I discovered this some months ago, when vsync and crossfire are enabled in old UE2 games, the combination will cause strange framerates and massive stuttering. So you should disable CF by disabling Catalyst AI, rename the game to ForceSingleGPU.exe, or make a profile in RadeonPro or the profiles feature in CCC (starting from Catalyst 12.1).
This seems to affect the standard UE2 games, not the heavily modified ones like Bioshock or Duke Nukem Forever. It does not matter if you’re enabling vsync with D3DOverrider, an in-game option, or the engine .ini file, it all results in the same stutter. I’m noticing it in Unreal Tournament 2004 for example.
UPDATE: 11.11 has fixed both Killing Floor and Red Orchestra. This fix is not needed anymore.
Looks like Catalyst 11.10 has extremely high gpu usage in Killing Floor, so it struggles to maintain a solid framerate when there’s any action on screen.
No problem, put 11.9′s atiumdag.dll into your ‘\steamapps\common\killingfloor\System‘ folder.
The original Red Orchestra is in the same situation.
UPDATE: Apparently 11.10 is now fine with the apps and games that the Rage drivers broke, so you’d want to update to the final release. Some people’s Rage turned blue, so those people should just use the atioglxx.dll from the Rage driver that works best for them (put it in Rage’s game folder): 11.10p v1, 11.10p v2, 11.10p v3.
I’m seeing reports of people saying that the Rage drivers broke all other OpenGL applications or games. No problem, there are two ways to quickly fix this for yourself.
You can go back to having 11.9 WHQL installed for the system, then simply place atioglxx.dll from the 11.10p Rage driver into Rage’s folder. (Wherever rage.exe is located, I don’t have the game.)
Or if you just want to fix 1 or 2 things while keeping the 11.10 preview installed for the system, just put atioglxx.dll from 11.9 into the game or application folder of what you want to fix. Java based games like Minecraft or Spiral Knights actually run java.exe, so you will put the dll into Java’s ‘bin’ folder instead.
I put in a couple other OpenGL driver files, atigktxx.dll and atiglpxx.dll, just in case if using the single atioglxx.dll alone did not work.
By the way, these are 32-bit dlls for 32-bit games/apps/Java. As for issues in Rage itself, I can’t do any tests since I don’t have the game. (Which would be useful since I’m a 4870×2 and I hear 4 series has the most problems at the moment.)
UPDATE: 11.12 seems to work fine, this should be good for 6 series cards that can’t use old dlls.
Not sure how widespread this is, but on my 4870×2, ETQW will freeze after a few seconds of playing and then BSOD with “Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed.” The STOP code is 0×00000116 with atikmpag.sys as the faulting module.
This happens on… let’s say recent drivers. I can successfully play without issue using the handy 10.4 atioglxx.dll, which is the latest most stable driver for older OpenGL versions or games. I also used atigktxx.dll just in case. Simply place them into the main ETQW folder.
I’m also seeing that Doom 3 has a driver reset after a minute of play or when vsync is enabled, so the 10.4 files fix that as well.
After installing AMD Catalyst 11.8 drivers, I noticed Borderlands was not performing properly on my 4870×2. 11.9 or 11.10p do not appear to have fixed it.
No problem, just drop 11.7′s atiumdag.dll into the ‘Borderlands\Binaries‘ folder. Simple problem, simple solution.
You may have noticed how awful Brink feels and looks in motion when playing the campaign or challenge modes, totally different from what your framerate counter displays. Here is how to get around that nonsense. The main idea is 1-you will run a local dedicated server, 2-you set what campaign or challenge to load, 3-you connect to it.
First, install the dedicated server in the tools section of Steam. While that’s downloading, go to the launch options of Brink in your games list and add ‘+set win_allowMultipleInstances 1‘ so that Brink’s executable can run more than once at the same time. (Otherwise you wind up having to launch the game first, then alt-tab to launch the server second.)
Once installed, check the ‘\Steam\steamapps\common\brink dedicated server‘ folder and you should see example .bat files. Edit an existing one, or copy into a new file, adjusting the server name and ports as you want them. Everytime you want to launch the server, just run the .bat file. Push the quit button or type in ‘quit’ in the console for the server to shutdown.
Now it’s time to tell the server what campaign and maps to load. Instead of memorizing server console commands or map names, I would make a .cfg file for every map of each campaign so that it’s very simple to quickly start playing on the mission that you left off in your campaign. Every .cfg file will look like this:
Replace #TEXT# as necessary. You can have spaces in your password, quotes don’t seem to be needed (eg: ‘g_password hello world‘). Change the campaign team name to ‘resistance‘ or ‘security‘. To play the Agents of Change DLC maps, add ‘_dlc1‘ to the end of the campaign line (eg: ‘campaign set campaign_security_dlc1‘).
Set your coop player amount to a number between 2 and 4 (eg. ‘applyServerConfig ChallengesCoop2‘ for a 2-player game). Change your password just like a campaign server, and then change the challenge map number to the challenge you want: Be More Objective: 06, Parkour This: 05, Escort Duty: 01, Tower Defense: 03 (eg. to have a Parkour This challenge, the last line would be ‘spawnServer sp/challenge_05.entities‘)
So once you make your .cfg files (or use mine), place them in the ‘\Steam\steamapps\common\brink dedicated server\base‘ folder. Launch your server with your .bat file from earlier and type ‘exec security3‘ if you want to play the 3rd mission of the security campaign and your .cfg file for that mission is named security3.cfg. Then launch the game and go to Freeplay, search for LAN servers, and you should see your local server ready for you to join. If your router’s ports are open, you can have your friends join your server as well. There is a handy script to open and close the ports via UPnP, so that you don’t need to bother opening your router admin settings as long as UPnP is enabled.
Now you can play Brink the way it’s supposed to be! It may seem complicated, but once all this is set, you just exec the .cfg you want from the server console window, nice and simple.
Source for original .cfg file and discussion: Steam Forums More information on some of the commands, or using additional ones: BrinkBase.de
You can also type commands in the console window and sometimes the values and what they mean will be displayed (eg. typing ‘si_botDifficulty‘ in the server console).
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.
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.
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.
Apparently, Divinity 2 has some kind of stuttering going on, making things look much worse than the actual framerate. This is not part of the game like the poor choice to lock the main menu at 30fps (which then unlocks once you’re in game, just like Enemy Territory Quake Wars).
Luckily, there’s a simple fix. If you haven’t seen this posted around, what you do is go to the compatibility tab in the properties window of the game’s exe and check on ‘disable desktop composition‘. I don’t think ‘run as administrator’ is needed, but you can check that on in addition to the desktop composition toggle.
No idea how widespread this is, if it’s just for Windows 7/Vista, or if it includes Nvidia cards, or if it’s tied to specific generations or drivers.
