Video Problem

[happy_Alex]

Can anyone help? I have a video problem.( I'm not being lazy in not reading the threads its that I'm not to sure which terminology applies to my problem)

Basically when I run CIV4 I get lots of flickering polygons on the screen, here's a snapshot:


My system specs

Pentium 4 2.40 GHz
1.25 GB RAM
video card: Radeon X80 GTO

advice is hugely appreciated

[p dandy]

haha beat you to it but thanks for the screenshot. I also see those flickering polygons and they start increasing in volume the longer I play. Can you verify this too? The difference is I have a nVidia card 7800gt

[Enkidu_Warrior]

Yep, p_dandy, I can confirm that. Eventually, it overloads the card and dumps me to the desktop, without clearing the video cache. I end up having to reboot to clear it.

I've also captured some lovely screenshots and sent them, along with my machine specs, to the Take2 support mailbox. Everyone should do the same, so that they can find the common cause.

My machine is a 3.2ghz P4, 512k L2 cache, 1gb DDR-SDRAM, mobility radeon 9700 card, catalyst 6.6 ati mobility video drivers, fully updated MS XP Pro.

I've tried so many things with the game options, ini settings, different video drivers, external utilities, installations, unpaks, and spent the last week surfing various forums. It's happening to enough people that it's not isolated to an oddball configuration - it's clearly something introduced in the 1.61 patch and not fixed in Warlords initial release.

EW

[p dandy]

So did this happen for you when you installed Warlords or was this happening during 1.61 Vanilla already? This only happened to me once I installed Warlords. What I hate about this is that once it freezes up and I terminate it (control alt delete), it does something to the directX so my other games stop working.

[Enkidu_Warrior]

It started with the 1.61 patch, which I only installed about a week before getting Warlords.

I did a complete uninstall/reinstall of vanilla, followed by Warlords (letting Warlords patch it), and had the same problems.

So then I did another uninstall/reinstall of vanilla and went back to the 1.52 patch, and now I'm having problems with that.

Then I did another uninstall.reinstall of vanilla with the 1.09 patch, and same thing.

Clearly the installation of 1.61/Warlords changed some setting somewhere that's making it impossible for me to go back to an earlier patch that worked ok.

You mentioned it screwing up DirectX. Is there some way to check/fix this?

thanks for any help
EW

edit - interestingly, I've noted that by running dxdiag after the video goes haywire in Civ, the screen pixellation disappears. However, if I continue the session, stray pixels reappear when I do other things, such as scroll this window I'm typing in, unless I reboot. curiouser and curiouser

edit2 - here's a lovely screenshot from 30 minutes after loading a saved game, doing nothing (I actually walked away from the comp for that time).

Attachment 134048

[p dandy]

Ok I uninstalled everything and reinstalled Vanilla. Then I patched to 1.61 and there is no problems. That shouldn't mean anything because Vanilla always worked for me. I even was able to put everything to max settings and play without any ridiculous polygons showing up.

Let me say that the very FIRST time I played Warlords (2 hours straight) nothnig bad happened. It's the second time I decide to start it that I get polygons within the first 10 minuts of play.

I will try to install Warlords again when I get back later today.

Warrior, when you played Warlords, did you happen to set anti-aliasing? This might be a shot in the dark but I think I remember things being ok when I had it at 0 during the initial session. Then I changed it to 4 during the second session and things started getting wierd.

[johnnnybrauvo]

Hey guys , it might be heat .

I had ZERO problem with 'vanilla' Civilization 4 , but after playing Warlords for about 20 minutes I kept getting massive graphical glitches .

I checked my video cards temperature and it was 109 Celcius !!

Now I can only play for about 20 to 30 minutes before the game gets so bad ( read my video card gets SO hot ) that items start dissappearing .

That might be it .

I have NO idea why the Warlords add on effects the heat of my video card so much . I could play LITERALLY hours and hours on vanilla Civ 4 with no problems at all .

[Enkidu_Warrior]

Yeah, I left anti-alias at zero, and double-checked that my video driver was not over-riding this (CCC allows this). Thanks for the suggestion though.

Regarding heat, I've never checked the card's temp, though I will note that I get the video problems every time - including if I just start the machine up and launch straight into CIV. It would be unlikely to build up enough heat to have problems so quickly.

cheers
EW

[p dandy]

Did it work for you? I noticed that I still get wierd polygons if I change the resolution. I also checked my card's temp and it maxes at 71.

[Enkidu_Warrior]

nuh, nothing's worked so far. tried various drivers (old and new, CCC and Omega), updated XP with everything recommended, re-installed direct x, changed settings on video card, changed screen resolution, changed video settings in Civ, disabled sound, disabled movies, changed other ini settings even though I didn't know what they did either... also defragged, and countless uninstall/reinstalls of the software to various patched levels. all to no avail

the latest effort is I've requested a bios update from my manufacturer. will try that later tonight

EW

edit - problem solved! I received a VGA BIOS update for my motherboard from my manufacturer. I recommend anyone still having video problems contact their manufacturer to try a similar solution.

[p dandy]

Hey Warrior, what does this fix entail. What do you need to send them and what are they sending back to you. Sorry, I'm not fluent in this BIOS stuff.

[Enkidu_Warrior]

basically, I called and explained the problem. after checking my model number, they suggested the VGA bios update.

I gave them my email addy, they sent me a link with instructions on what to do. This essentially amounted to

- download the file from the link, save it somewhere you can remember (it's an .iso file)

- burn the iso file to CD as an image (they included step-by-step instructions how, of course this requires a cd-burner on your system. if you don't have it, they may send you a bootable disc)

- reboot the machine with the cd in the tray. it boots to the A:\ drive.

- once there, you have a prompt that says "type GO to update VGA BIOS"

- type GO, wait a bit, then when it says it's done, eject the disc, reboot the machine, launch Civ, problem solved

I should note that my machine is less than 12 months old, so this is not necessarily just a possible problem for older machines. If you aren't comfortable with the above instructions, the easiest thing may be to take it back to the manufacturer to let one of their techs do it.

good luck!

EW

[col]

I get the same weird polygon problems - and my bios is bang up to date (DFI Lanparty Ultra-D) .

[col]

Switching the vsync from 'Application controlled' to 'On'. (use Nvidia panel)

Seems to have done the trick.

edit: :aagh Came back after15 mins.... Grr.

[Targon]

I'm not getting the same problem, but after installing Warlords, I find the game crashes due to a lack of video memory.

My configuration:

ATI brand ATI Radeon 9800 pro with 128 megs memory

AGP Apature size of 128 megs.

Since the old game didn't cause this problem, it's pretty clear that something changed in the game that requires more video memory, or old textures arn't being cleared or something.

Now, this WOULD be easy enough to fix, except that I play some other games that slow down a lot since pumping the AGP apature to 256 megs would cut down on available system memory. I really don't want to upgrade my memory to 2 gigs on this system since I plan to replace the motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card in another few months.

So, my only suggestion based on my own experience is that your problem may be the drivers for your motherboard/chipset, including the AGP or PCI Express drivers. Check the setting for how much system memory you make available to your video card, and possibly tone down the graphics in the game until Firaxis releases a patch.

I hope this helps.

[p dandy]

Originally Posted by col

Switching the vsync from 'Application controlled' to 'On'. (use Nvidia panel)

Seems to have done the trick.

edit: :aagh Came back after15 mins.... Grr.

Yes I get plenty of these "think I fixed it" moments as well. One thing I experienced is that if I alt-tab out before the polygons gets too bad and alt tab back in, everything looks good for about 2 minutes. Then it acts up again.

[col]

I've tried different video drivers for my 6600GT

84.21
84.26
91.31
91.33 (beta)

All are the same. Polygons go if I minimise then maximise. They return and ultimately crash Windows with an infinite loop in nv_disp.

[col]

Most promising fix is simply to set the max frame rate to 30 in the ini file. Looking good so far. Maybe Civ4W simply tries to push frames through the card faster than it can cope with.

[p dandy]

That makes sense. I'll try to verify as well later this week.

[col]

Solution seems stable. No more artifacts and I've completed a couple of games without any more problems