Video Card Issues

To obtain the latest drivers for your hardware download the drivers from your card manufacturer's web site. See below for links to the driver sections of various hardware vendor's webpages.

Additionally, you may want to install and run a third-party driver installation program such as GLSetup which contains many OpenGL drivers for a variety of video cards. GLSetup version 1.6 is provided for your convinience on the Homeworld CD to save you download time should your current OpenGL drivers not work with Homeworld. Recognize that GLSetup is not supported by Sierra's technical support, however.

All compatibility comments below assume that you are trying to run Homeworld with the Default OpenGL renderer as a first attempt. Depending on your chipset, however, it may be necessary to run using 3dfx OpenGL, Direct3D, or software. Homeworld places labels beside available renderers in the Video Options screen that indicate the graphics API a particular driver uses: GL for OpenGL, D3D for Direct3D, and SW for software.

If your chipset is not listed below you should consult the documentation that came with your hardware to determine how to get updated drivers.

Some 3D hardware does not provide an OpenGL implementation and running Homeworld with Default OpenGL selected as your renderer will then not be accelerated by your hardware at all. If Homeworld pops up a dialog box informing you that the selected renderer is unaccelerated, try Direct3D next, then software mode if all else fails (the Homeworld software renderer is considerably faster than OpenGL without hardware support). If you must use the software renderer, try running Homeworld with the /rasterSkip commandline switch for a moderate speed increase; some people find this too visually distracting, so try for yourself and see.

Homeworld also supports the /safeGL commandline option. You should run with this if any of the following problems occur when using OpenGL as your renderer: oddly coloured backgrounds, no stars in the backgrounds, no background bitmap in the loading screens, or ship meshes that are missing polygons or are oddly coloured.

Recent versions of Windows 98 provide drivers for certain 3D chipsets, but they generally do not contain an OpenGL ICD. GLSetup drivers or drivers from your vendor's website are preferred.

If you experience problems when testing a new display mode (new resolution or bitdepth), be sure to see if Homeworld will run at 640x480 16bit. Some cards incorrectly report resolutions they cannot properly support, and Homeworld may fail to recognize the problem. If you select a new display mode and Homeworld appears unresponsive (ie. black screen or garbled text) either wait a few seconds or hit the Spacebar to have Homeworld restore the previous mode. If all else fails, try pressing CTRL-SHIFT-F12 to re-enable the default renderer (software, 640x480 16bit).

Note also that not all 3D hardware supports the same set of features as another, and some scenes and effects will appear differently on different system configurations. This is to be expected.

Users with an AMD K6 or greater processor with 3DNow! instructions or an Intel LX chipset on their motherboard may experience crashes or system lockups when using OpenGL with NVidia Riva TNT2, 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee or Voodoo 3, and S3 Savage3D boards. AMD users are encouraged to use Direct3D for hardware acceleration if this problem occurs.

Below are a list of known issues and driver recommendations that have been tested successfully with Homeworld.

3dfx

Intel

nVidia

3DLabs

ATI

Matrox

Rendition

S3

Diamond