Madden 2006 SLI issues anyone?

jmferraiolo

Junior Member
May 11, 2005
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I have an FX-55 and a 6800GT SLI setup on a 23 inch hp l2335 widescreen monitor and it has a number of problems with Madden 2006. I have tried everything at this point but have been unable to get the game to run satisfactorily without massive screen tearing in AFR or straight up visual corruption in any other SLI (or single card) mode. This is with the 77.77 WHQL drivers. I run the game in 1600x1200x32 with all visual details maxxed, per the stats of my system.

All of my other games run fine, with no corruption or artifacts.

1) The Madden 2006 application "mainapp.exe" is the exact same name as last year. That means that whatever options were configured for the Madden 2005 SLI profile are also being applied when a user launches Madden 2006. This seems to be an AFR rendering mode of some type.

Problems with this mode: All of the shadows on the players and referee flicker intensely. This seems to happen in AFR or AFR 2. Since vsync does not function in AFR (Thanks Nvidia), there is also an amazing amount of graphical sync tearing and the game is generally unplayable because of this.

2) If users even get past the first step and figure out how to create a modified Madden 2005 profile to use with Madden 2006, unfortunately any of the other rendering modes will cause graphical corruption inside of 10 minutes of play. Using SFR with vsync on completely stops any tearing and
graphical glitching, however eventually the screen and players will become all garbled. This also happens in the menu screens. There's also a related problem with helmet mapping where the textures become massively corrupt and stretch across the entire width of the field in distorted fashion.
This same phenomenon happens with SLI Antialiasing mode as well.

3) Even in single card rendering mode, it seems the very act of having SLI enabled will cause distortion exactly as SFR mode. The only mode that works without eventual total corruption is AFR, and that mode is unplayable due to the image tearing. Damned if you do... damned if you don't.

Since Nvidia probably won't get around to fixing vsync with AFR any time soon, I'm looking for either alternatives (I've TRIED maxxing antialiasing and ansiotropy with the hopes of slowing down the game to get it under the monitor's refresh 60 hz rate to eliminate the tearing -- but no dice,)

Two things need to happen and one of them SHOULD happen:

1) EA needs to fix the corruption with SFR mode and Madden
2) EA needs to add a 85 hz option to 1600x1200x32 resolution -- MANY monitors are capable of this, there is no excuse why it shouldn't be available
3) And in a bout of wishful thinking, EA needs to add 1920x1200 support for the widescreen monitors MANY people are gaming on these days. However this would require changing the rendering code, which appears to be 100% lifted from Madden 2005. Ah, the joys of a short dev cycle.

Does anyone have an LCD panel that's seen the same issues as me? What about the corruption in SFR?

I'm sure that I can't be the only one with these problems. If you did have this problem, what kind of a SLI profile did you use to solve it? I'd really like to play this game, but right now I can not.

Thanks for any input one can offer. I am crossposting this to several boards for maximum coverage, since there seems to be no talk of this issue yet (though the game's only been out a couple days).