Just for future readers who encounter this problem...

If you have an ATI card (radeon perhaps) and the screen goes all multicoloured and unreadable when you load QW, but is temporarily fixed by alt-tabbing through your other apps back to QW, but goes bad again when the scoreboard comes up, or the countdown starts etc, then the only fix I could get to work is to uninstall your drivers and install older drivers - for example installing catalyst 6.12 seems to work.

If you have weird dots over the screen then changing the gl_ztrick value should clear that up.

Hrm. I get that too, but only if my resolution in QW doesn't match my monitor (mostly when on LANs and I don't have my regular monitor). It's fixed by going to the video menu and setting the correct resolution. I've memorized the key strokes needed to get to the video menu, and when I get there I alt-tab so I can see the text again. Oddly enough as long as I stay in the video menu, the colours don't f*ck up again. I have an ATI HD4870.

With my ATI X800 GTO I tried many different vid modes with vid_mode command but none helped...

Don't buy ATI for qw

Gah! I was just waiting for you to post here - it was inevitable! I hate you. Stupid NVIDIA fanboy!

LOL

ATI has historically been troublesome on any Quake opengl engine. Why does that make him a fanboy?

I have an ATI Radeon 4870 HD nemas problemas what so ever! lots of problem with those previous nvidia cards to

When considering opengl and ATI, there are nothing but problems of some sort.

NVIDIA's opengl implementation totally outclasses ATI's, but it doesn't come as a surprise considering the history of NVIDIA and opengl.

Nothing but problems? I think that's stretching it way too much. I agree it's been bad, but it has also improved a lot in recent years. We can thank companies like id Software for that, but more recently the PS3 which has forced ATI to make a decent implementation of OpenGL. Since OpenGL and Direct3D seem to be converging featurewise, I predict the difference between the two will become minimal.

No, the biggest problem when considering ATI for old OpenGL games like QW is performance. Not surprisingly graphics card manufacturers optimize their drivers for the latest games, and old games don't necessarily benefit from these optimizations. So really, if you think about it, it's more a problem with QW than ATI. As any id game, QW has a bunch of optimizations that made sense at the time, but do not make sense today. One prime example is gl_ztrick. It was a neat trick back in the 90'es, but it's counter-productive on modern cards and can cause glitches, which we see way too often on these forums. But such problems aside, which you most likely won't have if you just use default ezQuake settings (gl_ztrick is off by default IIRC), the only problem you will have is performance. Well... problem is perhaps stretching it a lot. Sure you could have gotten better performance had you bought a similarly priced NVIDIA card (which, as mentioned, have a faster OpenGL implementation, especially for old games, for historic reasons), but personally I get fine FPS, and everything runs silky smooth. I'm not complaining. I am happy for my ATI HD4870.

Oh, and 5h17h34d - I only wrote that in jest, of course.

Perhaps generally but Nvidia has always worked and always worked very well with Id Software opengl games. Period.
ATI is quite the opposite.

I never said anything bad about ATI, I just find it stupid that people who's primary/only game is qw, keeps buying ATI.

But porting this, might be something for you raz0?
http://mhquake.blogspot.com/

but for these who use powerstrips way of tunning refreshrate ati is good choice because powetstrip dont support nvidia geforce over 79XX .
anyway when i had ati i remember i have done bind alias on tab that changes some setting to walkaround gamma issues , so when i alttabed just one more tab and all working good . (:

There's some command like gl_restoregamma which sorts the ATI related gamma problems now. Until then I just had 2 aliases, 'g' and 'g2' which had slightly diff gamma values and I've have to exec them alternately after any alt-tabbing. Fun fun fun!