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I realize this may be low priority because it's a single system and this is likely a "Will not fix" issue, but I wanted to bring it up in case there was any chance the developers wish to follow up on it. I'm the owner of an ASUS G73 laptop which has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 chipset. From what documentation I've read, it's suggested I use the last video driver release from the manufacturer in 2010, which is the Catalyst V8.683.0.0 driver. However, utilizing this driver causes a crash of beta 10 immediately on launch. I have the executable disassembly and line that's throwing the exception, although I know this may not always be useful identifying the offending line of source. I can open a ticket and provide the disassembly if requested.
FYI, upon upgrading to AMD's latest generic driver for my chipset, the issue no longer presents itself. I am currently utilizing the driver so I may conduct beta testing. To some degree it makes me wary that defects I report may actually be caused by using the updated driver, although I know that's probably unlikely. Still, my system has been experiencing a lack of stability lately. Please advise if you'd like the crash dump for the older catalyst driver.
If the newer driver works then this is not an issue. Also it is very likely that we cannot do anything about it. A driver crash is always caused by the driver, not the application. No application can crash a driver on purpose. That would beat the idea of a driver.
We are totally aware that ATI/AMD's drivers for OpenGL are a mess and we openly recommend NEVER to use ANY OpenGL application with AMD/ATI graphics hardware. YoU'll have nothing but trouble. Our development tools keept crashing on us all the time with two of the latest catalyst drivers and slowed them down in other occasions.
To summarize: OpenGL + ATI = NO-GO. Our advice: Once you found a driver that works with OpenGL, NEVER change it. if you have to update the driver in general, backup the OpenGL library portion of it and use it in the application directory so that one will be used.
Over the past months we have experienced everything from shader compiler errors to downright driver kernel crashes which is simply outrageous (and yes we are 100% sure that this is not caused by the engine, we are in part professional game developers and/or computer scientists and we know what we are talking about)
I'm also a software developer (although I have not worked with D3D or OpenGL more than once in a few exercises during my university courses). I promise I do not intend to question the dev team's expertise. Just wanted to field the issue and see if any more information was desired. I didn't suspect it would be any use because I probably wouldn't investigate it either were this my project. I'm always loathe to use the outdated driver because it's outdated for a reason, and I've had an uneasy history with ATI chipsets in general. This laptop was the last mistaken chance I've given them, hehe. I'll let you all know if I come across anything else more substantial.
Let's put it this way - I am using atioglxx.dll which dates back to mid 2010 (I placed it in the game's dir). Using a newer version will cause a critical shader compilation error.
We have full control over the source code and we have spent more hours on debugging sessions that we want to remember, and usually whenever a crash like yours happens it always goes back to the atioglxx.dll, so the cause is as obvious to us as it is unfixable.
ATI has a history of bad OpenGL support and unfortunately there is nothing we can do to change the fact that Saga relies on OpenGL, since the original SCP team abandoned DirectX a long time ago (which was the worst decision to make ever)