Tribes 2 Geometry/Texture problems (X1300 / Vista)

P

Pen

Veteran XV
Problem:

When I run Tribes2 (TribesNext) on my Laptop, I get very weird geometry problems. The models all have textured lines and beams shooting out in all directions. This is a severe graphical corruption, but it is not random. The appearance is consistent and stable and appears the same in OpenGL and Direct3D.

System:

Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop: Intel Pentium Dual Core, ATI X1300, 1GB RAMs Vista Home Basic.
This system will run most 3D games that are not too demanding (Guild Wars, UT2004, etc)

* I copied the Tribes2 directory directly from my main (Win XP) PC. I can run it just fine off the flash drive on the XP System, but if I run it off the flash drive on the Vista system, I get this weird graphics glitch.

* I had older drivers on my laptop and I updated them but the latest Dell drivers are 2 years old so I got the latest ATI drivers. In all cases, the appearance of the corruption has been the same.

* I have tried a lot of 3D games on this laptop and as long as I can get them to work under Vista, they all appear and perform as expected.

* I can get into a Tribes2 game - there is geometry problems everywhere, but the performance of the game is otherwise smooth.

I have tried turning off a lot of the effects like dynamic lighting, vertex, volumetric, etc - it makes not difference. The Tribes2 Characters look like porcupines with elephantitis

Anyone have any ideas?
 
I think it has something to do with A.I. Catalyst or whatever. Disable it. I have a 4850 but didn't install Catalyst (just the driver) and don't have this problem.
 
I forgot to mention that I had gone through that and disabled all the little automatic features. I just checked again and the Catalyst AI is disabled.

I have a 4850/1GB in my main system and have had zero issues with the AI on all the games I have tried.

Doesn't it seem weird that the geometry is messed up in BOTH OpenGL *and* D3D? And that the exact same instance of the game (on the flash drive) works fine on my XP system?

It seems like it has to be either Vista or something else unique to my laptop. Something about the way Tribes2 tries to render the geometry internally, before it is passed to the OGL/D3D layer.
 
Player Model Trouble

Whenever I load up Tribes 2 model setup my player model has a bunch of jagged lines jutting out randomly. It even happens in game and I'm stuck in 3rd person with that same graphical issue. Does anyone know why this is happening and how to resolve it? Thanks.
Click to expand...

This person is having the same problem. I am at work so I can't really play around and I don't quite get what they did. Some way to modify the driver for the mobility chips? I'll have to play around with this but I did try switching OGL to D3D without any change.
 
I added the line from that link about the triangles setting and forced the system to D3D and now it works - sorta.

The D3D performance is not that great and I am guessing 30-50fps with heavily reduced graphics and running 1024x768.

It's at least playable now - my son is always wishing we could play together so now we can.
 
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