Help! When I start civ4, monitor goes black

[Tsarevna]

Hello fellows,
I'm hoping somebody can help me. I bought a new Sony monitor ([FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]SDMHS95PS) LCD screen, and whenever I start civ the screen goes black and a little message appears saying:

INFORMATION
OUT of RANGE
INPUT2: HD15
81.3khz/100hz

I think I know what the problems is....
"Out of Range" I think means out of scan range, meaning the monitor is trying to operate at a higher refreshrate (measured by khz/hz) than it actually can go. It's limit is actually 72, and here we have it trying for 81.3 horizontal and 100hz vertical (or vice versa.)

I thought I found how to fix this, (I just cntrl+alt+delete and stopped civ4 and my desktop was all there again) I went into Display Properties and set my refresh rate at 60 Hertz, but it seems the game overides my settings.

[/FONT]

• I have the latest drivers from the Sony website.
• I set my Display Properties to 60Hertz
• I used Dxdiag to override Direct Draw, and set it to 60Hertz (Start>Run>Dxdiag>More Help (tab)>Override

But when I startup Civ4, the screen still goes black and it still tries to use higher refresh rates than my monitor can support. I looked at the Civilizationiv.ini file to see if i could force it, but I don't see a way to do that.

My question is: How do I force my monitor to be in the same refresh rate no matter what program is running? Do I do that in the BIOS?

My monitors manual says this in the troubleshooting section:
"Adjust the computer's graphic board with the following ranges:
Horizontal: 28-80kHz (analog RGB), 28-64 kHZ (digital RGB)
Vertical: 48-75 Hz (analog RGB), 60Hz (digital RGB)
Resolution: 1280x1024 or less"

But it doesn't tell me how to do that.

Thanks for any help.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]

 

[Akhenaton]

My question is: How do I force my monitor to be in the same refresh rate no matter what program is running? Do I do that in the BIOS?

You can't change it in the BIOS, it can only be changed by manipulating the graphics driver's settings. You should be able to remove "customized modes" which have refresh rates unsupported by your HW from the list which the driver presents to applications to choose from.

As a last resort you may use a refresh rate overrider which hooks the driver and immediately countermans all attempts to set refresh rates beyond the list, if some badly behaving program tries that.

See RivaTuner's documentation on how to try either of these strategies (known to RT as "Driver level display modes" and "Low-level refresh rate settings").

 

[merchantoftolbi]

I recall having the same problem with another game, Empire Earth II (Which sucked by the way) I had to change the graphics card settings.

 

[Tsarevna]

YES!
I solved my problem.
Thanks guys for the tips, I realized that I did already have a way to tweak graphic card settings with Display>Properties> Advanced>(My video card name tab Geforce FX 5700 Ultra)>Tiny green button (displays options for tweaking graphics card)>Refresh Rate Override.

In the past (with my old CRT monitor) i had tweaked the refresh rate overide settings trying to get rid of these wavy bendy lines that the CRT had in the corners of the screen. Well i completely forgot about this.
My resolutions for playing RTW and a few other games like Civ4 were set to override (the application and windows settings) at like 100Hz.
Well now that I have a monitor that supports only 72 Hz max, therein lied the problem.

I set my override refesh rates to 60Hz for the resolutions of games, and presto, it worked!

(I would post a screenshot but imageshack isn't working right now, must be site maintenance.)

Thanks guys for the help!