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Jim Paradise · May 2, 2003, 01:09 AM

I have a Radeon 8000 (or 8500.... truthfully I forget) that I had taken out of my G4/400 because when I'd play games such as Star Wars Pod Racer, Driver, or Carmegeddon II, I found that the graphics would be sort of pixilated. I don't mean that the edges of shapes would be jagged, rather, the whole screen looked pixilated like a screen of little dots on it placed over top of it. I thought this was a problem with my graphics card (since I had flashed it), but when I tried some of those same old games out on my new Powerbook with the Radeon 9000 mobility in it, the problem persists.

So my question is, has anyone else experienced this problem of graphics looking off/pixilated with older games? Games that are native to OS X run like a champ, but old games in Classic or OS 9 have this pixilation problem. I'll try and make a few screen grabs soon to illustrate the problem more clearly. I figure that since this is happening on two seperate machines with two seperate 64MB ATi cards, that I can't be the only person to have experienced this...

roders · May 2, 2003, 02:49 PM

I think you need to change to 32 Bit colour/screen depth.
Also make sure you have the latest and correct ATI drivers for your OS installed (I'm guessing 9.2.2) and the latest Version of OpenGL & Rave (included with 9.2.2) as you could for some reason be running without 3D hardware acceleration (i.e. software rendering) also try upping your screen resoloution.

Jim Paradise · May 2, 2003, 05:09 PM

Done and done with both machines.... same effects still. I suppose I'll have to tinker more.

iamnid · May 6, 2003, 11:40 PM

When I had my powermac with the radeon 8500, I never experienced any of the problems you are describing and I played a lot of different games, old and new.

If you are only experiencing this with OS 9 only games, maybe you need to update to the latest ATI drivers for OS 9... they are a separate install from the OS X drivers and unless you have manually installed them you won't have them on your system (i.e. OS 9 didn't come with them).

roders · May 7, 2003, 07:41 AM

Make sure your desktop is set too, millions, not thousands of colours before playing games.

mac freak · May 7, 2003, 08:24 AM

Could you possibly take a screenshot and/or a digital camera shot? That'd really help, as it would be more clear what the problem is.

Jim Paradise · May 11, 2003, 04:12 PM

Sorry that it's taken so long to grab some screenshots! I took some from Driver to illustrate the "pixilation" that occurs. With my older 16MB Rage in the G4/400, things such as smoke (well, everything really) don't have this pixilation problem.

The pics are here.

Example:

iamnid · May 14, 2003, 11:20 PM

Uhhh.... ok... I don't see any extraordinary pixelation. Driver is a crappy PS1 port and that's basically just the way it looks. Perhaps I'm missing something... can you show us another screenshot? Also, what specifically is strange with the driver screenshot?

Okay, sorry I followed the link and looked at the other pictures... you mention that the smoke looks bad. I think it isn't anything to do with the card but with the way smoke is implemented in the older games. Nowadays smoke effects are created differently, not exactly sure how but they look more realistic. Back then, when driver was made, smoke was made up of 2D sprites. The smoke is really just crappy smoke pictures that they've sort of pasted onto the air behind the car in the screenshot. Hmm... I'm not sure I can explain it, but the problem isn't with your card but with the way old game designers made smoke.

gizzard · May 15, 2003, 05:43 AM

16-bit color on all Radeon cards look bad, even ATI will admit this. Unfortunately, for some older games (like Driver), there is no option to use 32-bit color.

Jim Paradise · May 16, 2003, 12:09 AM

Originally posted by iamnid:
Uhhh.... ok... I don't see any extraordinary pixelation. Driver is a crappy PS1 port and that's basically just the way it looks. Perhaps I'm missing something... can you show us another screenshot? Also, what specifically is strange with the driver screenshot?

Okay, sorry I followed the link and looked at the other pictures... you mention that the smoke looks bad. I think it isn't anything to do with the card but with the way smoke is implemented in the older games. Nowadays smoke effects are created differently, not exactly sure how but they look more realistic. Back then, when driver was made, smoke was made up of 2D sprites. The smoke is really just crappy smoke pictures that they've sort of pasted onto the air behind the car in the screenshot. Hmm... I'm not sure I can explain it, but the problem isn't with your card but with the way old game designers made smoke.

No, on my old 16MB Rage card, the smoke looked fine, not pixilated. This is going to sound like a poor explination but- it just looked like smoke. Playing it on newer graphics cards makes the graphics look pixilated. I get the same sort of pixilations in Star Wars Pod Racer (it's not just smoke that's affected, it's all the graphics).

Jim Paradise · May 16, 2003, 12:10 AM

Originally posted by gizzard:
16-bit color on all Radeon cards look bad, even ATI will admit this. Unfortunately, for some older games (like Driver), there is no option to use 32-bit color.

Really? Hrrrm.... well that's pretty bloody annoying.

Thanks for the info, though!

I suppose I'll buy a Radeon PCI for the G4/400 and just use 16MB Rage for when I want to play old games.