smithpd on 20/1/2007 at 00:18
I just got a HIS Radeon X1650 XT because Nvidia no longer supports Thief in its latest offereings, and, besides, I got tired of Nvidia's bad dark textures, including bad sky, which I have endured for two years or so. I decided to get a part that will provide some life insurance for Thief. X1650 XT is a brand new model that competes with Nvidia's 7600 GT.
Anyway, the card works fine with the exception of one little quirk. When you escape to desktop in T1 or T2 (Pause key) and then return to the game (click icon on task bar) the gamma is reset to a default value = the value you set for 3-D games in the Catalyst Control Center. It can be restored to where you last left it (not the default value) by hitting + and - keys or by loading a save.
I have also tried the ATI Tray Tools utility. It can save color schemes for each game's EXE. Seems nice at first, but it works only when the game is first invoked. If you escape to desktop and come back, then it ignores both the Catalyst setting (above) and the ATT setting and leaves you totally in the dark. :(
I can't use the Rage3DTweak utility because it does not have a version that is consistent with my driver, so it won't install as a plugin.
Has anyone else experienced this gamma issue with other Radeons or ATI drivers? Is there a permanent fix for it? I can't try new drivers because ATI does not yet have Windows 2000 drivers for the 1650 series on their web site. Only XP. I don't know if it matters.
Any ideas?
Elentari on 20/1/2007 at 00:57
I've got a Radeon (something or another) on my PC and while during game play I have *NO* issue, if I alt-tab out of the game and come back, yeah, I get annoying gamma issues as well. The interface is SERIOUSLY dark and the actual game play window is pitch dark with a few lights visible barely.
While annoying, though, its not a huge issue for me. I find I can just change the resolution, return to the game play window, then go back and fix it back (i play on the 640x480 resolution. . .the others slow menu/books down too far and it bugs me) and it works fine to get back into things. While annoying on those nights I'm always jumping out to windows, at least it beats having to quit/restart, and if I don't flip out of the window, the gamma remains fine, even hitting esc during play or going to the options/map windows.
Wish I could suggest what to fix yours with, but I've never figured it out myself. I've just been glad I could play normally on it and its a small enough issue.
smithpd on 20/1/2007 at 01:04
Yes, the issue is not too large, viewed in isolation. But to make it come back with decent gamma, one is tempted to set an approximate Thief gamma value for all 3-D games in the Catalyst Control. The problem with that is, Thief must be cranked up so much, and then other games look far too bright. One is reduced to fiddling with settings every time one plays another game. The ATT utility should handle this, but it doesn't.
SlyFoxx on 20/1/2007 at 02:02
Though I've never messed with card settings on the wife's machine. It is some kind of radeon card ( about a 6 month old Dell unit) and screen brightness changes all the time when going to a scroll or save screen. Bugger it's annoying.
Dark Arrow on 20/1/2007 at 06:26
I'm not experiencing such problems, but I do have a problem with brightness and contrast settings with other programs. It appears there is a button combination alt+b and alt+c that add to brightness and contrast and it seems to be program related setup. It appears when I open a program and disappears when I close it.
Does anyone know if this is this a feature in ATI drivers or Rage3d tweak or something else?
theBlackman on 20/1/2007 at 06:47
Peter, see comment at EIDOS question. :D
ffox on 20/1/2007 at 08:06
That darkening has always happened to me!
I hit "O" for objectives or "M" for map before pressing Pause. If I forget, Esc then "Continue" puts it back to normal. Pausing with the game screen up rather than a static one is what causes the problem.
smithpd on 21/1/2007 at 17:55
Thanks to insructions from theBlackman, I was able to creat profiles using Catalyst Control Center (CCC). I have a different profile for each game I play, which has a specified color mapping for that game. For example, with Thief2 I specify brightness = 100, contrast = 110, and gamma = 175. Thief2 is automatically invoked if I activate the profile, and the profile is automatically used if I run Thief2 independently. With this, if I escape to desktop I get the desktop color profile, and when I resume Thief2 I get the Thief2 color profile back again.
The only problem with this is that if you change gamma in game, it returns to the specified profile, not your in-game setting. But you are close, at least. Hitting the "-" key brings back your in-game setting, so it is a minor inconvenience rather than a plunge into the dark.
The ATI Tray Tools utility (ATT) has a bug in that, when you escape to the desktop, gamma is set to 1.0, which is OK for the desktop, but when you resume Thief gamma is (incorrectly) not set back to the Thief value. So then you are plunged into darkness, which is disconcerting. It can be restored, again by hitting the "-" key as above. Anyway, I find this total darkness bothersome, so I deinstalled ATT, and now it works fine with CCC alone.
All this gamma problem can be avoided by deinstalling both CCC and ATT and using the bare drivers. Then the in-game gamma is always used. You take the bare drivers' defaults for all settings, so you have no controls at all, which has other disadvantages. Nvidia does not have these problems. Their control panel works as it is supposed to. But then you have to live with bad dark textures, bad sky, and no support at all for Thief (it doesn't run) with the latest drivers and after the 7900 series. Nvidia is at a dead end, which is why I chose ATI this time.
After all this, the ATI card is working satisfactorily, but with some rough edges. The rough edges are the inability to return to the exact in-game gamma setting, significant temporary glitches in color and screen flashing when changing resolutions. I still have to work on the fog issue. I think I can get fog by installing ATT and then deinstalling it, leaving registry settings in place. We will see. I'll report back later.
smithpd on 21/1/2007 at 20:21
This card cannot do fog. Or at least I cannot make it do fog. It is going back to NewEgg unless someone has a suggestion for doing something I have not already tried. See below for details.
I loaded up Sharga's Swamped mission and found no fog. Fog is essential for that mission. So I installed ATT and checked that all the fog settings were checked. They were checked, but still, I had no fog. Then I tried to follow the instruction in the FAQ to get fog. In short, the instructions are to install Rage3DTweak plugin to CCC. That would not work with my Catalyst verion (6.8 I think). Rage3DTweak is available for Cat versions only up to Cat 5.13.
I deinstalled all ATI software and ran driver cleaner. I then tried to install Cat 5.8, which was well reviewed. That would not install because it said that it could not find appropriate hardware. I had previously tried Cat 6.2 from the ATI site, and that did not install either. The X1650XT is a new card, and evidently it is not supported by drivers below the version that comes with it on CD (6.8 I think). So, I am stuck with having to use the recent drivers, for which I cannot install Rage3DTweak. I cannot follow the instructions in the FAQ to enable fog, and I know of no other way.
Apparently ATI has crossed a point of no return, just like Nvidia did with their 8800 card. It looks like we are hosed. If my observations are correct, then all we can do is to make sure we have some older hardware on hand that can play Thief.
This is kind of the last straw. No fog, a lot of hassle with gamma, and an apparent dead end for ATI. So I yanked the ATI card and went back to my Nvidia 6800 GT. It installed very quickly with no hassle. It worked right away with no problems other than the bad sky / dark textures. Fog is good. I also have a 4200 Ti with good colors (no texture manager issue) as a backup.
If anyone has a suggestion for how to make fog work with my fussy ATI X1650XT card, please let me know. I'll give it a shot if it looks promising. If not, this puppy gets returned. :(
Abysmal on 21/1/2007 at 21:15
I set my gamma in Thief's cam.cfg file to 1.75 (1.65 for T2) and have never had an issue; this is the same as just using the in-game gamma slider, but I wanted it a little darker for my LCD. T3 required some more ingenuity (the in-game slider is terrible and actually removes detail with its contrast), but I eventually perfected that as well.
Using outside controls is never a supported method, so you can't always expect these things to work smoothly. It's best to keep as much in-game as possible. I also get the gamma reset when minimizing to the desktop and returning, but again, doing that is not even the official way to exit the game so it's a bit silly to complain about. Some games break completely when doing that; it's just luck when it comes to that action. Hitting Esc and then clicking Continue fixes it anyways.
As for fog and ATT, go to Advanced Tweaks and uncheck W Fog. Fog is only good for FMs anyways, the reason it's disabled by default in Thief 2 is because it sucks so friggin horribly in every mission it's in (stated by a developer even), even with the "nicer" non-ATI fog. In my opinion ATI is still the way to go for Thief.
Thief on a tweaked LCD looks fab by the way (turn the panel brightness all the way down), it's just as moody and dark and great. Let those insecure about it continue to nitpick blacks and backlighting and fail to realize that the overall contrast & gamma of an image nullifies these minor issues to the human eye for the most part. I'm actually preferring it to CRT due to it retaining darker details far better whenever a light hits the screen, while still keeping it hard as hell to see in pitch black areas.
