(I am a cheshire cat / dark terrain person)

Ok, I'm sorry for being a total noob, but what is T&L exactly?

Did they specify on the box or otehrwise that T&L was required?

Grr... I need to be better at remembering to save my receipts.

If they never said T&L was required, then I am EXTREMELY angry. If they did say that and I just missed it, then I guess it's my fault for not reading the specs carefully.

What I'm REALLY pissed about is the fact that I was told that if you could run Pirates!, then you could run CivIV. I specifically asked that b/c I didn't want what has happened to happen.

I am pretty sure they specified it.

Hardware T&L referes to "transform and lighting". This means that the GPU will handle those processes instead of them being done in software on the CPU. I thought that hardware T&L was standard on GeForce 2 cards...at least some of them. I am surprised to see that so many newer cards don't have it.

It seems though that the black terain and missing textures is not exclusively a T&L problem. My guess is that it is linked to the "Render not found issue" and that the Nvidia cards are more likely to start with this error while a large portion of the ATI cards with this problem actually stop running Civ IV...again speculation..but what else do I have to do now?

never mind... :P

Look at thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transform_and_lighting
and this http://www.nvidia.com/object/transform_lighting.html

The T&L requirement is a bit silly. I mean, the 3D is nice, but has almost no effect on game play. There should have been a way to turn this off. I ceratinly have other 3D titles that don't require T&L (Pirates!). And Lighting and Shading are not exactly 'Critical' for Civ players.....

The T&L requirement is a bit silly. I mean, the 3D is nice, but has almost no effect on game play. There should have been a way to turn this off. I ceratinly have other 3D titles that don't require T&L (Pirates!). And Lighting and Shading are not exactly 'Critical' for Civ players.....

Correction! 2K does list T&L hardware support as requirement...... But that game runs on my non T&L machine just fine...