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Part 1, ATI Radeon Woes by Cameron Robertson You saved up the $700 for that new computer you are going to build with SimCity 4 in mind. You are able to get a nice processor, 1gb of ram since you know SimCity 4 eats it up and a Radeon 9200 for some nice, smooth gameplay. Recently helping Matej to build that system I mentioned above, we decided upon the Radeon 9200 as the best priced card for the system. At under $100, it was a great deal. I personally recommended it since it is basically a rebranded version of my card, the Radeon 8500, save a few tweaks to make it cheaper. Seeing as my Radeon 8500 runs SimCity 4 very well, even with graphics high, I thought nothing of it. That is, until the system was built... Previously Matej had managed to somehow run SimCity 4 on his Dad's laptop, which consequently only had 8mb of video memory (how he did that I will never know...), meaning that this new system would be a huge improvement for SimCity 4. So, after throwing things together, Matej was a little annoyed when scrolling in SimCity 4 was atrocious. He had just paid $700 for a computer that was not only meant to run SimCity 4, but The Sims 2 as well. We tried everything at first. Turning things to minimum, the latest drives, and the latest version of Direct X. Nothing helped. So, for the past few weeks, Matej simply avoided SimCity 4 (a sin). Really, the performance was not that much better from his Dad's laptop. That is, at least until now. While once again trying to tackle SimCity 4, something hit me- this sounds a lot like the noPartialBackingStoreCopies problem with ATI card. Basically what this means is that apart from a few select newer Radeon cards such as the Radeon 9700 and 9800, nearly all other Radeon cards have no backing store (this does not mean they are lacking; they simply use a different architecture). For people like me with Radeon 8500s or 9000's this simply meant a minor change in the Graphics Rules.sgr file and the problem is fixed. The only thing that is changed is that when one scrolls smaller buildings and trees disappear, really not a big loss. I automatically assumed that since the architecture of the Radeon 9100 and 9200 are very similar to that of the 8500 that noPartialBackingStoreCopies was also be true for those two cards. What I discovered is that I was not very far from solving the 9200 scrolling puzzle... Within several seconds I sped through the scientific process of diagnosing this problem in mind... and I needed to try out my theory. So Matej booted up SimCity 4, and per my request created a small city. What happened next would be the key to everything- the buildings and trees did not disappear, as they should of for a card like Matej's with no backing store. Quickly we dived into the Graphics rules and realized why- the noPartialBackingStoreCopies only responds to the ATI cards listed there- namely the 7000 series, 8000 series, 9000, Radeon VE, Radeon Mobility and Radeon FireGL. From my graphics rules you can see what I mean: 
Huh, I don't see the 9100 or 9200, even though they suffer tremendous scrolling issues because of this. The reasons these cards aren't listed are for several reasons including that at the time of patch 2 I believe that only the 9100 was out- and barely at that. Also, as you will notice that the for 8000's and 7000's they could simply put in a question mark as all the cards in those series were affected. However that was not true with all of the 9000 series. Not to mention, without a very important ID number from the newer cards, it would be impossible for SimCity 4 to discern what the Radeon 9100 or 9200 were. So all of you Radeon 9100 and 9200 SimCity 4 players out there, are ready for a speed boost? If this were a sitcom I might make you wait until next week for Part 2- but I'm nicer than that :-). |
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