GRaphic issues, flashing letters/numbers and polygon garbage

[pajarito79]

Hello all. I ran a search, didn't find anything with my particular issue.

I'm suffering from some hideous and distracting glitches. First off the intro movie and all others lag horrendously. During play and on the title screen/menus characters flash sporatically, and random polygon garbage will flash on and off the screen randomly. I'd post pics, but I'm afraid I'm such a complete nub with computers that I don't know how to resize them and thus my screenshots are too large in file size to upload...or something.

Anyway, pics wouldn't be of too much help anyway, I suppose, as the glitches flash on and off the screen so quickly that catching a decent image of the kind of disruption it presents is kind of difficult, but at any given moment there is something misbehaving visually. Everything else seems fine - leader heads, terrain, units, etc. It all shows up beautifully, so nothing's missing at least.

My graphics card is a GeForce 5200. The meat of the machine is:

Athlon 1700+
1.46 GHz 1 GB RAM

Or so says my "System Properties" window. =p

I'm playing without the expansion, but with the most current patch. I tried a couple times to use old drivers for my vid card, but they didn't make a difference, either.

DxDiag should be attached, assuming I didn't nub it into oblivion. =) Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[mdstjohn]

I have similar issues and a temporary fix is to alt-tab to windows and alt-tab back.

Michael

 

[crunch]

Start with disabling movies. You can disable the intro movie in the ini file: NoIntroMovie=1. You can disable other movies in the in-game settings. While in the graphics options menu, you can try to reduce game resolution, low details,... In the ini file, you can also SetMaxFrameRate=30.

Another chapter would be overheating. Open up the computer case and check that all fans are functional and not completely covered in dust. Vacuum clean it if necessary.

Your processor is not supremely powerful, maybe you could try to disable sounds completely to save some processing power. Ini file: EnableAudio=0.

Another ini file option, Fullscreen=0, will allow you to run the game in a window. Try that also.

If all fails, maybe you should continue in your quest to find different drivers. Experiment.

Your graphic drivers are almost 2 years old. Your sound drivers are 3 years old. Try to find updates.

 

[pajarito79]

Ok, I've tried all of Crunch's suggestions, to no avail. My video driver was old because I had been playing with trying out old drivers, and I have since reinstalled the most recent one...which inexplicably made things MUCH worse, even though it wasn't that bad when I first tried to play with that driver. Now virtually nothing is visible. Menus are complete garbage, with oddly colored "blocks" where the buttons normally are. I can vaguely navigate through them by memory, but even in the game virtually nothing is visible from all the distortion. =(

I have a sneaking suspicion it's my card somehow. I recently tried to play Star Trek Armada 2 (Hardly a graphic intensive game by today's standards) and it's producing similar problems and ultimate unplayability. Everquest 2 has given me some very minor graphic issues in the past, but nothing remotely bad enough to disrupt gameplay. I'll be getting a few upgrades for Christmas, and I may have to just wait until then to see if a new processor and video card can handle things better.

In the mean time, any further suggestions are of course appreciated. Thanks for the help, guys. =)