directory and the Modules directory as described by Kenjara.

Unfortunately this resulted in the game not running at all - it will not launch unless I first remove or rename the freshly copied atioglxx.dll from the Combat Mission main directory. I tried removing the atioglxx.dll from the main directory but leaving it in the Module directory and the game launched, but this evidently leaves it running with the 9.7 drivers, as CMSF crashed after 5 minutes as per usual.

Lethaface, are you running Vista like Kenjara? Maybe this fix isn't compatible with XP?

I guess I'll have to wait for the official fix from ATI and go back to my trusty old 9.3s.

Bah.

[kenjara]

Glad it works for you Lethaface!

But is a very interesting problem with regard to the other cards.

So me and Lethaface both have the 4870, although Lethaface has the x2 version grr. So it could be this fix only works on the 4870 but this is unlikely I would think its an xp/vista issue.

Ok heres a thought though, I brought my 4870 in december and it seems the 4770 is newer as reviews for it are dated around april 2009. So you could be right about it being newer and causing a problem, even though it has a lower series number. Seems there is roughly a years difference between the cards coming out.

[Lethaface]

Zatoichi, yes I'm using vista 64.

Will test up some more over the weekend, yesterday I had a go at the UK vs US mission and played it for a good half our without crashes. That wasn't possible before without 9.3.

So, Kenjara thanks again :)

I think it's definately possible that the 4770 is too new for the 9.3 drivers.

However, strange that zatoichi's 4850 doesn't work. Zaitochi, are you sure you downloaded the correct drivers for your XP install? (32/64)

Since your card should run the game with the 9.3 driver, it should not crash with the same dll under 9.7 drivers I reckon.

Or it is just lucky us and it isn't really supposed to work?

[Zatoichi]

I think it must be a Vista/XP thing - my XP 32 bit system just won't start CMSF if I put the 9.3 atioglxx.dll in my Combat Mission main directory. It's definitely the dll from the XP 32 bit 9.3 drivers I've been using all along - this workaround just doesn't work for my set-up unfortunately.

Oh well, I'm glad it's working for you guys - I'll have to hold on for the ATI tech bods to fix it I guess.

It doesn't actually bother me too much at the moment, seeing as CMSF is the only PC game I've been playing recently - so not having the latest drivers isn't really a big issue for me. Not that I'm for one one minute suggesting that the aforementioned ATI tech bods should stop working on a fix of course!

[Waycool]

Tried the new Catalyst 9.8 drivers for xp 32bit in hopes there might be some solution the dll is over 12mb so something different alas a no go crash as usual with the 4770 within 5 minutes or so. My card runs furmark stability test opengl 2.1 at 1680 x 1050 under load for an hour plus solid.

[Waycool]

New atioglxx.dll crash boom bang
1st mission Brit campaign about 4 minutes in.

AppName: cm shock force.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: atioglxx.dll
ModVer: 6.14.10.8870 Offset: 008ed52f

[Lethaface]

100% confirmed working (for me), had a blast today with the brits :) GL

[Battlefront.com]

Hopefully we'll get some feedback from ATI about this since we're very convinced it's a driver problem and we don't have a way of working around the problem (yet, anyway).

Steve

[Waycool]

Thanks Steve.

[spyre]

All I can say is that it is in progress and can't give an ETA unfortunately.

[Waycool]

Spyre have they isolated the issue and are aware of the cause in relation to CMSF and the atioglxx.dll??

[sross]

So, I'm buying a new system right now. Should I go with a GT220 or HD4650?

[LukeFF]

So, I'm buying a new system right now. Should I go with a GT220 or HD4650?

Why are you asking that in this thread?

[spyre]

Spyre have they isolated the issue and are aware of the cause in relation to CMSF and the atioglxx.dll??

No clue, I just report stuff and then they tell me when its fixed. They may tell me after its fixed but then it wont really matter by then anyway as it will be fixed.

[Other Means]

I'm on 9.8 and still getting issues.

ATI Radeon HD 4800.

Bit buggered really.

[Bars]

I have the same problem with ATI 4850 and Catalyst 9.8 - CMSF crashes just few minutes in the game. I've bought British Forces and haven't had a chance to play it yet, that sucks! :( I don't want to revert to 9.3 drivers, as 9.8 brought a great improvements to ARMA2 and some other new games. I just hope ATI will find a solution for this problem soon...

[Kawabonga]

I have too problem with ATI 4850 and catalyst 9.8 hotfix. I`m download new 1.20 version CMSF_Demo with British module and game crash :( If im change atioglxx.dll from catalyst 9.3 game dont run :(

[Waycool]

Kawabonga what version of ATI card do you have? Mine is a 4770 and it will not run the CMSF with the ATI Catalyst 9.3 atioglxx.dll. It seems there is a problem with 4770 as it is to new a chip. Perhaps you have a new ATI chip as well?

[Kawabonga]

I have Asus ATI HD4850 512MB card ,Windows XP SP3 .

[Zatoichi]

Kawabonga, I have the same setup as you, it looks like we're stuck using ATI 9.3 drivers in their entirety until the ATI engineers fix the problem in a future release.

[Kawabonga]

I`m test my ATI 4850 on Vista x64 SP1, and demo 1.20 crash with catalyst 9.8 hotfix but if I copy atioglxx.dll from Catalyst 9.3 to demo folder, run OK. I have still problem on XP SP3.

[Schrullenhaft]

It looks like this workaround works with Windows Vista and Windows 7 only, for the moment. Windows XP doesn't seem to be dynamically loading the OpenGL ICD that is copied to the CMSF directory properly. That's why users can't get CMSF to launch once they've copied the 9.3 Catalyst atioglxx.dll file to the CMSF directory.

It's possible that Windows XP and the newer Catalyst drivers won't allow for dynamic loading of the OpenGL ICD, but instead require that the system uses a "system-wide" OpenGL ICD that is found in the Windows\System32 directory. There are registry settings to this effect that might prevent the dynamic loading of the 9.3 Catalyst OpenGL ICD.

If there is a way to get it to work under Windows XP, then the Radeon 4850 / 4850 X2 owners should be working also. The Radeon 4770 and 4890 owners may be out of luck since the 9.3 Catalysts didn't specifically support those cards. Of course it's still just an issue getting this workaround to work under Windows XP.

I'll post more if I can find any legitimate methods to get this workaround working on Windows XP.

[Other Means]

I overwrote the atioglxx.dll in my system32 folder with the 9.3 one and it still wouldn't start. But I'm on a 4890.

[Waycool]

XP seems to be a bust for some of us ATI users ati 4770 xp-sp3.

[visor]

Hi,

I have an ATI Radeon 3850 und Windows XP SP2. If I install my old CMSF version, patch it to 1.10 (battlefront patch, cause I dl my game from battlefront) then to 1.20 i got every 4-5 minutes crashes of the game, I assume this is what you all discuss here. Right?

If I install the actual demo version (with marine and british forces) and play a battle (not british or marines, only CMSF) I have no probs with crashes, everything works fine.

It seems for me that it is not der ATI driver, must something to do with the old game and the patches.

Can please someone from battlefront comment this?

greetings
Visor

[Schrullenhaft]

visor - Some of the crashes may depend on the 3D Texture and 3D Model quality settings in the Options area of CMSF (Fast, Faster, etc.). With lower quality settings, the game can run longer without crashing. This is especially true on smaller scenarios (like you might find in the Demo). If you run a larger scenario, then you'll probably run into the crashes more frequently like you're seeing with the full version.

If you don't have to have the newest driver, then the Catalyst 9.3 driver should work fine regardless of the Texture and Model quality settings. For some users however, there are other games that have had bug fixes or performance improvements with newer Catalysts and they don't want to give them up. And thus the desire for some sort of workaround to allow CMSF to run without problems, but also allow other programs to run with newer drivers.

Unfortunately I haven't found a method to get Windows XP to dynamically load up the ATI OpenGL ICD of the Catalyst 9.3 drivers. It is working for Vista users, but not under Windows XP. I'll keep trying, but there is a possibility that I won't be able to get this workaround working under Windows XP.

If we're all very lucky ATI may fix this issue with some newer drivers within a couple of months (Catalysts 9.9, 9.10 or later). ATI is aware of the problem and it does affect some other OpenGL games (though not all OpenGL games). So they're working on it at the moment, but we don't know which future Catalyst release will have the fix.

[daviduk109]

Hello, I been reading this thread with some concern. I had pc rebuilt recently and swapped out my nvidia 8800 card for an ati 4850. The reason I did this is because the nvidia 8800 card wasn't compatible with some of my older games e.g. medieval: total war1. Now I am reading on here that cm:battle for normandy may not be compatible with my ati card lol. My system specs are:

ati 4850 , catalyst 9.6 drivers
windows xp sp3
4gb ram

Should I download demo of the game and see if it works? If so, what demo should I download and where should I get this from. I should just add I am aware that normandy hasn't been released yet, I am just thinking of the future!

Thanks

[Schrullenhaft]

Your Radeon 4850 should work with the Catalyst 9.3 drivers. If you want to use a newer driver (9.4 and newer), then at the moment there are serious incompatibilities under Windows XP. Windows Vista and Windows 7 users have a workaround involving dynamically loading the Catalyst 9.3 OpenGL ICD DLL file (atioglxx.dll). Unfortunately this straight-forward workaround DOES NOT work under Windows XP.

Battlefront has been in contact with ATI (a rare response from a graphic chip developer) and this issue is being looked at. The OpenGL problem that CMSF is suffering from affects other OpenGL games. So we're hoping that sooner or later ATI will release a Catalyst driver that will fix this issue. This might not happen immediately with the Catalyst 9.9 release, but then again it might (we don't know ATI's internal scheduling for driver code fixes and updates). I suspect that ATI will have a fix before the Normandy release (which will probably be in Q1/2010). Now ATI may break that fix in the future (which has happened with both ATI and Nvidia in the past), so there's no guarantee that there will not be future problems with any video driver.

Regarding the Demo you can download the latest CMSF 1.20 Demo - here (http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1336&Itemid=318). You'll have to pick which download location you want to get it from a bit further down the page underneath DOWNLOAD LINKS (approx. 470MB). It should be a pretty good indication of the compatibility and performance of the game with your system. The exceptions to this would be large maps/scenarios which can further slow down a system that you may not experience with what is available in the demo.

[daviduk109]

I have downloaded the demo CMSF_Demo_Setup.exe from the link that you provided. Before I install this demo, please can you confirm that the demo will NOT install SecuROM software on my pc. I had terrible problems with SecuROM software on my last pc and want to delay it getting onto my newly rebuilt pc for as long as possible.

Thanks

[Other Means]

I have downloaded the demo CMSF_Demo_Setup.exe from the link that you provided. Before I install this demo, please can you confirm that the demo will NOT install SecuROM software on my pc. I had terrible problems with SecuROM software on my last pc and want to delay it getting onto my newly rebuilt pc for as long as possible.

Thanks

No SecuROM.

[Schrullenhaft]

The Demo has no licensing what so ever.

The Battlefront version of the FULL game uses eLicense which requires one time game registration over the internet. It allows for two copies of the game to be simultaneously licensed (you can have more INSTALLATIONS of the game, but only two of them can be licensed for concurrent operation).

All other Battlefront games currently use eLicense. If you purchase a Battlefront game from a retail store, then it may be a CDV or Paradox distributed game, which uses different licensing methods. I'm not specifically aware of any of the retail distributed releases using SecuROM, but I'm not absolutely sure of that. Getting a Battlefront distributed version should pretty much guarantee not having to deal with SecuROM.

[daviduk109]

ok thanks, just to inform I have yet to try out the demo! i do need to get round to doing this. Once I have, I'll post back here the results.

[visor]

visor - Some of the crashes may depend on the 3D Texture and 3D Model quality settings in the Options area of CMSF (Fast, Faster, etc.). With lower quality settings, the game can run longer without crashing. This is especially true on smaller scenarios (like you might find in the Demo). If you run a larger scenario, then you'll probably run into the crashes more frequently like you're seeing with the full version.

If you don't have to have the newest driver, then the Catalyst 9.3 driver should work fine regardless of the Texture and Model quality settings. For some users however, there are other games that have had bug fixes or performance improvements with newer Catalysts and they don't want to give them up. And thus the desire for some sort of workaround to allow CMSF to run without problems, but also allow other programs to run with newer drivers.

Unfortunately I haven't found a method to get Windows XP to dynamically load up the ATI OpenGL ICD of the Catalyst 9.3 drivers. It is working for Vista users, but not under Windows XP. I'll keep trying, but there is a possibility that I won't be able to get this workaround working under Windows XP.

If we're all very lucky ATI may fix this issue with some newer drivers within a couple of months (Catalysts 9.9, 9.10 or later). ATI is aware of the problem and it does affect some other OpenGL games (though not all OpenGL games). So they're working on it at the moment, but we don't know which future Catalyst release will have the fix.

thx for your answer, meanwhile I installed the catalyst driver 9.3 and the game runs with no crashes (sometimes 1 crash in 8 hours)

Visor

[theFightingSeabee]

I have an ati radeon x850 and I'm getting constant crashes. It had been working fine with some old drivers, but started to crash from time to time. I decided to install 9.3 and it started crapping out within a few minutes. So I thought, maybe I can just roll back... nope. So I tried 9.2 and 9.1, both with crashes that result in either a blank blue screen, black screen, freeze, or restarting my machine!

I'm not sure what to do at this point! Any help would be great.

[Schrullenhaft]

theFightingSeabee - The Radeon x850 should work fine with the 9.3 Catalysts. This is actually the latest/last version that this video card will work with.

I suggest running Driver Sweeper (http://download.guru3d.com/Guru3D---Driver-Sweeper-(Setup)-download-1655.html) and hopefully it will delete all of your Catalyst files and registry entries. To use it, download and install it, then uninstall your current drivers with the ATI uninstaller (in the Add/Remove Programs control panel) . Once that is done reboot into Safe Mode and run the Driver Sweeper program there.

After the drivers have been fully removed and you've booted back into a Normal operating mode, now install the 9.3 Catalysts. This should hopefully work from here. If you're still seeing problems, let us know.

[thelmia]

Your Radeon 4850 should work with the Catalyst 9.3 drivers. If you want to use a newer driver (9.4 and newer), then at the moment there are serious incompatibilities under Windows XP. Windows Vista and Windows 7 users have a workaround involving dynamically loading the Catalyst 9.3 OpenGL ICD DLL file (atioglxx.dll). Unfortunately this straight-forward workaround DOES NOT work under Windows XP.

Battlefront has been in contact with ATI (a rare response from a graphic chip developer) and this issue is being looked at. The OpenGL problem that CMSF is suffering from affects other OpenGL games. So we're hoping that sooner or later ATI will release a Catalyst driver that will fix this issue. This might not happen immediately with the Catalyst 9.9 release, but then again it might (we don't know ATI's internal scheduling for driver code fixes and updates). I suspect that ATI will have a fix before the Normandy release (which will probably be in Q1/2010). Now ATI may break that fix in the future (which has happened with both ATI and Nvidia in the past), so there's no guarantee that there will not be future problems with any video driver.

Regarding the Demo you can download the latest CMSF 1.20 Demo - here (http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1336&Itemid=318). You'll have to pick which download location you want to get it from a bit further down the page underneath DOWNLOAD LINKS (approx. 470MB). It should be a pretty good indication of the compatibility and performance of the game with your system. The exceptions to this would be large maps/scenarios which can further slow down a system that you may not experience with what is available in the demo.

This is good. I recently got a new computer, bought the British mod, and BAM, all of a sudden crashes. Made me very unhappy, since I'd thought the crashes had been ironed out. I have a 4870 card and XP.

I'm not willing to roll back my drivers since my newer games need them, so I hope this gets worked out.

EDIT: I did a rollback to 9.3 and played for an hour. No crashes. I'll go back to the new drivers now. Pity ATI broke it.

[theFightingSeabee]

theFightingSeabee - The Radeon x850 should work fine with the 9.3 Catalysts. This is actually the latest/last version that this video card will work with.

I suggest running Driver Sweeper (http://download.guru3d.com/Guru3D---Driver-Sweeper-(Setup)-download-1655.html) and hopefully it will delete all of your Catalyst files and registry entries. To use it, download and install it, then uninstall your current drivers with the ATI uninstaller (in the Add/Remove Programs control panel) . Once that is done reboot into Safe Mode and run the Driver Sweeper program there.

After the drivers have been fully removed and you've booted back into a Normal operating mode, now install the 9.3 Catalysts. This should hopefully work from here. If you're still seeing problems, let us know.

Thanks! I'll give it a go asap and I'll post back with results.

[theFightingSeabee]

I tried all of that and have not had the constant crashes. I do, however, have a wierd rainbow coloring effect with all distant terrain.

[Schrullenhaft]

Hmmm... not sure why you're seeing the "rainbow colored terrain" at a distance. Does this clear up as you get maneuver the camera closer to that terrain ? Does this 'rainbow coloring' affect all terrain, including ground tiles or just plants and buildings ? About how far away (in 'game' meters) does this affect occur ? What 3D settings do you have set in the Catalyst Control Center and what are your settings in the Options panel of CMSF ?

I'm not sure if there is any way to get rid of this particular effect, but I really haven't heard of it from others at this point (that I recall). So hopefully it is just some sort of setting that can be dialed back that will make it go away (reducing resolution, anti-aliasing, etc.). It seems to me to be some sort of issue with video memory for textures.

[theFightingSeabee]

This has happened to me in the past when updating drivers. I rolled back (to which ones I do not remember) and it worked fine.

Details:
The effect does go away as I move the camera toward it. It also goes away when zooming, so I can't really zoom in to look at it closer.
It happens to terrain tiles, not really to plants or buildings.
It happens about 1000m or so away and beyond, but the closer 1000m or so is mainly seen when looking at that texture from a shallow vantage point. So the terrain would be really rainbowed out when viewing from eye view but much less so from a bird's eye view.
Displayed at 1152x864 70mhz. All settings at medium or turned off with no anti aliasing.

I found some old drivers... 8.9 in my drivers folder, so I may try to install them and see if that changes anything.

[Kawabonga]

ATI just released ATI Catalyst™ 9.9 some one test with game ?

[Sergei]

Probably no difference, as the release notes for 9.9 (http://www2.ati.com/relnotes/Catalyst_99_release_notes.pdf)say:

Known Issues Under the Windows XP Operating System

* "Combat Mission Shock Force" may fail after a duration of game play

At least they acknowledge it, maybe they'll fix it next...

[jkobmadrid]

i tried the 9.9 with windows 7 and radeon 4200 (integrated gpu).
still this OPENGL crash issue. so i'll wait with the brits....
another symptom is that the mouse cursor is floating over smoke and
can't be pointed smoothly and accurately.

[Bars]

I haven't played this game since i bought the British Forces and encountered this crashing problem...

[chaos49]

so is it safe to buy ATI card and run the game in win 7.

[Schrullenhaft]

If you use any Catalyst driver newer than 9.3 right now, you WILL get lockups in CMSF. ATI is aware of this issue and they WILL have a fix in a future Catalyst driver, but we don't know which one.

Right now the Radeon 4770 and 4890 can't use the 9.3 Catalysts, so those video cards will have issues for now that cannot be worked around. Almost any other (newer) Radeon can use the 9.3 Catalysts and should work OK with CMSF. When ATI fixes this OpenGL bug in a future Catalyst (which MIGHT get released before the end of the year), there shouldn't be a problem (as far as we know at this point) of running a Radeon with CMSF.

[tdogg]

I noticed a work around some did on page 4 of this thread, I tried to do it but cant figure it out. Stuck at what dll files to copy from 9.3, more detailed instructions would be nice?

[tdogg]

"e.g.

cd C:\ATI\SUPPORT\9_3_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\ Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\B_76557

then enter Expand atioglxx.dl_ atioglxx.dll into cmd and press enter.

This will expand atioglxx.dll in the current folder.

copy atioglxx.dll and paste in cmsf's main folder.

I did also put it in modules just in case as I saw a dll in there."



Cant understand the cmd press enter part.

[Roman9441]

for vista 64 i'm try Asus Ati driver 8.641 beta no crash and also Beta driver from ATI 9.10 beta RC 6-7 no crash,but just try only 1 hour

[Zatoichi]

tdogg - the cmd bit means the command prompt - the old DOS prompt - you can access this by selecting the Start button (bottom left hand of your screen on the toolbar), select 'Run' and then type 'cmd' (without the quotes). This brings up the cmd prompt, you then type the 'cd C:\ATI\etc' from the post you quoted, but you'll need to type the actual path to your ATI drivers - what was quoted above is specific for that chap's driver location.

This workaround only works for Vista and Windows 7 - if you have XP this won't work.

[tdogg]

I'm copy pasting the direct path, but the cmd says cannot find path. Still stuck, I'm a novice at using this.

[Schrullenhaft]

tdogg - what Windows version are you running ? In order to use this fix you MUST be running Windows Vista (32 or 64 bit) or Windows 7 (again, 32 or 64 bit). Windows XP will NOT work with this workaround. Again this workaround is only for someone who wants/needs to use a newer driver, but needs CMSF to work still. Your Radeon MUST be compatible with the 9.3 Catalysts to use this workaround too.

You have to download the appropriate Catalyst 9.3 driver for your particular version of Windows. You can then run the installer, but then cancel it before it installs. This should have hopefully extracted the files from the installer.

The path:

C:\ATI\SUPPORT\9_3_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\ Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\B_76557

Is specific to the Windows Vista 64-bit version of the driver. If you've downloaded another one, it should be slightly different. If you've accepted the default paths for extracting the files, then they should be in:

C:\ATI\SUPPORT\9_3_your version of windows_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Dis play\varies\varies, but may start with a letter and then underscore, some number

You'll have to browse around for the file ( atioglxx.d__ ) in File Manager. Once you've found it then you need to open a Command Prompt (often opening up the "Run" dialog box and typing in "cmd" can get you a command prompt).

You need to issue "cd" commands to get to that directory where you found the file atioglxx.d__.

Once there type in "dir" to make sure the atioglxx.d__ file is in that directory.

Now you can type in "expand atioglxx.d__ atioglxx.dll" and press {Enter}. This should expand the file. Type in "dir" again and see if the atioglxx.dll file is listed. If it is, then you can close the command prompt.

Now browse to that directory (in File Manager) where you expanded the atioglxx.dll file. You can copy or move that file to the CMSF directory, which is defaults to:

C:\Program Files\Battlefront\Combat Mission Shock Force

with that file in the directory, when you launch CMSF it will now use that ATI OpenGL DLL file that is in the CMSF directory. You should now have a stable CMSF experience, while your other games (both DirectX and OpenGL) can use whatever other drivers you have installed.

Again this ONLY works for Windows Vista and Windows 7. IT DOES NOT WORK IN WINDOWS XP !

[Jon Hagstad]

for vista 64 i'm try Asus Ati driver 8.641 beta no crash and also Beta driver from ATI 9.10 beta RC 6-7 no crash,but just try only 1 hour

I'm hearing that the OGL bug is fixed in 9.10 (and the betas)...

[Waycool]

I am hopping the ogl issue is solved I need my fix.

[Zatoichi]

Ha! Well I got so sick of waiting for a fix that I ended up selling my ATI 4850 and buying an NVIDIA GTX 260 to replace it.

Now it seems there's a slight graphics hitch with the NVIDIA 190 drivers meaning that buildings can light up when there's a lot of weapons fire - I guess that's better than the game randomly crashing. The game looks fantastic with this new card, so I'll live with the occasional flashes and hope NVIDIA fix it with the next release.

I hope ATI have sorted it out for everyone else though!

[Schrullenhaft]

Zatoichi - if you go back to some of the earlier 180 series drivers, this problem didn't exist. I'm not sure exactly which driver to use, possibly 186.18 should work and be free of this lighting bug.

[spyre]

Use the leaked 8.66 RC7 ATI driver and no more VBO memory leak.

[Jon Hagstad]

Now all Ati users go get the 9.10 drivers, they are out!

[phil stanbridge]

As I posted on the other thread:-


This news should be stickied or something guys!

If you read the release notes that came with the latest 9.10 catalyst driver suite:-

Highlights of resolved issues

* “Combat Mission Shock Force” no longer fails after a duration of game play

I think I'm going to invest in a new card!

Edit :- I did buy a new card, I went for the 5850 as it has had such good reviews. Either way anyone with a newish ATI will now be able to play SF properly! Yay.

[Lethaface]

BUMP:
Directly from the ATI release notes:
""Combat Mission Shock Force" no longer fails after a duration of game play"

well all the complaints must have helped! Good to see ATI resolving issues specifically for games like CMSF, for which the audience is relatively small.

[Waycool]

Cheers to Spyre and those who brought attention to ATI of the problem.

[c3k]

I'm getting the itch to make a new build and this just vaulted an ATI card to the top spot. Thanks guys for helping ATI fix their drivers.

Ken

[phil stanbridge]

Although it is working its far from perfect. There are settings in the CCC that cause CTDs so take that into consideration. Having said that, this 5850 overclocks like mad, and it is very smooth with ansitopic filtering set to 4x and it looks great at 1920x1200!

[SABER66]

Greetings ALL

OK so am i to understand that the ATI 9.10 drivers clear up the crashing issue. My card, and 1GB ATI HD 4650 was seldom mentioned in the thread. Wasnt sure anyone else was having this issue. I am running Win7 x64 I think....the damn thing has windows x32 AND x64 folders so i was getting a bit confused, most of the installed drivers seem to be 32bit??? Any informed confirmation will induce a Pavlovian dog-like response and send me searching for the proper ATI download page and hopefully, near term CMSF BF bliss!

Regards, MC

[phil stanbridge]

Yes that is correct, 9.10 here and no crashes although I get some weird problems. Can be sluggish at times, and when I alt-tab out or exit the game my desktop pointer remains the same as in-game.

Win7 x64 here too.

[Kawabonga]

On my system Windows 7 x64 game crash on start. On Windows XP SP3 game run OK. Old atioglxx.dll bug come back ??

Asus P7P55D LE
Radeon 4850 512MB
Core i5 750
4GB DDR3

Podpis problemu:
Nazwa zdarzenia problemu: APPCRASH
Nazwa aplikacji: CM Shock Force DEMO.exe
Wersja aplikacji: 0.0.0.0
Sygnatura czasowa aplikacji: 4a5fa1db
Nazwa modułu z błędem: atioglxx.dll
Wersja modułu z błędem: 6.14.10.9405
Sygnatura czasowa modułu z błędem: 4b4e85ea
Kod wyjątku: c0000005
Przesunięcie wyjątku: 00031a70
Wersja systemu operacyjnego: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Identyfikator ustawień regionalnych: 1045
Dodatkowe informacje 1: 0a9e
Dodatkowe informacje 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Dodatkowe informacje 3: 0a9e
Dodatkowe informacje 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

[Schrullenhaft]

I can't tell which particular Catalyst driver you're using, but if it is between 9.4 and 9.9, then you will run into the OpenGL bug. I know 9.10 - 9.12 tends to work. I haven't personally checked out 10.1 yet, so if that is what you're running, you may want to downgrade your driver to an earlier (9.10 - 9.12) driver.

[Kawabonga]

I use 10.2 beta, atioglxx.dll version 6.14.10.9405

[Schrullenhaft]

I suggest going back to 10.1 or the 9.10 - 9.12 Catalysts and see if you get different behavior.

It would be unfortunate if ATI/AMD re-broke the OpenGL driver after fixing it only a short while ago.

[Kawabonga]

I going back to 10.1 and now game run ok . OpenGL atioglxx.dll 6.14.10.9252 . But I worry for new catalyst 10.2 beta, drivers make crash on my system :(

[Sgt Joch]

I tried the new 10.1 on my 32-bit XP SP3 system. CMSF and CMBB both work as well as before.

[Kawabonga]

Please Test 10.2 beta :
http://rapidshare.com/files/340509106/ATI_8.70_RC2_Vista_Win7_Jan14.exe

[Kawabonga]

I test new beta drivers (DriverVer=02/10/2010, 8.703.0.0000)from 10 feb. and still crash on start game :( . Official drivers 10.1 work OK.
atioglxx.dll 6.14.10.9555
Something is broken in new atioglxx.dll

[mercerre]

At what time do the atiogl.dll problems manifest themselves? I ask because I'm running Win 7 X64 with Asus EAH 5870ms using the hotfix for ATI Catalyst 10.2. Have CMSF, USMC, & Brit modules installed licensed & patched to 1.2.1. No 3rd party modules yet.

I can start the Training Campaign, load the troops into the Strykers, and start them moving from phase line to phase line. When they came to the next to final phase line, I quit. Shouldn't the ATI OpenGl errors have shown their buggy little faces upon entering the 3D portion of the game? Or do they typically appear later once you have a significant portion of your life invested in a game?

[Schrullenhaft]

Here's the Catalyst 10.2 Hotfix (http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICatalyst102Hotfix.aspx). However the notes for it say that it fixes calling DirectX 11 routines for the "Alien vs. Predator" game and also fixes random mouse cursor enlargement for Windows 7. It doesn't seem to have anything for OpenGL.

Per other customers, it appears that Catalyst 10.2 will cause CMSF to be unplayable - it will not launch.

ATI/AMD is supposedly going to release the 10.3 Catalysts (an un-WHQL'd version - equivalent to a final beta I guess) tomorrow, Wednesday, March 17th per this 'tweet':

"Wow... talk about major demand - let it be - we will post an un-WHQL version of 10.3 update tomorrow then!!"

I have no idea if this will fix ANYTHING that is happening with the 10.2 Catalysts and CMSF. Apparently most of the work appears to be some performance tweaks for DirectX applications.

[Kawabonga]

I test new 10.3a drivers (OpenGL 6.14.10.9704 ) and now work OK :) Finally dont crash on my computer .

[acrashb]

Worked here too.

Also cleared up a problem with Word 2007!