Punkbuster & OpenGL extensions...

(jmfaust) #1

I have an ATI video card (Mobility 7800 FireGL) with the latest drivers installed. If I enable the OpenGL extensions in Wolf:ET my video card will eventually get into an irrecoverable state that requires me to reboot my system.

Many (but not all I think) punkbuster enabled servers check that I enable the extensions… which as far as I can tell don’t really change much at all (perhaps the eye candy will be a bit better?).

Anyhow, I get kicked from servers for having this feature turned off… Is there anyway around this. Can I use cvars to disable the extensions after I connect without punkbuster knowing about it? Currently I play on servers without punkbuster enabled… but that is very restrictive (most have it enabled).

Can anyone help me out here? Thanks in advance!

(SCDS_reyalP) #2

There are cvars to turn on/off most of the extensions individually, and these are mostly not restricted by PB. You could try disabling them all, and see if that helps stability.

Most of the extenstion cvars will be of the form r_ext_blahblah with 1 being enabled, and 0 being disabled.

I don’t quite understand why servers require gl extensions in the first place. It seems odd that there would be an exploit based turning extensions OFF.

(jmfaust) #3

Yeah I disabled the extensions a couple of days after I got Wolf:ET (basically as soon as I figured out it was the problem). The only problem is that more and more servers appear to be requiring the extensions be enabled. Perhaps this is because people are copying configurations around without understanding what is in the config?

Anyway will PB detect that I have disabled the extensions if I disable them some time after logging onto the server? In other words, does PB continually check that certain settings are enabled/disabled?

(SCDS_reyalP) #4

Yes. It checks for restricted cvars regularly. I suspect there is an exploit based on disabling extionsions, I just can’t figure out what it is.