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3D Games Graphics Pain
Apothe0sis
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered User regular
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered User regular
Hi Everyone,
a friend of mine is having issues when he tries to play any game involving 3d graphics - WoW, TF2, even old school games like NWN and Deus Ex.
Basically, anything with 3d graphics locks up and stutters every few seconds, he's on an AMD athlon 64 X2 dual-core 4200+, nvidia geforce 7600GT, 1 gig of ram and running XP SP3. This is also occasionally in combination with graphical distortion.
This happened on Sunday, and the only changes that come to mind are a .NET update and video card driver updates, both of which have been rolled back, but to no avail.
So far to try and figure out if we can pinpoint the particular issue we've tried a few different tactics.
Multiple modern games was the first attempt. Same regardless of game, though Source games regularly have additional graphical distortions - missing textures, smeared polys and weird stretches across the screen.
New/old video card drivers were installed/rolled back/etc
DirectX was reinstalled.
Tried finding an old game which ran in OpenGL mode - but got the same issues with the stuttering etc.
I had an idea of seeing how things ran in Deus Ex with software rendering mode, but we only had the steam version to work with and I Don't know whether that can run in Software rendering mode or not.
There MAY be the possibility of switching in a Voodoo2 if we can find a game across which we can compare the results. And if we can find the voodoo2.
So help us H/A - are these the droids we're looking for?
a friend of mine is having issues when he tries to play any game involving 3d graphics - WoW, TF2, even old school games like NWN and Deus Ex.
Basically, anything with 3d graphics locks up and stutters every few seconds, he's on an AMD athlon 64 X2 dual-core 4200+, nvidia geforce 7600GT, 1 gig of ram and running XP SP3. This is also occasionally in combination with graphical distortion.
This happened on Sunday, and the only changes that come to mind are a .NET update and video card driver updates, both of which have been rolled back, but to no avail.
So far to try and figure out if we can pinpoint the particular issue we've tried a few different tactics.
Multiple modern games was the first attempt. Same regardless of game, though Source games regularly have additional graphical distortions - missing textures, smeared polys and weird stretches across the screen.
New/old video card drivers were installed/rolled back/etc
DirectX was reinstalled.
Tried finding an old game which ran in OpenGL mode - but got the same issues with the stuttering etc.
I had an idea of seeing how things ran in Deus Ex with software rendering mode, but we only had the steam version to work with and I Don't know whether that can run in Software rendering mode or not.
There MAY be the possibility of switching in a Voodoo2 if we can find a game across which we can compare the results. And if we can find the voodoo2.
So help us H/A - are these the droids we're looking for?
Apothe0sis on
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What do you mean by "3d graphics?" Do you mean, like, games that use 3d objects (e.g. Dawn of War or any newer game) or games that use the new nVidia 3D effect? I'm going to assume you mean the former.
This sounds like something's up with your video card. It doesn't sound like overheating to me, because I've had video cards with heating issues, and they usually go for awhile before the issues present; the problems generally don't start immediately. Could be power supply, what power supply does the computer have/what's the required power for that card? I'm going to bet this probably isn't it, because if I recall correctly, the mid-7000 cards don't draw any sort of crazy amount of power (but I could be wrong, I haven't looked at them in awhile).
I would run a diagnostic on your computer (if you go into the boot menu, you should have an option to boot into a diagnostic menu, and there should be diagnostics for your card). If they don't return anything, I'd try swapping in a different card to see if the problems persist (obviously, this is only if you have the spare card floating around; buying a 2nd card for the purposes of testing is expensive and unnecessary).
How recently did these problems start? Do you remember anything happening right before they started (any time in a few days before the issues started, really)? Have you tried taking the card out and putting it back in to see if there's a funky PCI connection (this is unlikely, but possible; sometimes it just gets jiggled, and if the pins aren't lining up correctly, then the card acts up).
I would do all that to check your card before assuming it's a different component. If changing the card doesn't solve the problem, then I would check out your processor. Did your friend assemble the computer himself or order it from somewhere? If he bought it pre-assembled, does it have a warranty? If he built it himself, are any of the components still under warranty?
I doubt it. He would see it even when he wasn't playing games if it were overheating, since it would just overheat after an hour or so of idle use. I had a video card with overheating this issues past summer, and it doesn't create artifacts, it just freezes whatever's on your screen at the time and then turns itself off and makes your monitor (and thus computer) useless.