Missing HUD Graphics

[gosavich]

Hi everyone.

I hope that someone in the community can confirm and/or point me to a fix for the following issue. I just installed a new ATI Video card in my PC, and when I run Orbiter with FSAA turned on the HUD graphics dissapear leaving only the MFDs and the autopilot buttons drawn at the bottom of the screen. This phenomenon only occurs when in normal cockpit mode and not the 3d cockpit mode. Likewise, the simulation information block in the upper right hand corner of the screen also dissapears. When I switch to any of the external views, on the other hand, the simulation information block re-appears.

Does anyone have any ideas on what might be going on? My thought is that the FSAA algorithm utilized by ATI might be interpreting the HUD graphics data incorrectly as the edge of an object to perform anti-aliasing on and the lines are being averaged out (for lack of a better term) before being finally drawn on the screen. ATI Catalyst Control Center allows for several different FSAA modes such as box, small tent, large tent, and edge detect. I have experimented with each of these settings along with the overall number of AA passes (i.e. 2x,4x,6x etc.) but all of them show the same behavior with respect to the HUD graphics in Orbiter.

Is there some configuration setting in Orbiter that would work-around this graphical issue?

My previous video card had an Nvidia GPU on it and it did not show this same quirk when running with any of the user defined FSAA modes.

I would appreciate any feedback that anyone has on my problem.

Thanks for your time.

 

[gosavich]

Can anyone confirm this same issue with ATI/AMD GPU based cards running with any level of FSAA?

Anyone... Bueller?

 

[dbeachy1]

I have seen FSAA cause the same problem on my 7800 GTX nVidia card on my previous system (the HUD disappeared). However, I have not tested it with FSAA on my new system. My guess is it's a video driver bug with DX7 apps. Can anyone else confirm?

 

[tomek]

Are you using 16-bit color or 32-bit color?

 

[dbeachy1]

Back on my old XP system that used the 7800 GTX card where the AA problem occurred, it was using 32-bit color. But that was about two years ago...

 

[gosavich]

Here are my Orbiter video settings:

3D Device is listed as Direct3D T&L HAL (ATI Radeo HD 4800 Series)
Always enumerate devices is enabled.
Full screen is selected.
The screen resolution is 1680 x 1050
The color depth is 32 bit.
Disable vertical sync is unchecked

I can verify that changing the color depth to 16-bit does not have any affect on the issue. I have tried running in windowed mode at a lower resolution, but likewise the HUD graphics are only present when FSAA is fully disabled.

I seem to recall that my old video card, a GeForce 7950 GT, did not have this problem when FSAA was enabled. Then again, there were several differences in my computer's operating environment when I last ran Orbiter with this card. Most notably, the OS. I am now running Vista x64 whereas before I was running with XP.

The DirectX version was obviously different, but I wouldn't think that the codebase and routines being accessed by Orbiter would change whether run under DX10 or DX9 since Orbiter is compiled for DX7. I suppose I could try running with one of the OVP betas to see if this has any affect, but it seems like a lot of hoops to jump through just to test this theory.

I appreciate the discussion. If anyone else has any ideas of things I can try to possibly work around this issue, then I am certainly all ears.

-Thanks