Cities in Motion (and possibly other OpenGL games) Startup Crash Fix For ATI/AMD Cards

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.

Fix For The Polynomial Startup Crash

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.

Catalyst 10.10 Is Looking Good

The 4870×2 issue is gone, everything seems to work normally. There’s even a boost in FC2 dx10, maybe other dx10 titles have improved as well.

ATI Catalyst 10.8b Hotfix

I HEARD YOU LIKE UPDATES: 10.10 works perfect, I tested every one of the stuck games, and a couple of the regular.

UPDATE2: Get the 10.9 hotfix, so you can have any other fixes that are in 10.9 itself. This list here still applies, since both 10.9 and the HF were made before I even started this list. Hopefully they figure it out for 10.10.

UPDATE: They’re looking into it. (Cool! Terry saw me.)

Time for some testing. This is for those that had the 2nd crossfire gpu stay in 2d speeds.

Download 10.8b hotfix from AMD. (Older, if you don’t like 10.9 for whatever reason.)

I’ll update this as I go. You can open and close one of the ‘ok’ games to get the core back into 2d no problem.

ATI Catalyst 10.7 Major Crossfire Issue

UPDATE: 10.10 Solves it for good.

NEW HOTFIX DRIVER: 10.8b says it fixed the issue, which might have appeared on 10.6. It’s almost perfect, the games are ok, but when exiting some of them, the core is still in 3d speeds. Here’s a list of some games that I tested. I was close to trying TwL‘s drivers, too…

Today I installed Catalyst 10.7 drivers after skipping 10.6 from hearing some horror stories. I’m with a 4870×2 using Vista64. The installation went smoothly, including the HDMI install. (A year ago the HDMI installer failed on one release, worked on the next month’s release.)

After some testing, there’s a severe problem with the 2d/3d detection, so far with the second core.

With DX9 and OGL games, the second core does not switch between 2d and 3d speeds. On a fresh boot, it stays idle after launching a game. This mismatch makes games really stuttery, especially if they are more demanding. The DX9 games I tested were: Borderlands, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Far Cry 2, Lead and Gold, Mirror’s Edge, Moonbase Alpha, Need for Speed SHIFT, Serious Sam HD.

Mirror’s Edge managed to flip the second core into 3d, but then it got stuck after exiting! I checked Borderlands and it was as smooth as it was before (some areas can dip to ~45fps). Lead and Gold finally has a crossfire profile in the drivers, so now that the second core was in 3d mode, the game was nice and smooth without the huge flicker and ~40fps from before.

DirectX 10/11 games I tested (Battlefield Bad Company 2, Red Faction Guerrilla, Shattered Horizon) work just fine. Launching and exiting flips both cores correctly into 2d/3d. Even after Mirror’s Edge locks the second core into 3D, you could reset it back to idle speed by opening and closing a DX10 game.

If there is no hotfix, it might still be possible to take a specific .dll from 10.5 or 10.6 and put it in the Windows system folder so you can still use the new game profiles of 10.7.

BFBC2 Map Loading Times

UPDATE2: You can just put atidxx32.dll into your game folder if you don’t want to install the whole 10.5HF package. Expand it from the installer or use the one I have posted here. Here’s my test again with 10.5WHQL, then placing the dll into the game’s folder.

10.5 – 29s
10.5 – 26s

HF dll – 10s
HF dll – 11s

HF dll – 12s (vsync)
HF dll – 11s (vsync)

OLD UPDATE: Apparently they aren’t in the WHQL 10.5s, no wonder.

ATI Catalyst 10.5 was supposed to fix the loading times for Battlefield Bad Company 2 when using 4800 series cards. I’m a 4870×2, but I didn’t really notice much difference. Maybe my 3.6ghz Q9550 or crossfire made it less noticeable. Oh well, at least it’s not the horror stories of 1 minute or more. I’ll have to check some single 4870 or 4850 user stories to compare, but here are my own results:

Panama Canal empty map and vsync with D3DOverrider, since the game’s option does not work. I load it once from a fresh start of the game, exit to the main menu, then load once more. The total time is from the fade to black on the server browser to the fade to black on the map loading screen. (This second time is from the first fade until the fps goes really high and hard drive usage relaxes.)

10.4 – 36s (25s)
10.4 – 34s (25s)

10.5 – 36s (25s)
10.5 – 34s (24s)
10.5 – 28s (23s) – Decided to close D3DOverrider so that the fps is unlocked, relaunched the game… seems that took off about ~6-8 seconds on the first time load.

I should have tested without vsync on 10.4, but still it’s just a few seconds difference. I wonder when they finally fix the in-game option if it will be any different.