New Videocard - won't do previous resolution...?

Hi Folks,

(Also posted to alt.comp.periph.videocards.ati but that groups been very
quiet of late.)

I play Path of Exile, have a QX9650 CPU with 6GB RAM (that I finished
building in 2009) running W7 64-bit and was using an HD5670 / 1GBDDR5.
However I was having to turn details down to keep a decent frame rate so
recently bought a lightly-used second-hand Sapphire HD7770.

I've been using CCC 13.12 for a while now with no problems. My monitor is an
oldie but a goodie - A Dell 4:3 20" UXGA (1600x1200) IPS. I don't like
short-screens for desktop use. However, when I play games I use 1600x900
resolution as games seem to be designed to work better in short-screen mode.
(They seem to set the size of the toon as a function of the vertical
resolution so to get a reasonable amount on-screen at any one time the wider
the better - within reason. This applies to the two games I play - Path of
Exile mainly but also a bit of Diablo III.) This was never a problem with
the HD5670, I'd just select 1600x900 / fullscreen in-game and away I went.
Nice crystal clear picture with small black bars above and below. (I like
playing full-screen mode and with the picture mapped pixel-to-pixel.)

However, with the same driver and the HD7770 I don't get an option of
1600x900 in Path of Exile (which is odd as wasn't that a fairly common
resolution for 19" short-screens?). I get the full 1600x1200 offered,
followed by 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1360x768,
1360x1024, 1366x758 ad nauseam right down to 800x600. I can select any of
the lower res modes and have them blurry - or have it windowed and have it
clear but small.

When it's windowed I can drag the window out to the edges of the screen (or
double-click the titlebar) - but the biggest it goes is 1600x1178 (and has
(custom) after it) - it reserves the other 22 pixels for the window's
titlebar. However when I try to drop the vertical resolution down to 900 the
horizontal reduces to 1594!!!! (And it's still windowed which I'd rather not
have...)

Can anyone help please? At the moment it seems I have a choice of the old
HD5670 full-screen 1600x900 but with low details and frame-rate or the
HD7770 running much faster but either windowed or running an ugly
resolution.

Thanks in advance.
--
</Shaun>

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1).

 

[snip]

I recently upgraded my GEforce 570 to a 780. Shit started to happen,
until I completely removed and then reinstalled with freshly downloaded
video drivers (not windows!). Now it's flawless.

might be worth a try for you as well. Somehow something did not get
properly updated after the hardware upgrade even though nominally the
driver recognized the new card.

-P.

 

My 'new' videocard purchase coincided with a new Windows (7 64-bit) install
as the old one got corrupted due to PSU issues causing RAM instability or
something.

Anyway it's a fresh install, with the latest drivers and it's still
misbehaving. I tried fitting the old 5670 and booted into a game and I *was*
offered 1600x900 fullscreen. I turned it off, switched cards back, started
the game/s again and 1600x900 fullscreen option is no longer there to pick.
<shakes head>

The guy who owned the HD 7770 before me swears that it ran flawlessly for
the <12 months that he had it (running through an HDMI cable to a 40"
1920x1080 TV as a monitor). I believe him, he seems like a decent guy and
I'm quite good at telling if someone's being truthful. (I picked it up and
he demoed it running before packing it up for me.) I've emailed him since
having the issues to see if he'd flashed the firmware or anything (he
didn't) and he says he only ever used it in the one resolution, for desktop
and gaming, and has now upgraded to something more powerful.

It will let me run my games at native resolution (1600x1200) but the games
that I play are rubbish at that. They set the character height as a function
of vertical resolution so when playing 4:3 you don't get to see very much
coming at you until it's already there.

Alas! I'm at a bit of a loss. I thought I might get used to playing windowed
but I'm not. Not only is the game area smaller but I keep accidently
clicking outside the game. Also once or twice I've accidently clicked on the
'window frame' as you would if you were dragging it or re-sizing and, when
you do the game (Path of Exile) freezes. If I don't release straight away
when there's stuff going on on-screen (if I'm trying to centre it again for
instance) the game client drops from the server within a second or so. :-/
--
</Shaun>

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1).

 

Yes - I sure recognize that problem with inadvertantly dragging or
losing focus by clicking outside a windowed game. Not that I have ever
heard of the one you're playing .... I am currently playing Funcom's The
Secret World which I managed to pick up for a few bucks on a special
(and it's free to play). I had to go to fullscreen to avoid trouble

-P.

 

That looks like it's *exactly* what I want, thanks heaps. When I'm in less
pain (so I can concentrate) I'll try it out and report back.

Cheers,
--
</Shaun>

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1).

 

It's been driving me crazi(er)! When the going gets tough it's not hard to
let the cursor stray outside the window a little. It's at it's worst when
I'm trying to get the hell out of Dodge so click as far away from the toon
as possible to make him run there - except I click on the desktop and he
stands still! Or worse I drag the window and it all freezes while he gets
killed.

Free is good. Path of Exile is a game that expands on the type of game-play
that Diablo 2 / Lord of Destruction made popular. While it's set in a
completely different world it feels natural to play for anyone who spent
ages paying D2 (like I did) and rewards planning and careful character
development.

What makes it even better is not only is it free to download and play but it
was developed by a group of NZ gamers. 'Grinding Gear Games'. I'd been
playing it in beta development and it went into general release toward the
end of last year. Two top 'paper magazines' awarded it 2013 game of the year
as did one of the big gaming websites.

It's funded through what they call 'ethical microtransactions' - using a
credit card or Paypal and starting at US$5. You can either just donate (and
get a forum title to signify that you're a supporter) or buy weapon and
armour effects in-game, extra storage space in your stash or even extra
character slots (if 24 isn't enough for you). What you *can't* do (which you
can with Diablo 3) is "pay to win". No amount of money spent on PoE will
make your character better.

It's the game that Diablo 3 should have been - if Blizzard weren't too busy
working out how to milk it for every dollar they could - and make it easy to
port to every console in existance (and so dumb it down).
--
</Shaun>

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1).

 

Ok, the back settled a bit and the meds kicked in a while back...

On reading that page more carefully it didn't seem to be quite what I was
after but it was very close. They were setting non-standard desktop
resolutions (and bemoaning the fact that AMD had started restricting what
resolutions they could set) while I wanted a different resolution in-game.

I have already been trying to edit the game ini files, on the advice of
folks on the game forum, with no luck. Also I'm no stranger to editing the
registry (albeit in XP) so I decided that, as it seemed close, I'd try what
those guys were doing.

I backed up the registry first - something that wasn't mentioned in the
forum. Then I proceeded to do as directed. However it made no
difference - either to the desktop resolution *or* the in-game settings
available. However, now I knew where in the registry the resolutions were
stored I decided to exlore a little...

In that walk-through the guy's changing the values in
"DALNonStandardModesBCD1" and he speculates that "DALNonStandardModesBCD2"
might apply to a second monitor, and "DALNonStandardModesBCD3" to a third. I
looked in "DALNonStandardModesBCD2" on my desktop and it was essentially the
same as "DALNonStandardModesBCD1". So I decided to add the resolution that I
wanted in-game to that value and see what happened. I re-booted, started the
game and... No luck.

However, after spending quite a bit of time browsing through
/REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0001
(on my machine) I was convinced that the answer must lie in there somewhere,
likely in one of the entries that was of type "REG_BINARY" but I didn't like
the idea of blindly changing stuff.

Then I remembered that, with the exact same driver but the HD 5670 card I
could get 1600x900 in-game and I had exactly that set-up in my second
machine! So I moved over to that side of the room and spent some time
browsing through the relevant registry entries on that machine and that was
the breakthrough. In the second set of stored resolutions in that machine,
"DALNonStandardModesBCD2" of the eight entries there seven of them were
1600x900, just with varying refresh rates.

So I edited *that* registry entry on my main machine to mirror the one in
the machine running the HD 5670, saved, re-booted, started the game and...
YES! 1600x900 (fullscreen) is now selectable in-game.

So, thanks heaps EMB for putting me on the right track. I still don't know
why swapping video cards (to a more powerful one) changes the registry
entries and restricts available in-game resolutions (and changes it back if
the cards are swapped again [?]) but at least now I know how to change it
back manually.

Without that forum post I wouldn't have known where to start so I owe you
one EMB, cheers.
--
</Shaun>

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1).

 

Most of those reg entries come from the inf files used at installation
time, so different drivers will result in different ones. Also they may
be under a different GUID for each card.

Custom resolutions are a prick on all recent windows. Back on XP with
crappy cards it was easy to get 15kHz timings out the VGA card to keep
my old CRT TV as an arcade monitor happy. Upgraded that machine to 7 (32
bit because it is old) and just gave up and used the svideo out on the
graphics card instead of taking the VGA to the scart input.

intel are the worst. Was no way I could get PC modes with audio over
HDMI to a TV from onboard intel, it was either PC mode as DVI so no
audio, or reducing it to a blurry component video mode with 4:2:2 chroma
and get sound to the TV.

AMD are worse with them defaulting to massive underscan till I install
their bloatware to turn that off, but when using any live USB distros
etc it has an inch of black all around the image.

 

Yeah, this must have been due to the GUID as, with the exact same driver
(and Catalyst Control Centre) I could get the resolution I wanted. However
put a newer card in and I couldn't. Put the older card in and yes, there was

To be fair Intel's graphics solutons are rather a Claytons option (despite
recent efforts to the contrary) - The graphics system you use if you're not
installing a graphics system.

While trying to get that sorted I read that, with their newer video cards,
AMD are restricting available resolutions and refesh rates (and frustrating
a relatively small but rather vocal group of users). Several posts I read
said that, if you're intending to use a resolution that isn't within a
certain small sub-set then you're best to go with nVidia for graphics cards.
--
</Shaun>

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1).