I am having a serious video problem. In nearly every game, the graphics become all red and distorted after about 10 seconds, and the framerate drops to 1 or something. This happens in nearly every game that appears to be using DirectX - Generals, Far Cry, Renegade, Halo, …
I am using a GeForce FX 5200 128MB RAM graphics card. Now before you say update drivers and DirectX - I did. I have DirectX 9.0b and 56.72 nVidia drivers for WindowsXP, WHQL.
I’m desperate on what to do, I can’t play any of these fantastic games anymore
I just ran DxDiag again, and tested Direct3D - and the same distortion occured in the testing application (you know, the rotating cube with the DirectX logo). So it pretty much has to have to do something with Direct3D.
Voets - does the problem occur immediately after you turn on your computer or after you have left your computer running for a while.
It may also be a cooling problem. Those artifacts (big blocks that go around the screen when doing 3D) happened to me when my graphics card got overheated. If you want, get a can of compressed air and blow all the dust out of the graphics card’s fan and other areas.
You may want to update to the latest beta nVidia drivers (62.11 I think). It may work
It doesn’t occur until I a game that uses DirectX has been running about 10 to 20 seconds, mostly when I’m in a menu. Now that you say it … it might very well be a cooling problem. It doesn’t happen until a game has ran for a short time. In that time it might have overheated. My graphics card has a passive cooler, that could be the cause of the overheating. Are the latest drivers 62.11 ? The latest one I found for WinXP was 56.72, but I’ll search it up
I have the exact same videocard and I dont have any problems, but I havent updated my drivers for a long time :P, maybe thats your problem…the new drivers…
It pretty much has to be, because if it were overheating indeed, then the rest of the graphics should also be messed up, but it’s only DirectX, nothing else.
Why not? You paid money for their product, why not bother them to get some support? MS won’t give a rat’s *** about Direct X issues, so nVidia is your only option, if they turn you to MS, then you got a problem.
I had a similar problem with my laptop. When you are browsing the web, using Windows, etc. your graphics card doesn’t do a lot of processing. Only when you start getting into the full screen 3D games does your card actually start processing a lot of data that cannot normally be done by your main CPU.
I think Windows and other 2D apps don’t force your computer to use your graphics card for processing graphics data. DirectX and OpenGL are the exact opposite. They try to send all of their data directly to the graphics card for processing. That could be why you see the artifacts in DX-based games.
Also, I prefer using the nVidia beta drivers. The beta drivers include fixes to current issues that the official drivers may not address. I’m currently using 62.11 on another comp, and I downloaded them only a few days ago from: http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=22252&category=main
I’ll try it out Kirupa, thanks I couldn’t contact nVidia, because after all they don’t make the cards. So I guess I’ll have to contact Creative, or better yet - reinstall the card with the driver that originally came with it. While reading through the backside of the box, I noticed this:
DirectX and S3TC texture compression
That might also be the cause, because mostly it’s the textures that screw up.
Ok … so I installed the original Creative drivers, plus an update to support DirectX 9 (or so it says), and now the games completely freeze the computer. The only thing that works is a cold reset. Help !
Okay, try this. I can’t think of it at the top of my mind, but change your graphic card settings to Full Acceleration, if it’s already there, drop it down notch by notch and test between each.
Or, turn your computer off overnight, wait until it’s cooled to room temperature. Then, turn it on and load a game that crashes immediately to see if it’s a heat problem.
Or, change your desktop resolution to the same of the game, then run it.
Or, shove it into another computer and see if it works.
