Open GL or DX 7?

[Merkin]

I know the auto-map opens quicker with Open GL, but otherwise I've not noticed any difference in graphics quality or performance between the two. I'm running the game in 1600x122 32 bit with all graphics enhancements enabled, on a 1.2 gig Athlon, 512 meg PC 133, 64 meg G-Force 2 TI. Has anyone noticed any difference in looks/performance between OGL and DX7? (besides the auto-map)

[April Ryan]

i find opengl much better.. in terms of the automap and the graphics.. i am sure u do notice the diff... but with my geforce 2 Go 16 meg i can only have it at 1400*1040*16.. but surprisingly.. dx7 i can have it at 1400*1040*32... beats me why it is like this.

[Vaprakgruumsh]

When I do opengl, on either my laptop or my wife's pc, screen breaks into three rows of 3 boxes, going 3 across, 3 down. Small thin lines, but clearly visible. Ever heard of this?

[vesselle]

sounds like either the card is not capable of it (esp on an older lapper) or the drivers aren't cutting it. i would try different drivers first.

[Vaprakgruumsh]

The laptop I can understand... but the wife's PC did it with her previous drivers for her card, which were just updated after installing the new EverQuest, we got the newest drivers off the site, and it does the same thing. It's very weird. (I should post a picture of it)

[vesselle]

her laptop and her pc? both?

is she chaotic like me? LOL.

you don't say what kind of card she has.
~if its a geeWhiz, the latest drivers are good, but some people have problems with them. you might consider going back to the previous ones.
~if its a voodoo, get the latest "beta" drivers.
~if it's a radeon, then we all know that the install proggie for those are horribbibble (they don't completely uninstall previous drivers, don't make registry changes, etc.)

does she do her own driver updates? screen artifacts are a driver issue and prolly revolve around bad installs that cause ghost drivers to resurface and try to claim gamesphere supremacy. (sorry. got carried away there.)

make sure she's running DX 8.1 (which she prolly does because the new EQ requires it)

rip every single instance of drivers out of her pc ~ make sure you get the ones in her "windows/inf" folder and delete her card's reg keys. unzip her drivers to special file (remember where it is [img]smile.gif[/img] ) after all that, reboot, into safe mode and windows will have you browse and point to the newly created file.
run the install.

::sighs, smiling:: the things we haveta go thru to get games to work.

[Vaprakgruumsh]

Well it works in DirectX7 (choppy), and works perfectly fine in DirectX6 mode in the setup (despite having DirectX8.1a on her pc). Weird. But it works. Was just wondering if anyone's ever heard of those weird box things. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[vesselle]

yeah. its the drivers trying to cope with the rendering system. wasn't opengl used for voodoo cards mostly?

when i ran por2 i would get those same gridlines. they looked like an overlay. but after updating the drivers, i didn't have a problem.

however, i just upgraded my drivers and for the heck of it, ran wiz8 in opengl, and got the gridlines too. they weren't there for my previous drivers.

oh well, looks like i'm back to dx7 myself and longer automap times. its okay tho, at least we have the choices. if dx6 works for your setup, then no reason NOT to use it. [img]smile.gif[/img] it's all good, right?

[Lorienelf]

I also get the grid lines using OpenGL. But only in the overlay, not in the 3d portion of the screen. Also, OpenGL was much darker than Dx for me, even when I turned up the OpenGL brightness setting on my video card.

I think the grid-lines may have something to do with the video card used. I have an ATI card and I think they have some trouble with it.

I have to use OpenGL though, because using DirectX I randomly get a fatal error when I go to automap: "DDHelp has performed an illegal operation" blah blah blah. I believe DDHelp is part of direct draw and that I have either encountered a bug or there is something wrong with my system, but seeing as how my system is 4 years old, it's ok [img]tongue.gif[/img]