Help! (RTW) (please!) (tech)

[rochvelleth]

As you know, I've been playing Rome Total War. In the last few days (i.e. a few days after I started playing) it's developed a strange phenomenon. After playing for a very short while, it starts... sort of flashing. There are rays of what seems like mixed graphics radiating out from the centre of the screen (a bit like a seam in computer graphics

Comments

[satanicsocks]

You need to make sure you have the latest version of the drivers for your graphics card. (Go to the manufacturer's website and download the most up to date ones and install them). That sort of screen tearing is extremely symptomatic of out of date drivers :)

[rochvelleth]

Does that sound like the explanation for what just happened as well (the edit at the end of the post)? I'm afraid I don't know much about these things :/ Thanks for advice.

[satanicsocks]

It's fairly likely, yeah, with the scrambled graphics and all.

[uisgebeatha]

What satanicsocks said. If you're not sure what make your card is go to Control Panel -> System, click the Hardware tab then click Device Manager which lists everything on your motherboard. I believe XP has an option to 'roll back' to a previous driver, should you install a new one and it doesn't work.

Hope that helps ^_^

[despotliz]

I got the random rays of light effect while playing a game recently, and updating my graphics card drviers did fix that, so I would suggest trying that. This was with an Nvidia card, not sure what model yours is.

[edith_the_hutt]

I have the same problem with Oblivion, which is why I often reboot after I play it (more than once it's wrecked Thunderbird's display, meaning I had to reboot to read your mail).

I suspect the GForce 6000 series are rather baddly designed in certain respects...

[chess]

Another possibilty is your graphics card overheating. The graphics card on my laptop is very prone to overheating when I'm doing something complicated (e.g. running NWN) in the heat, and does this kind of thing when it gets too hot.