A Question about water reflections...

How do you turn them on? I can't get them on and I'm not seeing that option anywhere!

~josh

Graphics card might have something to do with it.

Yep, definitely graphics card - if your card is not capable of it, apparently, the program will detect this and not offer the option. I've heard this happening to number of people, all who had similar specs with their cards.

I've got a 64 mb NVidia GeForce4 MX420 card. The main RCT website says that that should be enough to run it properly. Think it still might be this or could it be something else?

~josh

Nope you just proved its your card. Reflections on the water requires pixel shaders which isn't suported by Directx7 which is what your card is. If you had a directx 8 or 9 card you could see the reflections.

WOW. Can't one person just say where to actually find it instead of automatically saying it won't work?

Go to your graphics options, it will be at the very bottom.

^^^

The reason it isn't set by defualt on his is because his hardware cant do it. He can check it all he wants but he still won't get the reflections.

Whether his hardware can or can't do it isn't an issue. Functions that can't be performed in hardware are performed in software. The requirements say he can run the game, so he can run the game, even if it doesn't perform well.

That was my thinking Jeff. I guess I should upgrade to a better graphics card. The reflections aren't that big of a deal, but once I get tons of rides and peeps into a park in the real game, I could have a problem with lag. Anyone have any recommendations? What does this card sound like? Any good?

"Asylum GeForce FX 5200 256 MB PCI Graphics Card"

~josh

DOH! Editted for spelling...

*** Edited 10/2/2004 10:22:00 PM UTC by Rampage***

I'd spend the extra 10-20 bucks to go for this card. http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-164-023&depa=1

Will walk all over that card and its not much more expensive. Plus, rct3 is catered to ATI hardware so it should run better than its Nvidia counter parts.

And while I may be wrong Jeff, I know of no games/engines that will run shader (vertex or pixel) functions by software. Whether in DX or Opengl. It would be way overly taxing for the cpu.

Actually I did a little test of the ATI vs. NVidia theory with the demo. My 256 mb Nvidia was getting a 35-45 frame rate, while my grandparents with there 256 mb ATI was getting 25-30

the size of the gfx cards ram doesn't necessary affect it. you can can 128meg cards that are 10 times better than 256meg cards.

I recommend a radeon 9800pro or a 5900xt for a budget card to buy.

I think I'm gonna go with the Radeon 9200 card. I'll get 128 mb and it's only $95.00. Dell offered the 9800 pro for ONLY $400 so I'll be going a little cheaper than that.

~josh

Just go to Newegg. Or Mwave.com. Both places have lower prices then you would find retail or on the bigger sites like Dell. I've bought from both of them, and both are excellent.

Also, I am not sure I would go with a 9200. Looking at the Atari forums, it seems like a lot of people with that card have had problems running RCT3.

Computer parts seem more expensive in the US.

I'm from England and a 9800pro is about £80-£100 which I don't think is unreasonable for somethings that's going to dramitcally increase gaming pleasure!

Go with the better card, i would strongly recommend at least a radeon 9600, or at least an nvidia 5700.

the radeon 9600XT is around 20 times more powerful then the 9200 at high settings, the 9800 is even sometimes 4 times as powerful as the 9600xt... (i have a radeon 9800 pro 128mb... i would highly recommend it). Good thing about the 9800 is that it's ddr as well

the 5200 or 9200 are ok cards... but these are ultimate budget cards which won't run the game very well, they are cheap for a reason.

just look around for a cheap 9800... it'll make ur gfx look so much better.

But also, what are your system specs?

Okay. I ordered the ATI 9600XT a few minutes ago. Shoudl be here next week! Thanks for the help guys!

~josh

I got a 5500 overclocked and that runs fine. For GEFORCE i mean. It was 200 dollars so im guessing that it's mid-level performance. It was the top of the line like 3 months ago though lol. I got it on sale.

---

Ross McColl said:
Computer parts seem more expensive in the US.

I'm from England and a 9800pro is about £80-£100...

---

You can get a 9800pro in the US for $159 which is roughly £88

If you got a 5500 three months ago and paid $200 for it, you got screwed. They sell for under a hundred now. Stephanie got a 5700 six months ago for a little over $150.

When you're evaluating video cards, the memory doesn't really mean anything. The key thing is the chip that's on the board, and what it's capabilities are. Plenty of info on AnandTech and other sites. It's also important to consider how CPU-bound the card is. They all benefit from a faster CPU, but the newer ones apparently allow for a lot of the math to be off-loaded.

Both ATI and Nvidia have cards with some letter designation that indicates it's a somewhat stripped version of another card. Nvidia "MX" cards are this way. I'm not sure what ATI calls them.