Blinking/flashing/flickering graphics

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PEJU

Chieftain
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Dec 28, 2009
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I excitedly installed Civ 4 along with both expansions on my year-old laptop, only to find it unplayable. Starting with the intro movies, the graphics flicker, stutter, flash and blink in and out. Hard to explain, it looks almost like the game is shooting different menus and windows on top of existing ones without any prompting. Funny thing is that the actual game screen, that is where the action happens, is not affected, only the menus and panels around it. I would've given up and blamed my laptop if not for this fact.

My specs are almost at the recommended level (100 MHz short). Attached is a DxDiag log. Any idea what's wrong? Many thanks in advance.
 

Attachments

Yes... I have the exact same problem. Graphics flickering, as if there were menus or another program opening beneath. Of course, no other program is open or running in the background.

I have tried turning off all animations in game and lowering grpahics quality - it has made some of the distortions less noticable and common, but it is still extremely frustrating and annoying. It draws your attention away from whatever you are doing contantly.

Note: I should mention that I did not have this problem when Beyond The Sword first came out. (Whatever version that was) However I lost my copy of the original Civ 4 and bought Civ 4 "The Complete Edition" for christmas which I understand to be the latest version.

Since installing this is when the issues have begun.
 

Attachments

I've downloaded and run the DirectX exe, and it says it's "determined that a newer or equivalent version of DirectX has been installed already. No installation necessary."

Currently I've got version 317 of BtS installed, but I've tried it with a few other versions, and the problem persists.

Changing graphics settings didn't help for me either.
 
:hmm:

SiS graphics is not really good for gaming (and is abominably badly supported by the manufacturers) - however it *should* work. Try patching the game to 3.19 - its always best to troubleshoot with the most recent version of the game...
 
Patched it, no change. I'm about ready to give up, as everything I can think of is up to date. Pretty frustrating, damn computers.
 
I had a similar problem before I replaced my graphics card. It sounds like you may have a malfunction in your graphics card. Have any other graphics functions of your computer been affected?

NPM
 
SunTzuX said:
Yes... I have the exact same problem. Graphics flickering, as if there were menus or another program opening beneath. Of course, no other program is open or running in the background.

I have tried turning off all animations in game and lowering grpahics quality - it has made some of the distortions less noticable and common, but it is still extremely frustrating and annoying. It draws your attention away from whatever you are doing contantly.

Note: I should mention that I did not have this problem when Beyond The Sword first came out. (Whatever version that was) However I lost my copy of the original Civ 4 and bought Civ 4 "The Complete Edition" for christmas which I understand to be the latest version.

Since installing this is when the issues have begun.
Click to expand...

I am running the latest version of the game with a Radeon X850 XT and Catalyst 9.11 with no problems. Maybe it's due to you using 64bit XP? I am using 32bit.

Install the latest Catalyst drivers for your card (they will be labelled "legacy" by AMD/ATI, but they are still relatively new). Go into the Catalyst control panel and reset your settings to the defaults.
 
Okay here is the deal. I'm running an older HP Pavilion zd8000 notebook with WinXP. Had been able to play fine for years. However, I stupidly didn't get my laptop cleaned after using it out in the field and even taking it to Afghanistan. After playing in some hot weather, I started having graphics problems.

I'd boot the game up and as I would go through the menus, I would get flickers as well as these 'triangles' that would flicker on and off. I remember when I had some driver issues away back playing some of the fantasy modes that this would happen. Even before I could get the game going, it would crash to a black screen with the music playing forcing me to do a hard reboot.

While this applied to Civ, I could still play games like Plants vs. Zombies. I took it in to get looked at and it actually had a motherboard failure while at the techs. So they cleaned it out. (It was WAAAAY dirty) and replaced my motherboard.

However, I still have the same problems with Civ even though I now can play a more intensive graphical game like Left 4 Dead (not well, but it plays) I'm currently using SpeedFan and it shows my system is running at an acceptable heat. However, since the game would crash almost immediately, I don't think it's heat related. I'm wondering if somehow when I was updating my system I either corrupted or overwrote needed drivers or otherwise did something that bolluxed up what Civ needs to play.

Oh, I have this problem playing with my hard drive version of Civ as well as via Steam.
 
Same problem here. As the poster above noted, it's as though there's an application underneath resetting the graphics. It happens as often as every second or two, but more typically occurs every five to ten seconds.

The flickering/flashing/whatever is present regardless of what compatibility mode I've selected for the Civ4BeyondSword.exe application. It also occurs at both the native display resolution and any lower resolutions I select.

This is a fresh install of Windows 7. I've applied the DirectX updates as instructed in other threads. The hardware is on the old side but exceeds spec requirements; the display card is new and running the latest driver. BTS is patched to 3.19. DXDiag.txt is attached.

Any help would be very welcome. Thanks in advance.
 

Attachments

I've found that often if a game is playing in a different resolution than it should be, (perhaps a different one than windows is running) You will run into that issue with menus. I can't recall what game it was, but it has happened to me on several occasions and the screen resolution was to blame.

I'd try changing the resolution to something a bit lower and seeing if that helps.
 
has anyone found a sure fire way to resolve this problem - i have tried both Civ 4 and civ 4 colonization and both have this flickering problem.

Any suggestions

Thanks
 
Inverarity said:
Same problem here. As the poster above noted, it's as though there's an application underneath resetting the graphics. It happens as often as every second or two, but more typically occurs every five to ten seconds.

The flickering/flashing/whatever is present regardless of what compatibility mode I've selected for the Civ4BeyondSword.exe application. It also occurs at both the native display resolution and any lower resolutions I select.

This is a fresh install of Windows 7. I've applied the DirectX updates as instructed in other threads. The hardware is on the old side but exceeds spec requirements; the display card is new and running the latest driver. BTS is patched to 3.19. DXDiag.txt is attached.

Any help would be very welcome. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
You're running almost the bare minimum of memory for Windows 7 at 1 GB, and adding Civ on top of that might be causing the CPU to page out Civ periodically to use memory for something else.

If you can borrow a stick of RAM from a friend, add it to your machine, then try Civ again with more memory. I'll bet a nickel it will work better. :)

@ Returning: Please upload a DxDiag file so that we can look at your system specs.
 
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