How to avoid grafic Problems while playing Freelancer

Freelancer had it´s Release in 2003.

You might think, well, perfect my Grafic Card is from 2009 this Game will run perfect within my High End Gaming System.

But unfortunal this old Game may not recognise your Card.

For this Louva-Deus (cudos man) updated the File which is responsible for the detection of you grafics card on a regular base. Unfortunal the File is now outdated.

But it is not that hard to do it yourself.

Just follow this manual step by step to put your grafic card into the database, so the game will proper recognize it:

First of all you need the manufacturer and the vendor of your Grafics Card.

With a freeware Tool called GPU-Z it will be easy to find out:

1) Download this tool by using this GPU-Z Download Link .

It´s an exe file, you do not need to install anything. Simply doubleclick it whereever you downloaded it to (on Vista and above with Admin rights please).

You will see something similar like this:

GPU-Z-Screenshot.gif

The marked parts are what you need.

1) Now open your mypathtofreelancer\Freelancer\EXE Directory in your Explorer.
2) Search for a file named flconfigdatabase.txt and open it with for example notepad (if the file is write protected you need to disable the write protection first).
3) Search your manufacturer in the file - in my case NVIDIA
4) Have a look where your type of Card is listed - in my case GeForce
5) Scroll down to the last GeForce (or ofc. your Crads type) entry - in Crossfire 1.9 it´s:

0x0398 = "GeForce Go7600 (??)" // added by Louva-Deus

for the GeForce Cards.

6) Now insert your Grafic Cards Vendor by using the second marked part of GPU-Z which is in my case 0A34 - simply put a 0x before and the correct name of your Card without the name of the manufacturer behind it so it will look like this for example:

0x0A34 = "GeForce GT 240M" // added by Daywalker

7) Save the File.

You will notice that several glitches will not exsist anymore. Also you will be able to see the Mega Asteroids which makes mining more profitable and some more things. In many cases where spawning NPC´s stucked the Game it also went away.

Have fun.

Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

actually the latest file of the flconfigdatabase supports all current and even following graphic cards without need to edit something. (at leasts thats what is said about it)

@OP
Sorry OP, yes i was reading this too - but it is not correct, since we tested it in month now within PX on many machines. Fact is, that the Game has to communicate with the Grafic Card. If it does not do so, a general manufacturers Grafic Card will be chosen for the Game and this will not support the new settings you initiated - by hardware default - which is much more powerfull. Having everything rendered by Software is ofc. possible but realy inefficient for the Mega Grafic Power we have today. Also the CF included flconfigdatabase.txt is not the newest one.

On a sitenote, for some reason i didn´t saw any reply added when i was searching for new posts - thats the reason why i wasn´t here to answer the requests.

The intention to post this here was when i was talking to ppl about the big Asteroids which they wasn´t able to see, or a talk with Players on a Dual Card Setup but also having serious fps problems and and and.

Arrow
Arrow, this is no trick - this is serious editing to enable hardware defaults for modern Grafic Cards - Louva-Deus is also a serious Nick in the FL scene and was working on it for years.

@Cresthen
Their are a few possible Answers for your problem. The most common one is that your Grafic Card is now supported by the Game. Freelancer will not render anything which your Grafic Card is able to do by Hardware default anymore. Because of this you need to go to your Grafic Cards Settings and set them proper for the Game. Just to mention it, you Card is a total overkill for DX9 - which is the CF core now, even if it is a little older. Your Card Stats states Support up to DX10 by up to 1.2 TeraFlops. You should be able to get more than 140 fps with it in every situation - this includes nebulas.

@all
It would be helpfull to put your vendors and descriptions (maybe just upload a sreenshot of GPU-Z by clicking on the little camera symbol) here - if your Card is not listed. So everyone visiting this thread can simply have a look if someone did the same for the same Card before.

@Cresthen

yes, update your catalyst drivers to the newest version ATI Radeon™ Video Card Drivers . The Bios is up to date. OpenGL settings does not interfer with DX Settings while FL is based on DX and Quake on OGL. Normaly your Driver package should support Profiles for different Games - choosen by the started exe file automatically - Enable the feature and use it for the different Games. This way you are able to get the max performance settings for every game. Get rid of trilinear buffering for the moment and ofc. vsync - thats a Performance Killer.

If you want to learn something about Settings start here: Guru of 3D: PC Hardware Reviews and tests or at Tom's Hardware: Hardware News, Tests and Reviews these are serious english sources (for german users i also suggest the gulli board).

For the beginning go for the ATI Tray Tool and test the settings one after the other in the Game (i do not have much experiences with ATI Cards) Zapp is a good source for ATI Card tweaks.

Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

is it possible that somebody creates a new config file with updates settings so i can update the mod with it?

I will try that

I have to find the biggest manufacturers sites with vendor entries but don´t expect it to be ready tomorrow please.

edit: Request to anyone: Please post your Grafic Cards Manufacturer into this thread so i get a clue about the most used ones i have to add.