[Workaround] Stuck green all over the planet on AMD cards

It might be wise to report this on the steam store page @jables ? Give the people a warning so that they can decide to take the risk or not? For now people are left out in the dark which isn't good.

Yes, but it isn't fair. They should help us.
It's weird because all the game I'm currently playing don't have any problem with my video card...

Exact same problem here ...

My Radeon HD 5970 just died, so I went for a R9 380x.

The starting planets just keep their green glow even after landing the commander.
Weird thing is that notification cameras don't show the glow.

All my drivers were fully uninstalled and reinstalled, and are up to date.

Screenshots here :

This is an AMD issue. Looks like it's their fault.

I guess that Uber could do something to repair it. Every game I ever played work well, it's only PA:T who doesn't work correctly.
Yes, it's the fault of AMD for sure, but I think that Uber could help to fix it...

Most other games don't use OpenGL though. If the AMD drivers have bugs in them related to the use of OpenGL, then there is little Uber can do besides tell the vendor that their OpenGL implementation is faulty.

We are assuming it's a 'bug' though. I mean the thing is that this *only* effects a specific generation of AMD card (GCN vs 1.2). The older cards on the *same drivers* don't exhibit the problem. That suggests that the issue is somewhat more subtle than just *AMD changed their OpenGL*. If that were the case *all* AMD cards on the new drivers would suffer.

The main problem I have with this is that this problem looks set to be an issue with *all future* AMD cards. That equates to a lot of gamers moving forward, probably including myself once I chose to upgrade. Uber do have some responsibility to their customers, specifically they must ensure the game *works as intended for the graphics cards they state are compatible*. They haven't said anywhere that I am aware PA *isn't* compatible with GCN vs 1.2 cards. Now as they have written the engine at least *some* of the responsibility should lie with them to make sure it works. We are all assuming that the cause of this issue is AMD's fault, it could very well be how Uber have written the code (during development they noted how some fundamentally broken graphics code magically worked on nVidia gpu's thanks to some weird nVidia shenanigans in the driver correcting the problem for them- AMD on the other hand had followed the OpenGL specification with their driver and thus the code failed for them. AMD are the more likely of the two to actually work to spec).

I mean I can understand they can't spend vast amounts of time on things like this, however as far as I can tell the issue is that the selection circle highlight gets stuck. I mean can't we just get a workaround so we don't get the green highlight for selection circles (just show the edge)? That would be enough. Maybe one of the devs could take the time to tell someone here with some modding skill what shader / option / hook / hoosamaflit needs to be disabled / replaced / fiddled with to disable that one feature. A community workaround would be sufficient imo. As things stand though no one has found a work around- older drivers on these newer cards aren't really an option, from what I've read no one with a GCN vs 1.2 card has got the game to work correctly.

What I'd be interested to know, any of you who have one of these cards and also runs Linux, does this problem exist there?

UP

@bgolus @jables

How far did you get with this?

Any response from AMD?

Is there anything we can modify to work around the issue?

From playing around a little range_ring_resolve.fs seems to be responsible for that spawn ring, as well as for all other range rings, together with a bunch of other range_ring shaders.
Setting the output alpha to 0.0 in it makes all range rings go away, that might also be true for the buggy green. Now since I don't have any hardware here to reproduce the issue I can't play around more, but somebody with a piece of hardware to reproduce the issue ought to be able to do something.

EDIT:
by setting
float distance = 10.0; //texture(ldf_result, screenCoord).x;
in line 37 of range_ring_resolve.fs I can produce this kind of output on my Radeon HD 7850:


It doesn't even go away after I land my commander. Maybe the value from that texture read (or maybe that texture is written to in a buggy way instead, dunno where it is written to) is somehow broken on newer AMD cards.

might have to make a mod that erases the data in that shader

As I said, there would be bad casualties, like all range rings. I would rather see a solution that doesn't just cut that stuff away completely.

oh the unit firing range rings? Well yeah that would be bad

The shader is in \media\shaders

Well I guess all I can say is, if it can be fixed by us probably around that shader. But since I can't reproduce it here I dunno what to do.

Hey guys. I'm think I'll try to push AMD to fix that, but as I don't have GCN hardware I'll need some volunteer who agree to spend time on that: doing testing, running APITrace, etc. If somebody agree then I'll try to get in touch with AMD engineers and pass issue forward.

Also would be really handy if you able to run Linux at least once for testing.

It's will be also preferable if you can sent me your Skype login in PM.

PS: Likes are cool, but I still need a person with affected hardware to test it.

Hello everyone,

the bad thing about this bug is that at night , i cant see the terrain properly so any ledges are unseen by me wich makes it hard to control my army :|
(not the best planet to show this but i hope you get what i mean)

@SXX i would volunteer but i cant run on linux :|

and it seems that i can intensify the glow by issuing an area command , so it seems like the green glow "stacks" over one another. But i can only "stack" the glow 2 times ; so all area commands after the "first" dont cause a further intensified glow:--->

by comparing the screenshots provided you will see what i mean with "intensified"

btw i have a R9 285 with ( u guessed it ) the latest AMD drivers.

thanks for your attention !

Edit: Im running PA:T under windows 10 btw

I don't know if this will help anyone but there is a repo of all AMD driver DLLs from all Catalyst/Crimson versions including the OpenGL ones. There's a thread on Guru3D called 'AMD Driver DLLs Repository and Performance Survey' - I can't link to it as I can't post non-whitelisted links.

Can you post a doctored link? I.e.
somthing . com / urly bits

http : / / forums.guru3d . com / showthread . php?t=399547