Black Screen at start up

[Liewe]

I have played this game for almost all the time after its release. And suddenly the game doesn't work for me anymore . Everytime I try to start up the game, I hear the 2k Games intro music as well as the firaxis games one. When the menu is loaded I also hear the menu music. So the audio is in its place, but no visuals??

Does anyone know what to do?

 

[Liewe]

BTW I got no kind of error.
And when I ALT+TAB from the game I see the menu for a tiny second.

When I start the game minamized it works perfectly, even when I maximize it afterwards :S
It doesn't maximize totally, which is no good...

 

[cood]

I had the exact same problem. I played it a few times and then I rebooted and tried to open Civ4 and it gives me a black screen but plays the music. I have a Geforce4 Ti 4400 and I updated all my drivers and got the latest patch. Any other ideas?

 

[Settler42]

I have this problem as well... i recently got a new graphics card, Radeon x850 AGP, and now this is happening.

black intro movie, can hear sound, after that it goes to the main menu, and the cursor is present, can click on stuff, and can hear music, but the whole screen is black. and when i alt tab i see the screen for a split second...

i have latest ati drivers, winxp sp2, latest civ4 patch...

heres my dxdiag info

 

[Snerk]

I got this problem after i tried to update my driver. Turned out i only installed the driver software. The driver wouldn't install due to it didnt find my video card. I completely removed the driver software and reinstalled the game and i was up and running againg. However i got some lag issues in late game on standard maps or bigger. Useless laptop!

 

[Liewe]

Problem Solved...
I tried some different drivers, and one of them worked.
So the problem was indeed with the video card driver,
Thanks for the help