Serious Sam seriously messing up.

[leech]

Is it me, or does Serious Sam not like the G400? I have power desk 6.23 installed in WinME and I just installed 5.52 in Win2k (I have a Marvel G400-TV and can't get anything newer than the 6.23 to install in WinME, in Win2k I forced the 5.52 drivers in by adding some lines I saw in the forums here into one of the inf files.) Serious Sam just locks up randomly, and randomly has texturing problems. For instance it'll start flashing weird colors all over, and of course much like quake 2 way back when I had my G200, the walls have a tendancy to turn into rainbows.

My system now has a Marvel G400-Tv, SB Live value. Asus CUSL2 MB, P3-850 (nothing is over clocked), 3com 3c905b-TX, Generic Realtek card, Adaptec 2940UW, and some USB devices (Logitec Wingman Force 3d, Intellimouse Explorer, Lexmark z52 printer (which I just bought) and a HP 2100c Scanner). Any help would be greatly appreciated. I would have beaten this game by now, if it didn't lock up always. Laters.

Leech

[Rags]

It's not a Matrox problem, it's a problem with the game, EVERYONE is having problems with it.

Rags

[spazm_1999]

Does theses occurs often 'cus i haven't seen anything really bad with Serious Sam.... the only thing i had is a flashing floor in the 3rd map.

Spazm

[Grego]

Ive played through the entire game, and have only experienced rendering probs once or twice, nothing serious and no lock-ups!

------------------
System:
Asus A7V rev. 1.01p bios 1007
AMD Thunderbird 800@824 fsb 103
SBLive retail with liveware 3.0
Matrox g400 MAX pd 6.51
LG Flatron 795FT 17" monitor
IBM 13.5 GB 7200 hdd
Pioneer 103-s dvdrom
WinME
directx 8.0a
128mb pc133

[Heiney]

Just don't use the 6.51 ICD! It's bilinear filtering is all messed up, in Q3 and Sam. 6.50 is fine though.

And Matrox is working on a way to get multitexturing to work but who knows if it'll ever happen. I guess they've known about the prob for months.



[This message has been edited by Heiney (edited 28 May 2001).]

[Heiney]

You know guys, what's really amazing, is that this game runs a hell of a lot prettier and faster on a P2-400 with a TNT2 (vanilla) than a G400MAX on a P3-1000, at the same settings.

And there isn't any texture swimming and corruption.

Maybe the NVidiots aren't so clueless?

--------------------
ABIT BF6, Pentium III 1GHz, Alpha P3125 Cooler, 256MB Crucial 7E, Quantum Fireball Plus LM, IBM 75GXP, Matrox G400 DH@160/200, Enlight 7237, 300watt TurboCool PS, and some fun with a Dremel!

[MP]

I've also had lots of lockups with Serious Sam. It was like 10 minutes of gameplay, reboot, 10 minutes of gameplay and so on... It's not a heat issue and all other games I have work just fine. I've had some bad experiences with EAX and so I decided to check it out. In SS audio options I changed the setting from EAX to DirectSound and since then I've played several hours with no lockups.

My setup:
Abit BX6 Rev2.0
Intel Celeron 433@488
SB Live Value
Matrox G400 MAX
3Com 3C905B-TX
Hauppauge WinTV PCI
IBM DeskStar 14.4 GXP
Logitech MouseMan Wheel (USB)
Win2k Pro, Matrox PD 5.52, LiveWare 3.0

[leech]

Well, I'm considering one thing. I know I have the settings in my bios set to AGP 4X, so I think I'll try changing it to 2X and see if that works. But so far I haven't had texture swimming, just textures turning various colours. I remember the swimming texture thing in Q2 on the G200, that was always a trip to watch. Wish me luck.

Leech

[leech]

That's a nopers, in fact as soon as I loaded my Serious Sam saved game it locked with black lines going vertically through the screen and a black square for my mouse cursor. Lovely.

Leech

[Heiney]

I think Serious Sam has shown us that Matrox has an ICD that works well for certain game engines, namely id software engines.

It is lacking features that Sam needs. Most notable is the lack of a blending mode so that MULTITEXTURING can't be enabled! That's pretty sad.

I haven't had any lockups recently. But, I found that if you have your G400 overclocked, this game will likely have MANY problems with 'quality' mode, under video settings. Texture corruption and eventual lockup are almost guaranteed. 'Normal' doesn't seem to care.......strange.

If Matrox don't get their act together soon with this awesome game, and since upcoming games are all well beyond the G400's abilities, an upgrade to a non-Matrox card may be in my future

--------------------
ABIT BF6, Pentium III 1GHz, Alpha P3125 Cooler, 256MB Crucial 7E, Quantum Fireball Plus LM, IBM 75GXP, Matrox G400 DH@160/200, Enlight 7237, 300watt TurboCool PS, and some fun with a Dremel!

[MP]

Ok, it seems I made some hasty conclusions before. It isn't the EAX after all. I can play with EAX on just fine.

The following is in the Serious Sam FAQ at http://www.croteam.com/game_faq

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
- Problem: occasional crashes (mostly at the third switch) on all Voodoo boards
While we're waiting for 3Dfx to solve this problem in driver, there is one workaround you can do.

At the console prompt, type one of the following (your choice):
1) 'mdl_iShadowQuality=0' - this will disable rendering of simple model shadows (which are the cause of crash)
-or-

2) 'ogl_bUseCompiledVertexArrays=0' - simple model shadows will be rendered, but overall rendering performance will be lower
</font>

These correspond to the settings for Model Settings>Shadow type and Faster Rendering in Options>Advanced Options>Advanced Rendering Options.
It seems that G400 doesn't like the "Faster Rendering" option at all, at least in my case. I get constant lockups, if Faster Rendering is enabled (by the way, I only tested it with "Enabled for everything"), no matter if EAX and/or shadows are used or not. And no lockups as long as Faster Rendering is disabled.

[This message has been edited by MP (edited 30 May 2001).]