agp acceleration grayed out in preferences?

i just got a new ATI radeon 9550 256 grafic's card and installed it and need to know why in preferences in the acceleration box is grayed out and cannot check it and need to know if this really needs to be checked or why the box is grayed out ty for any info on this

Yo butch! O that's perfectly normal for ATI, it's 'cuz of the way they code their drivers... there's some technical reason... about them not being fully OpenGL-compliant, so that box doesn't show up.

Mebbe it should say in the future that that box only works with Nvidia cards, unless something changes by then.

Check this thread out too:

/111/63/51794/1.html

BTW I have never noticed much of a performance increase with it on, seems fairly slight.

I've tested this on nvidias and hacked the prefs to allow me to use it on an ati card, and it does provide a slight speed increase on an nvidia card, while on an ati card you will actually see a slowdown with this enabled sometimes upto 50%

thanks for the answers to the apg box ....hope i can answer someone sometime and help them out ...seems card is running okies so not messing with it ...hehe clear as a bell as they would say and moving right alond thx again for the info

I actually just upgraded from a GeForce 4400 to a Radeon X800 XL. I expected a massive increase in FPS and I actually have a reduction. Highly disappointing...

Haven't tried any other games, so I'm not sure how it is on other games, but based on reviews on the X800 XL, this shouldn't be. Is SL extremely ATIphobic?

No it just doesn't work to well with ATI because of ATI's non-standard way of using OpenGL. Have you tried the Omega drivers to see if they improve things?

4400, as in Ti4400? That's odd, but one thing to remember is SL is highly CPU-bound and will poke holes in any weak links in the overall makeup of your computer. So what's the rest of your system like?

Been running ATI 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition (256) for awhile now, with the AGP option fully functional in Preferences settings. This card is driven by a huge big Mac dual desktop and a 8Mbit cable connection. SL performance is very good.

BTW, I tried several times disabling and enabling the AGP option - standing on the same spot and with same FOV. I experienced a decrease in overall frame rate from an average of 35 FPS to around 24 FPS with AGP disabled.

Bottom line, ATI, Mac, and AGP option is a go for me.

One big headache you will have when upgrading from Nvidia to ATI is the frggin' drivers. You have to run a drive cleaner program (I use Drive Cleaner Pro, its free) to remove all traces of the old drivers. Also, as was mentioned, SL is very CPU bound. What are your specs?

The power of a really nice video card lies outside the settings in the game. With a high dollar card you can turn AA and AF filtering way up and loose those jagged edges without sacrificing frame rates.

Keep in mind if you're using Mac OSX you're using FreeBSD (a Unix varient) wich is a native OpenGL environment so it comes with OpenGL already on your system. ATI doesn't have to supply anything in that department so all they have to do is have their drivers make calls to your native OpenGL.

Windows doesn't come with native OpenGL support, instead it comes with a Direct3D wrapper. So ATI has to include a version of OpenGL with their drivers and because their windows drivers are more geared twoards Direct3D their OpenGL drivers work differently. Nvidia's cards specialize in OpenGL there's no real reason to deviate too much from the standard in their case.

makes you wonder how SL runs on BSD with a macintosh but i cant run bsd on a pc with sl

now i know apple has their own bag of goodies but...

Mac OSX and your generic BSD build are packaged quite differently as there isn't much of a variety of Mac hardware like PC hardware (I think the only differences from mac to mac is their videocard).

I would never leave SL if it ran on Linux/*BSD. It's probably a good thing the game makes me reboot into Windows or I'd never get anything done.

Be sure to sign up for the Linux alpha test (yes its really happening).

Sorry for the delayed response, haven't checked the thread in a while...

The old card was a MSI GEForce 4400TI.

System is AMD Athlon-64 3200+
1GB RAM (Patriot high-speed RAM)

And I switched to omega drivers without any noticable change in FPS... Not sure if it's the system slowing things down or not, but it's not like my system is ancient either. :-/

Make sure you clean your system of the old drivers. Download a copy of Driver Cleaner Pro 1.3 (its freeware) and follow the instructions. You'll probly have to re-install your drivers again and cleaning out your system will probly add another 10 - 15 mins on your install, but boy does it make a difference.