UPDATE 2: Now that you can set custom profiles in CCC, you might be able to force GRID’s profile for Serious Sam HD. (I don’t have Sam installed right now.)
UPDATE: It seems radeonpro is NOT applying itself, so I guess the only options are to stay on an older CAP, find a CAP switcher, get a faster single GPU card, use a crack (which would disable achievements and multiplayer), somehow trick steam into loading renamed .exes (could an NTFS junction work?), or have Croteam make us a copy of the game exe that’s named as GRID.exe, since attempting that yourself just closes the renamed .exe and launches SamHD.exe.
The latest CAP disables crossfire in the Serious Sam HD games due to crashes happening near water. This should be a game issue that also affects SLI. I assume The Second Encounter will act the same as my testing of The First Encounter.
But if you don’t mind the possible crashing and want to get your framerate back to where it was before, just force the Race Driver GRID profile in radeonpro.
UPDATE: Turn off vsync if you enabled it in the .ini files. Use D3DOverrider with triple buffering instead.
Simply rename UDK.exe found in the Bin32 folder to AliceMadnessReturns.exe. Make sure to have the latest CAP, and it still works even with my sparkling spots fix, which uses 11.2 dlls.
The Alice profile is almost as fast as other profiles like Crysis 2, but without flickering of the water or other artifacts.
Here’s a similar situation to the Cities In Motion issue, this particular CAD software also has a problem running on ATI/AMD drivers newer than Catalyst 10.4, or at least 10.4 looks reliable enough to function properly. After launching, amdkmdap has a driver reset when the 3d rendering panel appears, crashing the application.
The fix is nice and simple, just place the appropriate OpenGL driver into the program’s folder where CityEngine.exe is.
If you have any other OpenGL game or application that is crashing after 10.4, try this fix or the Cities in Motion one.
Your card should support 10.4 drivers in the first place, I have no idea what you would do if you’re using one of the latest Radeons or if you’re using an nVidia card.
UPDATE: 12.3 breaks the editor when you’re using these old dlls.
You could probably expand the rest of 11.2 and put it into the binaries folder. The game mode is still fine, so just the editor is affected like the above screenshot.
It appears every driver after Catalyst 11.2 has a bug in Unreal Development Kit. I would have noticed this sooner if I used UDK more often this year. I don’t know how many cards this affects, it might just be for older cards. I’m on a 4870×2.
Anyway the solution is simple, put 11.2′s dx9 dlls into the binaries folder of UDK. Installing the whole 11.2 driver set for the whole system is not a useful workaround, since most people would need fixes or performance gains seen in newer drivers.
So grab the dlls, then place them into the appropriate folder:
For the 32bit editor and game: put atiumdag.dll into \Binaries\Win32 For the 64bit editor: put atiumd64.dll into \Binaries\Win64
If you’re using RadeonPro to force crossfire profiles, it will overwrite the dll that you placed, so you’ll have to use the driver version compatibility feature to use 11.2′s dll. I would instead just make a copy of and rename the 32bit UDK.exe into AliceMadnessReturns.exe to get crossfire scaling when launching the game.
Once again, like the Section 8: Prejudice trick, grab RadeonPro (since it’s a steam game) and simply use the Half-Life 2 crossfire profile. Apparently other profiles flicker or do not scale as well.
Credit goes to spyre who noticed this… months ago. I’m not sure why it’s still not in the CAPs or drivers.
UPDATE: Another profile that scales and doesn’t flicker is Company of Heroes, RelicCOH.exe. It might even be a bit faster than Dark Void’s.
After a fair amount of testing, the Dark Void profile gives the performance boost of the FEAR profile without the flickering.
So what you need to do is grab RadeonPro so you can make a profile for the game. You can’t simply do the exe rename trick, as it has a launcher that blocks you from starting from the game exe directly.
Once inside RadeonPro, push the ‘add a new profile’ button and select S9-Win32-F.exe from the Binaries/Win32 folder of the game. Go to the tweaks tab and click ‘manage custom profiles’, then add Dark Void as ‘ShippingPC-SkyGame.exe‘. Now to fix the launcher issue, go to the launcher tab and select ‘Games for Windows Live’ from the dropdown, then pick the actual launcher exe, which is S9.exe in the root folder of the game.
This should do it until a profile gets built into the drivers. Enjoy!
UPDATE: 11.4 is out, grab it from AMD. The 2 dlls are exactly the same as the preview dlls dated February 27, so it’s not an issue anymore.
If you dared to install Catalyst 11.3 WHQL over the 11.4 Previews, then you might run into this in Battlefield Bad Company 2. In DirectX 10 or 11 mode, enabling anti-aliasing causes various effects to disappear, mostly transparent ones.
Luckily there’s a simple fix. Just place aticfx32.dll and atidxx32.dll from either 11.2 or 11.4p into the game folder and everything is back to normal.
UPDATE:I was curious as to what this FAQ item was for Atom Zombie Smasher, so I tried the demo. Nothing appears, just the exe starts up. Seems the same atigktxx.dll trick does the job for this game as well, it loads up just fine now.
Looks like Cities in Motion is an OpenGL game with the exact same issue that The Polynomial had for a few months. On drivers after Catalyst 10.4, it appears crossfire is breaking the game from working, and there is no way to disable it on a 4870×2 like myself. Some single gpu cards may be affected, so you might as well try this, too.
The simple fix should be placing 10.4′s atigktxx.dll into the game folder. Here’s an alternative fix that may or may not work for you if you have tried this atigktxx trick.
Do note that the file is from the 64-bit Vista/7 drivers, I’m not sure what the effect will be on 32-bit, XP, or on the latest 6 series cards. If you have crashes or freezes that happen after the game menu has loaded, then you might have a different problem unrelated to this. The beta, demo, and final release all should act the same. If the demo worked before (on drivers after 10.4) while the final does not, then you probably have a different issue.
FINAL UPDATE: This post is a mess… this should not be a problem anymore for anyone. You should be on drivers newer than 11.2 or older than 10.5. This used to affect the BIT.TRIP games, but those run fine now as well. What has not yet been fixed in updated drivers is Cities in Motion.
FINAL FIX: Turns out you just need atigktxx.dll in the game folder! No mess, not even the main atioglxx.dll. Download the 10.4 dll here, place it where polynomial.exe is, done! I also noticed after installing Catalyst 11.2, the dll might not be needed anymore.
FIX ATTEMPT: I tried a brute force method, I put every driver file of 10.4 into the game folder. You can do this while still having whatever newer Catalyst you have installed, just run the 10.4 installer, cancel it, open a cmd prompt at C:\ATI\Support\10-4_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Packages\Drivers\ Display\W76A_INF\B_98282 or similar, then simply ‘expand -r *.* c:\pathtoyourgamefolder‘ and voila! I have not yet tried deleting any of the files 1 by 1 to see which ones are required to stop the BSOD so the game folder would look cleaner, but so far it works!
UPDATE2: mixed reports saying 10.12 is good, it’s almost a guarantee that it’s good for 5970 users that were stuttering, but it’s the same crash for me still on 10.12.
UPDATE: this might be affecting Bit.Trip Beat as well. Something to do with crossfire, but there are some reports of 5970s working fine.
So I finally attempted to try the demo of The Polynomial, but the driver is crashing on startup of the game (it’s in OpenGL). I’m trying this on a 4870×2, Catalyst 10.11 WHQL, latest CAP, Vista 64.
It might be something to do with crossfire, or at least in my case and this user. The developer is also active in that thread, and I’ll try to get some form of exposure to ATI/AMD, so we’ll see how this goes.
Workarounds
-The whole older driver package: refer to the working fix at the top of this page.
-Current iD Tech games (with this side effect! depends on the visualizer options): doom3.exe, etqw.exe, prey.exe, quake4.exe, wolf2mp.exe
-Riddick Butcher’s Bay profile looks like a bunch of detail is lost, and the bloom is lower resolution, yet the bright flashing lights are gone: sbzengine.exe
-An older atioglxx.dll: I tried 10.2 and 10.4, the game launched without glitches, but has a BSOD soon after. This must be because crossfire changed at 10.5, as mixing dx10/11 dlls older than 10.5 would also BSOD in Shattered Horizon and Bad Company 2. If you’re ok with not having the latest drivers (if you don’t need the fixes in there), you may be able to get away with installing 10.4 and just the latest CAP.
-RadeonPro recently added some OpenGL support, but the crossfire options are not functional just yet. I can’t think of any DX9 things to test if the ‘disable crossfire’ option is different from just disabling CatalystAI, but if it is, then this would end up a working solution once this app is updated.
Dark Athena, older Quakes, Unigine, FurMark, and a couple other profiles I attempted to launch act like the original game’s driver crash.
I will update this post if there’s a workaround better than the iD one, if there’s some combination of settings to try, or if either the drivers or game manage to fix it.
