RT3 Textures are blurry.

[AMD 103]

Hi, I'm back. I was tycoonk4, but my account was deleted. Guess I should use it more often.

I want to play RT3, but when I load the 3D world, all the textures become very blurry shortly after loading. That drives me a bit nuts.

Running Windows 7 64bit.

My processor is a Intel Core i5. My Graphics card is a Nivida Geforce 9500GT with the latest drivers.

I have 8192 Mbytes of RAM.

[Gumboots]

Yeah, we know. There's already a thread about it. I was going to try writing a custom dll to hoodwink the game into behaving, but that means learning Windoze-specific coding, which is kinda like going swimming in a cesspool. Nobody else seems interested in doing anything about it. I'll have a go when I get the time and the inclination.

[Hawk]

Yeah, we know. There's already a thread about it.

A link might help.

[AMD 103]

I've looked, but I saw no thread.

[Hawk]

I think it's explained in this thread.

viewtopic.php?f=82&t=3376

[AMD 103]

Close, but no cigar.

While some of my problems are mentioned, it doesn't state much else.

I know it's a hardware problem.

[Hawk]

How much on-board memory does your vid card have?

Are you running the latest vid card drivers? If so, that may be a problem. Sometimes the newest drivers aren't a good match for older software.

[AMD 103]

Yes, I am running the latest drivers.

I have 1024 Mbytes of video memory.

[Hawk]

Maybe try going back to an older driver version.
You may have to use Driver Sweeper to help uninstall and clean out any left over remnants of the existing drivers.
I'm using V-296.10, but I'm on an XP rig. Not sure if that driver version will work on a Win 7 system.

[AMD 103]

Found it. I'll give it a shot.

[Gumboots]

The thread I was talking about is this one: The infamous low res gfx problem.

AFAICT, it comes down to the way the memory is calculated with a signed integer, which returns a negative value above certain amount even though the RAM available is very much positive. Seems to be more likely to affect nVidia cards too. As mentioned, the way around it seems to be to write a custom dll that sends a false (positive) value for VRAM to the game, so it doesn't think your VRAM is non-existent (ie: negative).

[AMD 103]

Ah, so that's it.

That explains why the GFX update does nothing.

I think the largest amount of RAM on a GFX Card in 2003 was 512 or something like that.

[Gumboots]

I tok a bit of a look at it, but since I've never done Windows-specific coding before I'd probably have to mess around with it a bit to get it working. It sort of got put on the back burner for the moment, but it should be easy enough for someone who knows the drill.

[thietavu]

It seems like AMD's and Nvidia's graphics drivers behave differently with RRT3 these days...

At least AMD's drivers up to the current version 13.2 beta 7 work just fine with RRT3 (I'm using the TrainMaster version). Video memories up to at least 2 GB work fine.

I don't know what - if anything - happens beyond that 2 GB video memory barrier. Any experiences, anyone?

[Gumboots]

I have an idea that AMD's cards include a correction for older games that run into this problem with signed values, but nVidia cards don't.

[thietavu]

I have an idea that AMD's cards include a correction for older games that run into this problem with signed values, but nVidia cards don't.

You are probably right there, and I've come to the same conclusion. But whatever the reason may be, AMD has done something right for us who also play older games... Maybe there's an RRT3 fan in their team. :)

[mpxd]

Hi all,

I had this problem on my radeon 6950, and didn't want to limit my system memory like suggested in http://steamcommunity.com/app/7610/disc ... 327118/#p1 .

As a result, I think I've tracked down the cause of the problem and put together a workaround. I think the problem is caused by the d3d8 GetAvailableTextureMem() function returning a larger value than RT3.exe expects. To get around that, I've put together a wrapper for d3d8.dll that always returns 512MB from that function. It seems to work -- I've been sitting here staring at some nicely textured trees for about an hour now.

I've uploaded the fix to http://depositfiles.com/files/w6b7zylvt -- feel free to host it elsewhere or attach it to a post here if it works for you too. To use, just download, unzip, and place the d3d8.dll in the same folder as RT3.exe.

---

Edit by Hawk: I've added the fix to the website.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/rrt3.htm

and

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/

[Hawk]

I downloaded the file, but I'll wait for others to test it before I add it to the site.
I don't have that problem so I can't test it.

[Gumboots]

Seems to work perfectly on my box. Awesome.

Thanks mpxd. I'd been meaning to do this sometime, but Windows-specific coding isn't my thing. Now I don't have to (yay!).

ETA: I tested it by playng a scenario for about a dozen years. No problems. Game is stable, gfx are perfect.

[thietavu]

Must test even though my Radeon 7870 doesn't suffer from this problem.

How much VRAM does your 6950 have? Have you used the latest drivers? For some reason, RRT3 TM detects the 2GB VRAM correctly, like it did 1GB with my previous Radeons 5770 and 5850.