Graphics Question

Well, I've got a new Video Card. The ATI Radeon 9250 PCI. So I was itching to see what I could do with it and my 512 MB RAM and 2.4 GH processor combined. I heard you could see the lights on the night side of a planet, but I couldn't. So I looked through video options say "Anti-Aliasing" I don't really know what that is and I bump it up to 1X and now I see clouds and everything just plain looks better. But still no lights. Are there higher Anti-Aliasing levels? I can't go above 1X.

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Try 4x, just if it slows to much on larger maps you might have to adjust. You should be able to run just fine at that though.

Edit:oh yea I forgot, there is an option just for the planet lights on there somewhere too.

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Are there higher Anti-Aliasing levels? I can't go above 1X.

The game will handle up to 6x, but it only shows as an option what your card supports. a 9250 is a pretty low-end card, so it's not surprising if it only supports 1x.

But still no lights.

Make sure you also set the ambient light slider in the options low enough that you have shadows on the backs of the planets (if they're too bright you can't see the lights).

I'm not sure exactly what is required for the lights to appear, but a 9250 is only DirectX8 compliant, so if you still can't see them after adjusting the ambient light and making sure they're enabled, you may need a DX9 compliant card (this is actually the game's stated minimum requirement) in order to see them.

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My luck. I get a new card for Christmas and it sucks. Oh well, beats the integrated stuff I was using before it. I'll just deal with it I geuss.

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Sorry for the double post but I found out that the card IS DirectX9 supported. Though, even with Ambient Light all the way down, there are no lights, and with ambient light at 33(it was at 41) still no lights. Any ideas why? I figured a 9250 PCI Conventional would be able to create city lights on this game.

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Sorry for the double post but I found out that the card IS DirectX9 supported.

It is one thing to work with DirectX9. It's something else to support all the features new to DX9 versus DX8, or older versions still. A Radeon 9250 is based on the R200 series of GPUs (R280 to be exact), which only contain support for DirectX8 and earlier features. The 9500-9800 series cards are based on the R300 line and support DirectX9 features (which is likely necessary for the lights on the dark sides of planets).

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33% ambient light is still a VERY high amount of ambient light. For the best visuals, i wouldn't recommend using more than 10%-15% ambient light. I myself don't use above 10%.

Just for your information, you can get higher Anti-Aliasing in the game without using the in-game settings. To do this, open up the advanced options for your card and find the AA settings and manually set them (and make sure you don't select software controlled). You can also download a program like ATi Tray Tools and use it to set the AA settings for your card. Either way will override the games settings and use whatever you've chosen instead. For instance, GalCiv 2 recognizes my card as only supporting 4x AA, but that's not correct, so i have the drivers set to override software control and i have my AA set to 8x.

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