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Troubleshooting - Rendering Issues
GenesisIV uses OpenGL shaders to generate atmospheric effects. On some older or lower spec cards shaders may not be fully supported and the photorealistic renderer shows unusual colours. All other rendering should be unaffected. Upgrading your card is suggested (nVidia GeForce 6600 cards can be had for around US$100), but alternatively running the program with the no shaders option will solve the problem, although with some restrictions.

On a suitable card fully supporting OpenGL 1.4 the default landscape or Ayres Rock should look something like this. This image was rendered using an nVidia 6800GT at fractal level 2.		  

This image was rendered on a nVidia GeForce2, which has no hardware support for shaders whatsoever. The image is very blocky with low quality as shader processing has been completely ignored. Nevertheless, given the age of the GeForce2 it is highly to nVidia's credit that rendering is as good as this.

Later cards, such as GeForce 4 Ti series, that also do not support the GenesisIV shader in hardware will give similar quality images, although with a less pronounced blocky structure.

  
ATi cards tend to be more problamatic, as this image, rendered on a ATi 9600 SE using the latest drivers (as of september 2005) show. Although this ATi card reports the shader as loaded, it shows multi-coloured artifacts whilst rendering and solid black on completion. These problems do no occur with all ATi cards, but are common for the lower specificed cards.  
Finally for comparison the landscape rendered on the same ATi PC as above, but starting the program in 'no-shaders' mode. In this mode GenesisIV performs atmosphere processing in software using a similar algorithm (the main difference being mist is not so pronounced). With GenesisIV versions 6.0.x colours for vegetation and 3D models are not processed correctly for atmospheric decay (so photorealistic rendering is effectively limited to scenes without these, although 3D models placed in the foreground appear ok). Later versions will address this issue. Rendering in software is also slower than hardware shaders.