Friday, February 11, 2011

Eve Online: weird graphics stuff

After the recent Eve Online: Incursion patches, I have had weird graphics effects on this laptop, which sports a ATI Mobility Radeon HD2300 GPU. It's not an impressive gpu, not by a longshot, but it's still supported for the current Eve client.

The first nuisance is this weird darkening issue with ATI cards on Windows 7. The solution is to upgrade to the latest Catalyst stuff, which I can't because it's not available for my hardware. Just my luck :)

The other issue concerns screenshots. If you press the printscreen button while in Eve, a snapshot is saved - by default as a .bmp in the C:\Users\username\Documents\EVE\capture\Screenshots directory. After the latest patch, there's some truly strange coloring in my screenshots:
Eve Online: weird graphics gli...

The Windows photo viewer does not show these artefacts at all, but Picasa does. Uploading to Koinup didn't work either, this resulted in a format error: "the file you provided seems to be invalid". If I copy the picture to .jpg, the strange coloring is preserved:
Eve Online: weird graphics gli...

Luckily, I am still able to get good copies of these snapshots, by opening them in Picasa and saving a copy, this time as a bitmap again:
Eve Online: a home in space

Perhaps this is solved too, by installing that Catalyst 10.12 package, but first I need to find a way to get that to install on my laptop!

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