Really bad graphics issues - PLEASE HELP

Hi all,

Iv'e just got a really new computer installed and already I am having real bad problems, particularly graphics related and I am in dire need of some help! these are my specs:
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Intel Core 2cpu 6600 @ 2.40GHz
- 2 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX

Now i don't want to sound precious, i know that is a really good set-up, but it seems to not be working very well at all! One of the biggest frustrations is the game farcry, my old computer couldn't really run it and now it seems my new one wont either!

symptoms:
- farcry video settings' "auto detect" options choose everything on the lowest settings (thats when i knew something was up)
- i change the settings to highest possible and begin playing
- at first, colours, lighting, etc apear almost inverted, very mixed up and incorect (indoors)
- outside (in the game outside) graphics perform near perfectly but with some EXTREME faults, for eg:
-- most textures appear as perfect, sharp, awesome
-- big areas of terrain apears as black only
-- water looks like complete CRAP (as in, even my older computer displayed it better)
-- boxes around entities in the water
PLEASE see the attached screenshots to see what i mean!

if anyone could PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help or offer any words of advide it'd be greatly apreciated, i dunno what to do - this isnt the only problem and i feel ive bought a top of the line computer that can't do anything right!

Does vista recognise that the card works? Are drivers on the card installed? 8800 GTX what... 640? 320?

hi,
thanks for replying:

yes, vista recognises that the card works but i suspect that farcry doesn't, as my last post suggests. nVidia control pannel says that I am running forceware version 162.22 which was published last week. I have made a slight discovery with farcry, i can run the game smoothly with all settings on very high except shadows and lighting drop-down boxes (they are set to lowest). This is is the only way the game will operate without big shades of black everywhere and without lighting being alll stuffed up. With the lighting setting on mediem or higher the lighting gets very wierd (waaaaaay to bright indoors and on some surfaces). Indoors its like the lighting is inverted but the colours are not - its all very wierd. On the low lighting and shadows setting the water also looks really bad still even though water dropdown box is set on very high and i don't know if this is because the car is failing to work properly or if it needs lighting and shadows to be set higher. OH, and by the way, its a 8800 GTX with 768mb.
thanks again, john

Don't know if it will help but have you installed the AMD64 patch. It will work on Intel 64bit chips also. This patch shows allot more detail in farcry and maybe it will correct the software issuse you are having.
I had your same problem on an older computer but could never get it fixed.

Do you have the lastest chipset drivers installed?

Test another game and post the results. Lets see if the same thing happens.

ok, well, the confusion continues...
i had put on the sims 2 and played that for a while, graphics = perfect. Until, after a while, the game would crash in a way that it would freeze for about 5 seconds, then the screen would go black, then it would refresh, play perfectly for about 2 seconds, and then freeze, go black, and just keep repeating this process of dying, and then temporarly recovering. I shruged it off and tryed farcry, which doesnt crash but has crap graphics syndrome. Now i put on call of duty 2 and set it to the most graphics intensive setting and began playing, it did the sims crash/refresh pattern almost instantly! i know its the same because the same error msg that the sims gave me popped up. Something about the "display driver 'nvlddmkm' has crashed but has recovered sucessfully" - except it really doesnt recover. I googled this and found forums full of peaved users and the basic jist is there is no solution and vista is an incompatiable hunk of unready junk - this may be the case. One solution that was offered was to click the personalise option of the right-click on the desktop dropdown box and change the appearance scheme to "clasic" to replicate a original windows look rather then the flashy vista look. They said that this was the only solution they knew of, and it was temporary, it worked! for about half an hour... then crashed, same nvlddmkm problem! CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP!!!!!!

oh, and blackram air, im not very computer smart, what is this AMD64 patch -for the game or for graphics driver or what? and what is a chipset driver...

Lol I want to help you fix this =P

Try:
Right click on the desktop shortcut to the game. Click "Properties" (or whatever it is) then click compatability, then check "Run as Administrator". Try game. If that doesnt work, change the os IN THE COMPATABILITY tab to XP, make sure "Run as Admin" Is checked. Try game.

It sounds like it is a problem with your driver, if the above doesn't work try using the vista auto updater thing to find a new driver.

Good luck.

johnshorter said:

oh, and blackram air, im not very computer smart, what is this AMD64 patch -for the game or for graphics driver or what? and what is a chipset driver...

Click to expand...

The amd 64 patch is a patch for Frycry to run 64bit.
Chipset drivers are put out by intel, ati, nvidia etc those are the drivers that control your northbridge and southbridge on the motherboard. Example pci-e runs off the northbridge.
Also this error you have ("display driver 'nvlddmkm') is a common error among users everywhere. Don't really know how to fix that one.

Have you downloaded the very latest DirectX 9 updates?

It could be a couple different problems. First, are you running the game with Administrator permissions? If not, try that; it's not likely to cause a huge problem, but it could be.

Also, what are you doing with anti-aliasing? If you have it all the way up, you may want to just turn it off. AA isn't really necessary if you can run at a higher resolution.

The other real big one is that nVidia drivers are terrible right now. You may pretty much need to wait a couple weeks for new ones to come out.

It'll help you determine things if you can run it on lower settings and slowly change things.

By the way, the reason FarCry set your settings to low was that it was programmed well before the 8xxx series cards were designed. It doesn't know what it's dealing with, so it just assumes it's an unsupported card. Just something you'll have to deal with for all your older games.

Hi there.

First of all, pls can u give me FULL HW specs? It's very important. Till You can deliver them I can give u some hints.

- FarCry doesn't have a single problem with forceware 162.22, it's not driver related. Tested on my system.

- You don't have a problem with Farcry, You have problems with many apps and mostly D3D apps. Pls try running Doom3, Quake4 or Prey and let me know if u have display corruption or other stability issues with them too, because these are OpenGL based. OGL have always been much better in compatibility than D3D, so to test stability issues, u have to try both APIs.
But don't try running FarCry in OGL, OGL in FC is only for testing purposes, it wasn't written for that API. Also, installing 64bit patch for the game will most likely not solve anything.

- Some guy here said that nvidia drivers are "bad" in Vista right now. Well, they are as good as they can be, try ATI ones, you would be surprised
Even nvidia betas are still more stable than ATI official releases...

- Go to M$ update and install the DX web runtime. Thus, you'll get the latest DX9 and 10 libraries. (No need to install DX9 from games' install cds)

- After reading all replies (but i don't have your full specs, especially PSU brand and power output), it all looks like a HW problem, one or both of these: insufficient PSU power or your GTX overheating.

EG. if your PSU says that it's 500w, it does'nt necessarily mean it can deliver it. FSP, Enermax, Tagan among others are good brands.

8800 series has a tempreture treshold of about 110c, if it reaches this temp, it will lower it's core and mem speed to cool down. This is what XFX support can tell u. But on the other hand, some cards just refuse to get above 85c, so it's generally a good idea to keep it under 80c. That can be a problem with GTX, especially because fan is even at 85c still running in it's 60% of max rpm. Till now, Rivatuner could be used to control the fan, and in most cases, when being run at 100%, card will cool down of about 15c, so instead of eg. 85c, it will reach 70c max. BUT, M$ released update (KB938979) which changed the way driver signing is enabled and it can't be bypassed at this time with this update installed, till someone finds a solution. RT needs driver signing off....

You can do these 2 things:
So make sure u have a proper airflow in tha case, or leave it open for those tests and don't use RT (not so effective)

--- OR ---

If u have the update installed, uninstall it and install RT and try the fan control and see if u still get the display corruption. RT will prompt u after installation to disable driver signing, just confirm that dialog. After restarting the system (RT doesn't specifically require this, but do it) UAC will tell u that it disabled some apps on system startup, just let them run in the dialog (2 instances of RT should be listed here). This can be overriden too, but it's more complicated, i'll give u the tutorial if u want lately. Or u may also completely disable UAC, but this is really not recommended.

Hope this helps for now.

Oh, i forgot, but i think u've already done that. U definitely need to have mobo drivers installed (intel chipset configuration utility), get the latest ver. on intel web.

Heya! thanks everyone, everythings all pretty crap still but its getting slightly better... im trying everything you all said. I tried running it in XP compatability and stuff like that but it would recognise the cd was even in the driver.... ugh... to MaraST78 , im trying everything you said, just gonna take a bit... i dont think its my graphic card's fault, for some reason i can run half-life two on perfect graphics 100% fine. its the only game out of heaps that will work... and its probably the most graphics intensive one... wierd or what?

Oh yeah, and this one time it also said, after a game crashed, that superfetch has stopped working... does that ggive any hints?

Hmm, try Prime95 if u haven't done so already. Select Blend test to test the RAM. It will eat almost all of the ram available. Let it run for at least 10-12 hours. It will tell u, if there is a problem or not.

try in game settings with shadow settings.