Widescreen Gaming Forum

I am having a hard time understanding why this game, which doesn't appear to have any better graphics than it's previous installment Escape From Butcher Bay, states a Pentium D CPU and 2600 XT for Minimum requirements.

OK, maybe the Pentium D makes sense, after all dual core being required vs just recommended is getting more common, and things other than graphics processing are relegated to the CPU.

Why the need for a 2000 series GPU though? According to Tom's Hardware's GPU bench chart when set to overall game FPS, my X1950Pro is actually slightly faster than two 2600 XTs in Crossfire, or two 6800 Ultras in SLI, only one of which of either is said to be needed for min reqs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q1-2008/Overall-all-Games-fps,572.html

So I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a shot anyway. My system does play a handful of games that supposedly require dual core CPU, and some of those quite well.

I install the game, launch it, and immediately get a crash to blue screen with that "Windows has shut down to avoid damage to your computer. Check for video driver updates." error message.

So I uninstall my old Omega driver, and try the latest Cats for this card, which are only available in Legacy now. ATI is finally admitting on that very same driver page they're focusing solely on later gen cards now. As mentioned, part of those AoDA min sys reqs state Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultra, a much older card than the 2600. Way to keep up with the competiton on support ATI. :roll:

So I try the game again after laboring through the needed ATI driver cleaning using Driver Cleaner. Same problem, crashes to blue screen with same error message. At this point I don't know whether to look to the developer Starbreeze, the publisher Atari, or ATI.

I get the feeling it's a combination of all 3. I Googled and found one guy was able to run the game with an X1950Pro (X2 5200 CPU), though he said he was getting 7FPS in the menu, and 10FPS in game. One person responded saying Alt+Tabbing, then maximizing the game again raises the FPS by 40.

Perhaps the Legacy drivers take more dev time to write for that Atari didn't want to fund, so they state it only works with a 2600 and up. I am running, or trying to run, the patched version of the game btw. The only thing else I can think of to try is run it in 98/ME compatibility mode, which I'm doubting will work. That or wait until the end of the year to play it on my next system, which definitely will not have anything ATI in it.

Would it make me look like a fanboy if I said ATI drivers suck? They really do in my experience. That said, I haven't used ATI since Doom 3-era.

On the point of the game not looking much better than the original, you're right it doesn't... Dark Athena looks a good bit better, but not the original. It does however have a lot of cool new particle effects and motion blur/depth of field stuff, and maybe that is why it requires more card than you are offering.

Would it make me look like a fanboy if I said ATI drivers suck? They really do in my experience. That said, I haven't used ATI since Doom 3-era.

On the point of the game not looking much better than the original, you're right it doesn't... Dark Athena looks a good bit better, but not the original. It does however have a lot of cool new particle effects and motion blur/depth of field stuff, and maybe that is why it requires more card than you are offering.

My point was, the 2600XT it calls for on the ATI end of the spectrum is actually a much slower card than my X1950Pro, it's just a newer model that may not have been relegated to Legacy support like mine was.

I certainly am not one that's quick to call anyone an Nvidia fanboy merely for pointing out ATI is not as good at nor as long term supportive with their driver writing. I myself have been on ATI for the last 4.5 of my 7.5 yrs of PC gaming and I can definitely attest to that being more fact than fiction.

As for motion blur and depth of field, that is post processing effects, not handled with the main graphics rendering. As far as I know it's done via the CPU, but I could be wrong. At any rate, I don't see why they would make the spec higher (Pentium D min, vs P 4) due to that alone when in many games those are effects you can turn off in the menu or config files.

Not all is bad with having switched to the ATI driver though. I can now play Wolverine without the graphics glitch I was getting covering the whole screen repeatedly during fights. Thus, I guess I'm going to have to stick with their drivers, unless Angel "Omegaman" Trinidad starts writing the Omegas again.

I was really looking forward to playing Assault on Dark Athena, so Wolverine playing better is not much consolation at this point.

OK, it appears the Legacy drivers for the X1000 series may indeed be much of the problem. I heard from someone on another forum that rolling back to CAT 8.8 solves the problem. I rolled back to CAT 8.8 and indeed I could then launch the game and play it, though a little ways into it I had a game ending crash at one checkpoint. Replaying from a previous checkpoint didn't help.

I then installed Escape From Butcher Bay again, patched it, and ended up having the same problem. A little ways into the game it would crash, though this time with the crash log feature from the patch was popping up repeatedly in layers.

I suspected it was the crash log feature causing the problem, the AoDA patch uses it too. I reinstalled EFBB without the patch and just finished playing all the way through the game with no crashes. Tonight I'm going to try playing AoDA without the patch to see if that fixes the crash problem in it too.

Note that the guy that told me about using the CAT 8.8 driver could play the game before, although at extremely low frame rates with low settings. He now plays it on max settings with good frame rates. He also made no mention of having to play unpatched. So, in a word, ATI's legacy drivers suck, big time.

From what I read, Tom's Hardware is definitely not the place to get your hardware reviews.

From what I read, Tom's Hardware is definitely not the place to get your hardware reviews.

Kind of a moot point since they were only used in this case to show how my GPU compares to the 2600. Therefore since they test the GPUs with the same methodology each time they should at the very least be useful for a general comparison of one to another, esp within the same GPU camp.

It's also moot because you'd have to be extremely out of the GPU loop to not know the point I was making, that an X1950Pro is much faster than a 2600. It was really just the only chart I could find that had both cards on it, for those that actually need proof of such a thing. :roll:

I wouldn't say MUCH, but it does out-perform generally.
I need to correct my last post, It's a good place for Reviews, but I don't think the charts are very accurate.

I wouldn't say MUCH, but it does out-perform generally.

The X1950Pro beats the 2600 by quite a bit actually.