Duct taping the game to work with ati cards

[Shadow]

I finally got some sort of a fix figured out for making the game work on hardware/direct with my ati card. The performance is still crappy with me getting 30fps at times in stewart compound when I should be getting ~50fps, but the stuttering/frame skipping is gone so it's playable.

1st step: Update your drivers to Ati "performance driver" 11.11b or 11.11c as these drivers seems to fix the stuttering issue.

11.11b: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... mance.aspx

11.11c: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... mance.aspx

So, now the frame skip is gone and we can use hardware/direct, Awesome right? There's still the issue of running out of virtual memory when trying to use 1024x1024 texture resolution and this next step will fix that.

2nd step: We're going to apply the large address aware patch to enable the game to use more than 2Gb of RAM.
1st, backup your mx.exe just in case something goes wrong. Even though it's pretty simple thing, it doesn't hurt to be prepared.

Download CFF explorer, which can be found here: http://www.ntcore.com/files/CFF_Explorer.zip
It's a stand-alone version, so just extract it to a place of your choosing and it'll work, no other installing for it is needed.

After extracting it, run the CFF explorer.exe, then click the folder icon or go to file->open and browse to your mxsim installation folder for mx.exe, select it and click open.

In the left column, click the "file header" tab, then in the right column/window click the blue "click here" bar, it's in the lower right corner.
A window will pop up with different settings that can be ticked on and off. We're interested in the "App can handle >2Gb address space" one, so tick that on, then click ok. DO NOT CHANGE ANY OTHER SETTING!

Save by clicking the disk icon or from file->save. It will ask if you want to overwrite the original file, click yes, and you're done.

Now mxsim should work adequately on ATI cards with hardware/direct and you can use 1024x1024 texture resolution without running into the out of virtual memory error.

[yzmxer608]

Nice man! I'll have to try it, especially for screenshots the out of virtual memory error is annoying (lag doesn't matter if you're just taking shots).

Are the drivers just hotfix type? Or is AMD releasing performance drivers separate from the regular drivers now? I'm still using 11.9 since they haven't had any performance upgrades yet.

[Prada]

Amazing. I will have to try this. I have an ATI card as well and I thought it was just me getting the virtual memory errors. I didn't wanna sound like a noob asking such a dumb question so I just left it alone But this is great, I'll try it. Thanks dude!

[socalmx]

NVIDIA

[jlv]

Has anyone watched the memory usage in the process manager? I'm curious as to whether it's leaking memory or just using a lot of memory per texture.

[jbrandmx85]

For me, this has definantly seemed to help run the game a lot better. My laptop sux for playing but its all i got. Usually i cant play any tracks without having all my graphics settings way down. But after this i actually have them turned up and it seems to run just fine.

[yzmxer608]

Has anyone watched the memory usage in the process manager? I'm curious as to whether it's leaking memory or just using a lot of memory per texture.

Over time during a race/the game being open for a while you mean?

[jlv]

Yeah. The old ATI drivers would leak every time you updated a texture, so as you rode around it would use up your memory. It sounds like this bug is different.

[Ballsfalsky]

have never a memory leak problem on my laptop. It has an HD4200, and definitely cannot run the game at moderate graphics. Im waiting for my new PC to get here (should only be about 2 more hrs ). I got an XFX 6870. hopefully I don't have any memory leak problems.

[yzmxer608]

Memory usage didn't increase at all over about 5 minutes of riding.

[jlv]

One more question - does the actual memory used scale along with what the game reports for texture memory used? Is it always twice/three/four times more than what the game thinks it's using?

[yzmxer608]

Are you talking system memory or gpu dedicated memory?

Just did a test, in game it said 159MB texture memory used, mxs is using 123,900K memory, and gpuz says 491MB dedicated memory usage (obviously a lot of it isn't mxs).

[jlv]

I mean system memory. When you increase the texture resolution, how much do they go up by?

[Prada]

Problem...I did what was said to do up top and now the game closes every time I try to run a race :/ I don't know what I did wrong. I'm on the Mobility Radeon HD5000 series, which should work with this. If anyone knows what to do or has any idea, please help me!

[haydugjr]

Problem...I did what was said to do up top and now the game closes every time I try to run a race :/ I don't know what I did wrong. I'm on the Mobility Radeon HD5000 series, which should work with this. If anyone knows what to do or has any idea, please help me!

Mobility Radeon 5000 =/= Radeon 5000

Hardware

AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

When you download drivers they're separate on the ATI website, not to mention they have to be smaller and use less power for laptops so I think it's safe to assume the drivers are not interchangable. I'd look at finding some Mobility Radeon drivers