Major issues/unplayable

[Utopianh]

I haven't checked up on this in a while; it looks like there's a new patch out, but as there doesn't seem to be any major coding changes in the new release relating to ATI graphics cards and laptop drivers specifically I'm not sure it will address the issue.  I'll get around to dealing with getting the new patched release soon and test it though.  Originally though the game was completely playable and I have no idea what caused these issues, but I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who's seen this issue, so there's a chance it might get addressed eventually.

Key things are definetely ATI mobility drivers/cards in some way shape or form though; I really wish omega drivers where still updating, and I'm wondering if anyone had luck with the newest catalyst drivers?

[Epileptic]

Just got the game from steam, and i have the exact same issue. Playing on a laptop, ati graphics card with omega driver. Played the Demo without any problem, but the time between the demo and now, i got the omega driver. Would be lovely with a patch to address this problem.

[Alec]

Any clue what's causing it? Like are there any theories as to what exactly the new drivers don't like?

[Epileptic]

I am no expert what so ever, but its clearly something with the graphic drivers. It's at a constant 1FPS as soon as the bit-blop screen comes up, and it's not like its dipping from high to low framerte, its just a constant lag.
Maybe i should add that i got it from steam...

[Telipinu]

I played the demo of Aquaria one year ago. Everything was working fine. Then I finally purchased, installed and tried to execute the game yesterday. But I got an error message when the two bars are getting blue at the start. The program terminated without even getting to the menu screen or the company logo. The demo which was still installed, did also did crash the same way.

I use a desktop machine with WinXP (32bit), a Radeon X1950 graphic card and a Creative X-Fi sound card.

Since the demo worked before I came to the conclusion that newer drivers were causing the problems. After reading this very thread I decided to try the graphic drivers first.

I did first uninstall my ATI drivers (Catalyst 9.8 ) and installed after the reboot from the ATI/AMD Support site some random old ATI graphic drivers (Catalyst 8.12 ).

As a result the game now runs well. (Yes I know that it doesn't make sense to use an outdated graphic driver but anybody who experience the same problem might find this usefull)

[Epileptic]

Played around with making game profiles and changing different variables, but nothing seems to help. The only thing I've noticed is that when I set it to the lowest resolution the bit blot screen runs smooth, but when the main menu shows up, its back to 1 FPS.
Sad that it won't be able to play the game until I get a new computer, but I'm glad i could support what I think is the right way for gaming to go. Keep it up and hopefully future releases will be more compatible

[Scale]

Same here.

Laptop
ATI card
Running catalyst 10.3

Gonna mess around, see what i find.

[Scale]

I think i found the problem,
Trying to solve it now...

Edit:
I am sure i found the problem and it's a *itch to solve

[Scale]

I found out aquaria was using GDI32.swapbuffers, for those who don't know what that means, it means that your rendering in software mode and not with your video card.

The tool "OpenGL Extensions Viewer 3.0" confirmed this, my opengl driver was version 1.1 generic microsoft driver.
After testing tons of drivers and fixing the "unsigned driver" error message, i still found no opengl driver to be installed.

However the driver was in the system folder, it was called "atioglxx.dll", after that i went to find out how windows selects your opengl driver.
Which lead me to a registery key which was pointing to atioglx2.dll which doesn't exist, so i changed it voila opengl version 3.2

Good news:
I can run other openGL games yah!

Bad news:
Aquaira doesn't care and still won't run using hardware

Back to the drawing board

[Scale]

There all fixed only took me all day..

I forced the SDL library to use wgl_swap_buffers instead of GDI.SwapBuffers
Now i was going to look where SDL decides which to use but suddenly it already selects wgl_swap_buffers and the game runs fine.

To sum it all up:

ATI selects wrong openGL driver fixed by:
Start regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\OpenGLDrivers\ati2dvag
Change DLL value from "atioglx2.dll" to "atioglxx.dll"

After that SDL (simple directmedia layer) messes up.
This fixed itsself for me so i don't really know what to do with it.

So much work for a demo 

[Utopianh]

Sadly, I was never able to find a solution for this problem, although thankfully since, I've had to replace my laptop and the game has been running fine on my ATI Radeon HD 4890/AMD P2 X4 955 build.

I finally bothered to come back to it recently to give the Sacrafice mod a play through, and saw my old problem post had been bumped heh.

I hope you are able to track down this particular issue, and it's troubling that more people have encountered it because it was entirely inexplicable.

[mospheric]

So my story is that I bought this game as part of the Humble Indie Bundle. I cannot get it to work at all, and I'm getting similar problems that are described above. I'm actually new to PC. Who knew that PC games are so hard to get to run! I'm a QA tester at work, so I'm going to try my hardest to get it to work. If anyone needs logs, etc. just let me know.

I just bought a Dell xps 9000, with a Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. I'm running windows 7, x64. I just assumed these hoss graphics cards would work wonders, but I guess it's mostly that ATI doesn't support older games well with newer drivers? (I can only get 2 games out of the humble bundle to run *sadface* )

I'm getting an atioglxx issue too. I'm going to try the above method involving changing the dll and see what happens.

[mospheric]

Hmm. I tried Scale's approach. When I went to the OpenGLDrivers, I didn't even have the ati2dvag.

When I play the game in windowed mode, when the logo appears, I get the 1fps issue. After the logo, a scene appears of a valley with a dragon to the right (while still at 1fps). The scene fades to white and then the game crashes.

The windows crash report says that the fault module name is OPENGL32.dll

I'll try reinstalling and maybe installing the newest Opengl separately.

[mospheric]

Hmm, reinstalling did not help. If I alt-tab away, the game actually proceeds to the main menu. (Still at 1fps). I usually have to click to close the window though since it is unplayable. The windows report appears and notifies that the fault module name is now atioglxx.dll_unloaded

This ati problem is the same issue I'm having with Gish, Aquaria, and Penumbra (all part of the humble pack).

[mospheric]

Ok I seemed to fixed all these problems by finally getting ATI catalyst control center 10.4 to take. It took me 2-3 times of trying to get it installed. Once I did, the game works as suppose to!

Basically make sure you uninstall previous drivers, do a driver sweep of ati drivers, then reboot and install the newest drivers... hopefully no further problems