Intel Integrated Graphics: We've seen a number of serious crashes on several laptops with Intel integrated graphics. I suspect there's a driver-specific memory leak affecting many, if not all, Intel HD Graphics machines. However, my most recent testing suggests that the bug may be limited to 64 bit intel chips running the 32-bit sis binary. If you have a 64-bit integrated Intel display adapter, I highly recommend running the game using the sis64.exe binary, as explained here. (Most consumer laptops sold in the last 3 years have integrated 64 bit intel graphics adapters, so this is a widespread issue.)

AMD Cards: We've seen a lot of glitches on AMD cards. At present, it looks like we've managed to fix all the serious outstanding AMD issues. But -- certain cards, particularly the 5000 and 6000 Radeon series, have some very interesting quirks, and I wouldn't be surprised to see new versions of old bugs cropping up in the weeks and months ahead.

NVIDIA Cards: NVIDIA hardware generally runs the game well -- and off all the major manufacturers, their cards typically age best -- though very old (cira 2005) NVIDIA cards will run into performance issues when rendering some of the in-game assets. We've had one report of crashes on a machine configured with SLI-mode dual NVIDIA Geforce's -- if you have a similar configuration, please test the game using SLI mode, report any crashes, and then (assuming you discover a similar glitch), disable SLI when testing SiS.

If you encounter any new graphics glitches while testing on particular hardware, or manifestations of old issues thought to have been fixed, please post about it here.

Known Serious bugs:

• Crash during Gameplay: The game crashes between turns, possibly after emitting error like the following:
  

  Code: Select all

  ERROR BEFORE: glPushAttrib(a), GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY
  
  These errors were much more common in earlier builds, affecting most intel laptops. As of r13327, the issue is rarer, but, it is still affecting a handful of testers using Intel HD graphics. Our latest suggestion for testers who encounter this bug it to try using the 64-bit SiS build, as discussed in this thread. If you run into this bug, please let us know.
  Known Affected hardware: Intel HD Graphics 3000, Intel HD Graphics 4000, Intel HD Graphics 4400
  
  
• Crash on Launch: The game crashes when trying to launch, giving you the option of creating a "crash.dmp" file. If you see a bug of this sort on your machine, please let me know. It's one I'm actively trying to track down -- but manifestations appear to be rare. It *might* have been fixed by some changes that went in around r13027.
  Known Affected hardware: Intel HD Graphics 4000

Know Glitches \ Quirks:

• Water Shader glitches: The animated caustics in the Phidi ships / leader display occasionally 'skips' or 'flickers'.
  Known Affected hardware: ATI Radeon HD 4xxx-5xxx series, Intel HD Graphics
  
  
• Star Display glitches: The animated system suns appear as distorted "disco ball" renderings. (The thread contains some examples of what this looks like.) This was a widespread issue at the start of the beta, though it appears to have been fixed in all but a small minority of the cases. If you encounter this issue, please make sure your video drivers are up to date, then, if it persists, post a message on the forums, letting us know that you've discovered another AMD card affected by the issue.
  Known Affected hardware (past): AMD A10-6800K APU graphics, ATI Radeon HD 5700, AMD Radeon 6990 HD
  Known Affected hardware (current): 1 (somewhat eccentric?) AMD A10-6800K APU graphics chip

Bugs I'm *pretty confident* are fixed in the current stable build:

• Crashes during gameplay: The game crashes between turns. I suspect this is related to a texture allocation in the logic for generating planet city light / cloud layers. On some cards, a similar glitch appears to occur when ships are captured during tactical combat (and thus need to load new skin textures).
  Known Affected hardware: AMD Radeon HD 7480D.
  Similar bugs reported on:AMD Radeon HD 6900M, AMD Radeon R7 200.
  
  
• White Screen of Death: Game boots up to a white screen with a blue cursor.
  Known Affected hardware: AMD Radeon HD 6700. AMD A6-3400M APU integrated graphics.
  
  
• Crashes on startup: The game crashes on launch.
  Known Affected hardware: AMD Radeon HD7850.

mharmless wrote:Opening ship design via escape menu, looking at planet defenses, going to a new design, then canceling, caused a crash. Uploaded. Load save, esc menu, ship design, new design, escape. Crash. Load save, esc, ship design, new design, close with X, crash. Save attached as "Ship Design Crash.rar"

I fear this is one more instance of the AMD texture bugs. I can't replicate it on my machine -- and it would make sense that loading and then dismissing large textures (like those needed for the high-res ship art in the designer) could trigger a crash for about the same reasons that loading new planet surface textures appears to be triggering a crash between turns.

Just to clarify -- did you generate this crash on that AMD card, or one of the intel/nvidia chips you have access to?

This was generated on the 04 - Media PC. A10-6800K APU

sven wrote:Star Display glitches: The animated system suns appear as distorted "disco ball" renderings.
Known Affected hardware: AMD A10-6800K APU graphics.
(If anyone has a screenshot of this, please post it here.)

The red and blue stars seem fine. Orange and Yellow are the ones with issues. I'm assuming all the races except humans are Orange or Yellow? They all look wrong to me, only Human star looks correct.

mharmless wrote:

sven wrote:Star Display glitches: They all look wrong to me, only Human star looks correct.

Definitely a shader bug. What's surprising here is that the human star, for some reason, doesn't have it. Shader glitches can be weird.

mharmless wrote:an enemy fighter attack, during which their ships flash into black squares as they fire

likely shader bug. good one to remember to look at when i get those AMD cards.

6990 HD start screen
I hope you can see it I had to resize image. Btw what is the max size this board can handle if you want us to post images of the game.
this is also shown when I go to science, build or planet screen. It shows a quarter of a globe twiching erraticly.

My laptop runs the game just fine, but my ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series in my gaming desktop is displaying the following problems:

- white spaces instead of text on the game menu screen
- disco lights instead of planets orbiting the stars on the galaxy map

02 Primary PC now produces this error on launch instead of the old one:

mharmless wrote:02 Primary PC now produces this error on launch instead of the old one:

That's something like progress I've been fiddling around with the game's exception handling systems a little -- particularly as they relate to graphics bugs. The game is running a little slower atm, but, the reporting of errors should be more accurate. That said, I'm still waiting for the AMD hardware to arrive, and I won't take a serious shot at fixing these bugs until it does.

mharmless wrote:Primary PC now produces this error on launch instead of the old one:

Ok, first of the AMD hardware has arrived. I now have a 7-series to test on. This bug proved almost painfully simple to fix. Should be patched on stable. Somewhat eerily -- after fixing this, I noticed no glitches of any sort when testing with the card. Please let me know if you encounter any crashes on your primary gaming PC.

sven wrote:Ok, first of the AMD hardware has arrived. I now have a 7-series to test on. This bug proved almost painfully simple to fix. Should be patched on stable. Somewhat eerily -- after fixing this, I noticed no glitches of any sort when testing with the card. Please let me know if you encounter any crashes on your primary gaming PC.

I have valentines plans so won't get to hammer on the game much this weekend, but got home on lunch to test things.

02 Primary PC appears to work correctly now. Updated it, launched into the game, appears to find 1600x1200 resolution acceptable and the stars (even yellow and orange) look correct to me. I did go ahead and find a new bug during my few minutes on this PC, reported elsewhere.

01 HP Laptop also appears to work now.

03 Tablet PC continues to fail, but it isn't AMD so you probably expected that.

My own development workstation setup is now rather odd. My primary monitor is plugged into a Geforce GTX 460, but my tertiary monitor is running off an AMD Radeon HD 7000 series. It's a complex setup -- and one that I don't expect to see many people playing the game with. That said, I am now seeing some occasional glitches in my planet renderings. If anyone using a less-bizarre monitor / video card setup sees a planet rendering glitch like the following, please let me know:
(Otherwise, I may assume this is just an example of NVidia and AMD failing to play nice with each other.)

Big Imp wrote:6990 HD start screen
I hope you can see it I had to resize image. Btw what is the max size this board can handle if you want us to post images of the game.
this is also shown when I go to science, build or planet screen. It shows a quarter of a globe twiching erraticly.

Are people still seeing the "disco lights" bug in the current builds? I was able to replicate something similar on my test hardware -- but, that has theoretically been fixed since Saturday morning. On the other hand, I have yet to see this *exact* glitch, so I can't be certain it's fixed.

Aye I stil am seeing the discolight twitching in the left corner.. I played yesterday, I haven't checked today but I will.