Mec AntiKythera
King
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2010
- Messages
- 980
While this isn't specifically a Civ issue I knew folks here would recognize how serious this situation is so it seemed worth a post.
I had been playing Civ4 on my Win XP pro notebook without any problems until one day it crashed while playing. Since then video rendering has been problematic to the point of making the background color in the title bar of any window being shown as two color triangles instead of a finely rendered transition from one color to another. Video playback was also iffy at best. Civ was unplayable. I have since discovered that I can restore window and video rendering by cranking down the color quality and hardware acceleration settings. That's good, but it obviously prevents Civ from even starting up and that's bad, very bad.
If I run the MS diagnostic tool dxdiag then I see that Direct3D fails to render properly (regardless of acceleration settings). DirectDraw works properly only when color and acceleration are turned down.
I have reinstalled the GPU drivers, trying the newest ATI Catalysts and the original drivers delivered with the notebook. I have reinstalled DirectX. I have reinstalled Civ4. No improvement.
As far as I can see either Windows is borked and needs to be reinstalled or the GPU is, leaving only the option of buying a new notebook. Neither of which are very attractive prospects. Am I missing anything? Are there any other things I can try before getting drastic?
All help is appreciated, I hope to bet back to playing Civ and contributing to the forums.
Here is what it looks like:
I had been playing Civ4 on my Win XP pro notebook without any problems until one day it crashed while playing. Since then video rendering has been problematic to the point of making the background color in the title bar of any window being shown as two color triangles instead of a finely rendered transition from one color to another. Video playback was also iffy at best. Civ was unplayable. I have since discovered that I can restore window and video rendering by cranking down the color quality and hardware acceleration settings. That's good, but it obviously prevents Civ from even starting up and that's bad, very bad.
If I run the MS diagnostic tool dxdiag then I see that Direct3D fails to render properly (regardless of acceleration settings). DirectDraw works properly only when color and acceleration are turned down.
I have reinstalled the GPU drivers, trying the newest ATI Catalysts and the original drivers delivered with the notebook. I have reinstalled DirectX. I have reinstalled Civ4. No improvement.
As far as I can see either Windows is borked and needs to be reinstalled or the GPU is, leaving only the option of buying a new notebook. Neither of which are very attractive prospects. Am I missing anything? Are there any other things I can try before getting drastic?
All help is appreciated, I hope to bet back to playing Civ and contributing to the forums.
Here is what it looks like:
