ATI Video Card -- Aquarium SMEARING?
 

I cannot get the Marine Aquarium to work right on my computer.

The fish smear the background and leave trails that won't go away. They don't leave a trail on the coral, only on the background. My background lights don't work but the foreground ones do. The background stays black until the fish leave a smeary mess all over it. I attached a pic showing the problem.

I get the same problem with the Goldfish Aquarium but not the Shark one. The Shark screne saver from Lifeglobe is the only one that works right. I have updated everything-bios, direct x, all drivers and I'm still at a loss.

I have a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000Pro Rev 2 motherboard with XP and an ATI Radeon 9600XT card running the 4.7catalyst driver. I tried the 4.9 beta but it made no difference. I upgraded to directx 9.0c and it did not make a difference either. There's gotta be some smart computer guru out there that knows how to fix this.

Tami and I have gone back and forth by e-mail a half-dozen times and she has tried what I consider EVERYTHING...

1. Running in a Window -- still smears
2. Wireframe -- still smears
3. Adjust background color -- ignored, background is just smears
4. Turn off Texture Compression (Ctrl-T) -- nada
5. Change resolution to 800x600x16 -- nada
6. Ran DXDIAG -- all tests passed
7. Registry Cleaner -- no fix
8. Download and try Marine Aquarium 2 MD -- no fix
9. Download and try ATI Catalyst 4.9 beta drivers -- no fix

The only other thing I can think of is to turn off anti-aliasing.

I e-mailed SereneScreen but did not get a response.

The background is not being refreshed. It's got to be bad drivers or a bad card.

The Shark screen saver from Lifeglobe works perfectly. I can change the background lighting with the left and right arrows but in the Goldfish and Marine Auariums, I cannot change the background lighting. It just stays black until smeared. How is the Shark screen saver different?

Did you try uninstall the current video cards drivers first then reinstall the new one. I had problems with installing new drivers and not completely removing old drivers first.

I agree with Jim that it has got to be a Driver problem.

Drivers
 

Yes, I did, but I'll try again.

Also run DXDiag and send me the results. edgar@prolific.com

Sharks screensaver draws on the background all the time. That is why it doesn't show the problem. If you turn off the water surface by using key 'C', you will see the same problem.

You're right, I used the C key on the shark one and it smeared too. I just sent you my DXDiag to your e-mail. I uninstalled the catalyst drivers with the catuninstaller and reinstalled the 4.7 with no change. The catuninstaller should completely remove all the ATI drivers right?

The big problem on fixing this is that I don't have the video card that you have.

I am curious if you are the only one having this problem or there are other people out there having the same problem.

Have you ever had any of the screensavers run correctly before? If yes, what was the change that you made before it failed to work correctly?

Also try running it on Window mode by pressing the 'F' key and tell us if it is still fails.

I just recently built this computer in February and these Aquarium screensavers never worked on this computer. I do alot of DVD video editing of home movies and record my favorite TV shows with a TV turner card in this computer and burn them onto DVD and I've never had a problem otherwise with this graphics card. This is the first time though that I've used an ATI card. I have 2 other computers that I built for my kids, and I put NVIDIA cards in those and they play the Aquarium screensavers just fine. I'm not too impressed with ATI so far and I think next time I'll go back to NVIDIA cards. I never had problems with NVIDIA. I tried the F key and it was exactly the same problem, just a smaller version.
One strange thing I ran across was as I was checking all my screensavers in XP, I found that the 3D Pipes screensaver did not work until I went in the 3D Pipes Settings and "Disabled hardware 3D rendering." All the others worked fine even the Plus! screensavers exept of course the Aquarium Plus! did not work.

Try turning off your PVR/video recorder software.

I closed all running applications in the background and tried it again, but no luck.

This is definitely not my department... but have you tried replacing it with the NVIDIA card?

I have exactly the same motherboard but a NVIDIA graphics card. The screensavers run without any problems at all. I hope that helps you narrow down the possible culprits.

Yeah, that does help narrow it down. I've thought of taking one of my lower end NVIDIA cards that I have in the kid's computer and trying it in my computer to see what happens. I don't have a high end NVIDIA but I would need one with all the video editing I do. Unfortuneatly I paid $200 for this ATI 9600XT which I thought would have better support, but their knowlege base is weak and the contact support keeps taking you in circles. It's hard to contact them and then you get a stupid automated response that's worthless. What NVIDIA card do you have?

Here is a good thread on the subject. It might help.

I have a 9600XT card (and WinXP) at home. I think I'm using the 4.3 catalyst drivers, but I could try and upgrade to see if I can replicate the problem. The problem is that it's deadline week here at work and I'll be getting home from work *late* every day of this week (yes, Saturday and Sunday as well). I'll try and find room for it.

/Tiny Trial

P.S.
One way could be if you tried the 4.3 drivers and see if the trouble persists.

With the motherboard I am using a G4MX440 with AGP8X card (a fairly modest card by today's standards). Looking at the picture of your screen, the coloured streaks are quite pretty, and its interesting to see how the fish have moved around the "tank", but I would turn off the bubble streak to get the full effect.

Ha, ha - I guess that's the best way to look at it. It's not a problem, it's a FEATURE! Enjoy it.

It really does have to be the drivers. I know there are a number of people using Radeon 9600 cards, and surely there are some using the same motherboard. It's possible that the old drivers are not being completely replaced when you install new ones, or the download itself was bad. This type of problem is extremely rare, a small handful out of many millions of computers running the Aquarium. In every case, visual anomolies have turned out to be drivers.