Chershire/black terrain ATI: completely driver irrelevant? All SmartGART's fault?

[GenericKen]

For the sake of anybody having ATI problems who hasn't tried new drivers yet, I implore you to try turning off SmartGART before jumping through any hoops. I just tried installing the latest omega drivers (to the same result), but then tried disabling smartGART, and it's doing just as well as it was before.

I just noticed a couple of strange new characteristics to the bug now, however.

-Food only bug: Not only will the display show only food, but it will display the absolutely wrong amount of food. Grasslands (2 food) display one toast, Hills (1 food, 2 hammers) display 2 toasts.
-White grasslands: The terrain will actually draw correctly at certain zoom levels (the farthest possible, in reality). This makes me wonder if the layer drawing problem has to do with the *angle* of the cammera.
-Overlay White Grasslands: The overlay map actually draws itself very strangely; most of it is drawn as white grasslands, but certain tiles (those under mysterious shadows; I don't recall what those are) draw properly.

Screenies:

 

[Hardin]

Turning Smartgart off makes your video card run in PCI mode which decreases performance significantly.

 

[Elsewhere]

The zoom-level problem is probably due to the fact that the game has different textures for each zoom level, and the ones that are supposed to be used when zoomed in closer don't load for some reason (out of video card memory?).

 

[GenericKen]

Something to note about the final screenie:

The overlay world map displays irregular textures only occur AFTER peeking at the map in worldbuilder. Those normal spots and mysterious shadows I described earlier were the special resources on the start.


The idea that I'm out of video card memory seems odd, given that I've got a 64mb.

 

[jened]

food only bug = geforce2 mx bug. i guess it's not a graphics driver problem after all but a firaxis problem.

 

[mamimo]

I must say, as I mantioned in another post.
All my problems that were similar to yours, I am currently using CC 5.11 drivers & not less important load the game with HIGH priority (!).