SiS M650 Club

[santa]

Hi,

I've had my copy of Civ IV for just three days but already spent more time then all my previous games together trying to get it going... My laptop exceeds min requirements in term of speed and RAM. One area of concern is video card: I've got SiS M650 (http://www.sis.com/products/sism650.htm)

After some research on this forum I found a few posts similar to mine. All of the posters had the same card. Now, I am not a hardware wiz by any means. I searched SIS site, product info (attached) and could not find anything about PIXEL SHADING not about PnL. Chances are it is mentioned somewhere but in other terms. At this point I'm lost and frustrated. Could someone who knows anything about video cards or can extract useful information from the hardware manuals please tell me and other SiS M650 sufferers not to waste our time with this game.

Thanks.

 

[Akhenaton]

Could someone who knows anything about video cards or can extract useful information from the hardware manuals please tell me and other SiS M650 sufferers not to waste our time with this game.

What is the question? You don't have a video card, you have an IGP. A model (with the Real256 core), which doesn't support DirectX 9 and so doesn't meet the Minimum System Requirements for CivIV.

 

[santa]

I ran a dxdiag test and all test were passwed without a glitch. Report is attached. It's gotta be something else.

Thanks.

 

[Akhenaton]

Is there a way to upgrade it, perhaps a new driver?

I don't think so, or else SiS would certainly advertise that. It seems their DX9 support starts with the 661/760 series. Even with these chips only part of the functionality is supported by the IGP HW, some vertex and shader processing is done in the CPU.

One could ofcourse speculate that it might theoretically be possible to write software support even for the older HW, but it would be much more complicated and so slow that it wouldn't run anything except in some ridiculous VGA resolution, so that it would be practically infeasible.

 

[santa]

Sorry I typed over my old message, please see above.

 

[Akhenaton]

Sorry I typed over my old message, please see above.

You mean the one that carries:

D3D7 Test Result: Not run
D3D8 Test Result: Not run
D3D9 Test Result: Not run

Besides, I wouldn't trust DxDiag to run every shader test (it doesn't look like it if you compare the spinning cube and something like 3DMark's shader tests). In any case, you don't lose much of anything except a little bit of time by getting the latest SiS driver and finding out how it looks like with that. Maybe the driver allows disabling shader support so that CivIV doesn't even try something that messes up the graphics. Quite a long shot, because simply the specs aren't there.

 

[santa]

If that's from the attachment above, then yes.

Do you mind elaborating a bit on this -- I plan on leaving this post for other SiSM650 "victims".

So, let me guess, the October SDK probably won't do any good either, right?

 

[Akhenaton]

If that's from the attachment above, then yes.

Do you mind elaborating a bit on this -- I plan on leaving this post for other SiSM650 "victims".

Elaborate what? You wrote that all tests were ran, but the report indicates that no tests were ran.

So, let me guess, the October SDK probably won't do any good either, right?

No it won't.

 

[santa]

I guess I'm still holding on to the idea that there's a possibility to use this game even with this SiSM650. Before I EBAY it I want to make sure it is 100% improbable. I am not yet ready to upgrade my laptopp, even for the great game like Civ IV...

 

[Akhenaton]

I guess I'm still holding on to the idea that there's a possibility to use this game even with this SiSM650. Before I EBAY it I want to make sure it is 100% improbable. I am not yet ready to upgrade my laptopp, even for the great game like Civ IV...

Why don't you test the latest driver then?

Let's put it this way. The IGP has enough power to barely run the game at low resolution/detail, the problem is in missing features. There have been many complaints about this IGP and IGPs of similar design, and AFAIK no success stories in getting CivIV to run with complete graphics. There also seems to be no setting in CivIV to disable features needing T&L and/or shader support, so the chances of any driver solution actually looking good are pretty slim.

Also, there seems to be some confusion about whether the Real256 core in M650 supports even T&L. SiS claimed in 2003 to Tom's Hardware Guide that the chip does support HW T&L, but THG was sceptical even then. I think the difference is in that the core when used in discrete solutions like SiS 315 did support HW T&L, but not when integrated in the NB. This interpretation is supported by some SiS material also. Then there are also claims that Real256E supports HW T&L, but not Real256. Then yet other sources say that the difference between those is only in the core clock (166 vs. 200 MHz).

However, you can get to 100% not happening only by trying all of the improbable things, some of which even the game devs might not have thought about.