Sims 2 flicker

bowen

I'm having a slight graphics flicker while playing Sims 2 every so often where the whole scene (excluding the HUD) will just flicker out and back in. This is the only game I'm noticing it in and there's no way in hell it's pushing my card too hard if WoW isn't even doing it on max settings, or there isn't enough power or all that common mumbo jumbo.

Problem still exists in windowed mode, non windowed mode, after full reinstall, after driver update, after driver rollback, with vysnc on or off, with all the catalyst UI settings on defaults, and reduced down to performance or pumped up to quality, switched from CPU affinity of both cores to a single core (on either or). This started happening for no apparent reason one day.

Any ideas?

Windows XP
ATI radeon 4850 HD
Intel Core2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz (ASUS P5Q LGA 775)

Let me know if you need more info.

My last resort is to reformat the PC and then if that doesn't work try DX10 in Vista.

Edit: changed title because that may have been confusing.

GameHat

Hm, it's probably not much help, but my setup isn't too different:

Radeon 4870
Vista 64
Core 2 Duo E8400

I've not encountered your problem, so it's probably not a hardware compatibility problem.

bowen

I figured it was probably an xp issue. I do have a second PC with the exact same hardware as my first so I'll see if I can duplicate it.

Dunadan019

have you tried overclocking your card and setting the CPU priority to high?

thats about all i can think of.

bowen

No but I doubt it's an issue with speed, I'd be surprised if it was, and am not about to void my warranty in case it's a busted card.

Ninyu

Do you have dual monitors and by chance are you running something on the other one? When I run my Zune library software on one monitor it causes my EVE window to flicker on the other monitor. Minimizing the Zune window stops it though. Not sure what causes it and I haven't spent a whole lot of time investigating. Just a thought.

bowen

It's a dual card, but only one monitor.

Dunadan019

bowen wrote: »

No but I doubt it's an issue with speed, I'd be surprised if it was, and am not about to void my warranty in case it's a busted card.

well, do you have background tasks running? something like teatimer?

sometimes those can conflict with certain aspects of certain games.

also, the overclocking system for an HD4850 should be accessable through catalyst, it doesn't void the warranty to use the utility.

i would try eliminating all but the most basic processes and right click on the sims2 while running and set the CPU priority to high.

if you already did that.... well.... um... try vista.

BEAST!

GameHat wrote: »

Hm, it's probably not much help, but my setup isn't too different:

Radeon 4870
Vista 64
Core 2 Duo E8400

I've not encountered your problem, so it's probably not a hardware compatibility problem.

what drivers do you have?

i don't have Sims 2 but i personally have lots of problems with ATI drivers in general, one version will work fine but the next will totally screw up some games and fix others...

i'd really lean towards blaming it on drivers.....

bowen

Yeah I'm thinking it's drivers myself. And no I don't have anything running in the background. I'm going to try an excessive rollback.

Nobody

If it helps, my wife is having the same problem with Sims 2 on a Vista 32 machine using the same video card.

bowen

The more annoying bug is the "Please insert the original disc instead of a backup (1000)" shit that happens because of the draconian SecurROM.