ATI 9700 and no chrome textures

[southie4]

I have reflections checked but I get extremely poor results when choosing an aircraft in FS9 with chrome textures. Is it the 9700? Any thoughts? How about you, Bigshot? What ya think?

Thanks,

Robert


P4 3.2 ghz, Intel D865GBF 800 FSB mobo, 128 mg Radeon 9700 Pro, 1024 PC3200 DDR dram, two 80 gig Western 7200 hd's, 19" ViewSonic monitor, Win XP, 450 ATX power supply

[Mr Scenery]

Bad/Outdated Drivers:
I've been hearing that the latest ATI drivers are buggy/bad/unsatisfactory when it comes to 9#00 cards. I wouldn't know for sure because I have an Nvidia FX5900XT, but I still read things. If you're using the latest drivers try going back to an older set. Or if you're using old/original drivers, try updating to newer ones.

Bad Card:
How old is your 9700? If it's new it could be defective. If it's old, have you overclocked the #$%& out of your card, and eventually burnt it out?

Bad FS:
FS may have become corrputed, you try uninstalling-reinstalling.

Just a couple of ideas of the top of my head,
John T.

[kc10]

Are you sure it's your hardware and not the textures themselves? When you say chrome textures do you mean like American Airlines and AeroMexico? You may want to check to see if the textures' alpha channels are indeed setup for the reflective chrome effect. You can use DXTBmp to do this, and the alpha should have some dark grey areas for the bare metal "chrome" parts.
When I first got the Captain Sim 727 I was not happy with the reflection on the AAL livery. Sure enough the alph channel needed to be reworked for the shiny effect I was looking for.

Note,to the developers' credit, sometimes the reflective chrome is compromised a bit to maintain much of the detail in the textures. See, the more reflection you add in the alpha channel the more detail is lost in the paint (lines,dirt,etc.) and you end up with nice reflection and shine, but too clean and no detail.

[southie4]

The 9700 is only about seven months old and there has been no overclocking, at all, John. I had an ATI 7200, Buddy, and my chrome was great. That goes from all aircraft that was supposed to have chrome effects - from American Airlines to Bill Lyons' Swift Classic to repaints of the default King Air to the same for the Cessna 421C from Flight One - all in brilliant mirror-like chrome. Now those textures appear more white than anything.

I have a driver from a couple of weeks ago but this seems to go back to my "Big Upgrade of 2004", which included the switch from ATI 7200 to the 9700 since I was not getting the nice water reflections I was seeing posted.


P4 3.2 ghz, Intel D865GBF 800 FSB mobo, 128 mg Radeon 9700 Pro, 1024 PC3200 DDR dram, two 80 gig Western 7200 hd's, 19" ViewSonic monitor, Win XP, 450 ATX power supply

[southie4]

Hmmm. That's interesting.

P4 3.2 ghz, Intel D865GBF 800 FSB mobo, 128 mg Radeon 9700 Pro, 1024 PC3200 DDR dram, two 80 gig Western 7200 hd's, 19" ViewSonic monitor, Win XP, 450 ATX power supply

[southie4]

Anyone? Bigshot? Any and all help appreciated.

P4 3.2 ghz, Intel D865GBF 800 FSB mobo, 128 mg Radeon 9700 Pro, 1024 PC3200 DDR dram, two 80 gig Western 7200 hd's, 19" ViewSonic monitor, Win XP, 450 ATX power supply

[Bigshot]

Don't know what to tell you. The chrome textures display just fine for me. You might want to open the texture file and make sure the colors are 0,0,0 (black) as black appears as chrome when drawn on a fuse or wing or the like in the texture folder and make sure you're running with mipmapped textures. Non-mipmapped textures look like ##### on my ATI card as one would expect. Standard textures in all Flight Sims are mipmapped DXT3 textures. Mipmaps are added to standard DXT3 textures for both alaising purposes and for performance purposes and look much better than those 32bit non-mipmapped textures as they should, if you're video card is working as it was designed to work. Non-mipmapped textures do not alais nor do they perform as well. That's probably why you're seeing less than perfect textures. Get yourself the DXTBMP utility to convert the textures and add back the mipmaps if you don't have it.

[MadMaster]

Do the obvious...

- Delete the fs9.cfg file
- Change your ATI driver
- Update your intel chipset driver
- Try installing DirectX 9.0 if you haven't
- Run windows update

That is all I can think of, I hope one fixes the problem.