Eengstro’s Blog » ATI

More Team Fortress 2 rendering glitches

Eengstro — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 19:16:45 +0000

As a followup on my previous post, I managed to capture more Team Fortress rendering glitches last night.

The polygons in this sniper are all facing in odd directions. Notice the two long, thin polygons going down and to the left.

This sniper’s head and rifle butt seem fine, but the rest of him is being stretched to infinity. What’s with the hook floating over his head?

I was running ATITool while playing last night, and saw the following temperatures in the log:

2008-03-07 22:50:34 I Temperature: GPU: 83.3°C GPU environment: 63.0°C
2008-03-07 22:50:44 I Temperature: GPU: 83.4°C GPU environment: 63.0°C
2008-03-07 22:50:54 I Temperature: GPU: 83.4°C GPU environment: 63.0°C

This seems pretty hot. Is it too hot for the graphics card?

Another factor is making me think that temperature is the culprit: when I switched out of the game to save my screen capture, the card temperature would drop. This is expected, since the game’s graphics aren’t rendered when the game is minimized:

2008-03-07 22:52:39 I Temperature: GPU: 82.8°C GPU environment: 62.0°C
2008-03-07 22:52:49 I Temperature: GPU: 69.3°C GPU environment: 62.0°C
2008-03-07 22:52:59 I Temperature: GPU: 67.0°C GPU environment: 62.0°C

When I switched back to the game, with the card now much cooler, the graphics returned to normal. It looks like I need to start shopping for a cooling solution.

I also saw this, which is probably a bug in the game. Unlike the glitches above, this is the only time I’ve seen this:
This soldier moved around the map and fired his weapons, but there was no animation: his arms and legs didn’t move. It was like fighting alongside a floating mannequin. Only his eyes were still animated, adding to the creepiness factor.

Team Fortress 2 rendering glitches

Eengstro — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:31:15 +0000

I’ve been seeing more and more rendering glitches in Team Fortress 2 on my ATI X800 XT recently. The glitches always happen to characters or buildings only; the environment always renders correctly. Polygons will either stretch to infinity (sometimes as few as one, or every polygon in a character model), or they’ll “fan”, facing the wrong direction. The sentryguns in the screen capture here are doing both simultaneously.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or a hardware issue, but I’m suspecting the latter, as I’m the only one I know of (so far) that is seeing this. My first step is to monitor the temperature of the video card with ATITool while playing. (I’m not overclocking the card, just monitoring the temperature.) The next time it glitches, I want to know if the card is overheating.

Also funny is what happens to Steam after quitting a session of TF2 that’s been glitching. As you can see, Steam’s glitching too!

Hopefully I’ll turn something up on this. In the meantime, I’ll post more screen captures as I manage to get them.

Update: Followup post here.

ATI and McAfee don’t like each other

Eengstro — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:37:38 +0000

I recently installed McAfee VirusScan 2006 and Personal Firewall Plus 2006. Around this time, I discovered that my ATI video card’s control panel, Catalyst Control Center, stopped functioning: it wouldn’t even open.

It turns out that Catalyst Control Center needs access to the Internet, and Personal Firewall Plus 2006 was blocking it, apparently by default. Click the thumbnail on the right to see a screenshot of Personal Firewall, and notice that CLI.exe is marked “BLOCKED”.

To fix this, open the McAfee SecurityCenter, and click Personal Firewall Plus on the left side. Then click the link, “View the Internet Applications List”. If CLI.exe (with an ATI icon) is BLOCKED, then right-click on it, and choose “Allow Full Access”.

So, just why does Catalyst require access to the Internet? Who knows, but if you run ATI cards for a while like I have, you come to expect dumb things like this.