When playing AC with my 8800 gts 640, I get this very bizarre texture flickering/skewing in sky. Please see screenshots of the problem here: http://s128.photobucket.com/albums/p193/dauger75/Asherons Call/8800 Texture Bug/ The bug usually shows up within the first minute of play, but on occasion it can be up to 15-20 minutes or so before it shows up. What happens is that in a portion of the sky the texture either flickers between the correct texture and white, or it flickers against the correct texture and another sky texture from a different time of day, or it flickers against a skewed version of the correct texture. This bug has been reported by many people. There is at least one report of the problem on an 8600 and there are also reports on the new 8800 gt line. There's only one report that I know of a 8800 user that doesn't have the problem. That user was playing the game using 2000 server IIRC. XP and Vista are affected. I've personally tried driver versions 96.89 - 171.23 on XP 32. I've also tried the latest NGO and Omega drivers. As far as 3D management settings go, I've created a profile for AC and I've tried turning off every setting that has an off value. Also, game settings have no affect on the bug. I've also tried disabling write combining and lowering the windows troubleshooting video acceleration slider. Here's the kicker - The bug doesn't exist when playing the game via wine on Linux with the Linux nvidia driver. I'm wondering if anyone can think of anything else to try. Here are some messageboard threads regarding this bug: http://forums.ac.turbine.com/showthread.php?t=36609 http://forums.ac.turbine.com/showthread.php?t=32843 http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=48567 http://vnboards.ign.com/ac_utilities/b5432/106142724/p1/?51 http://vnboards.ign.com/ac_utilities/b5432/104885818/p1
Thanks for the reply. I forgot to put this in the original post. I've underclocked my card as far down as it will go (ridiculously low) and the issue is still there. Also, myself and others are able to run modern games which are much more gpu intense just fine. 3d mark as well. That combined with the fact that so many other 8800 users are experiencing the exact same phenomena leads me to believe that it is not heat related. Another thing to note: There is one user who RMA'd two cards and reinstalled his OS and still had the problem. Hope that helps.
Here's some temperature/clock data: The bug is appearing with: GPU Core @ 144 MHz @ 49c GPU Mem @ 209 MHz The card's default GPU core is 579 and mem is 850 with an idle temp of around 60c in my case.
Hmm well try one of the older nvidia whql drivers from this site guru3d.com. I don't know for sure but think asherons call is a much older and non supported game by nvidia anymore.
96.89 is the earliest driver I could find on Guru3d that will detect the card and install. The next earliest driver won't detect the card. I think 97.02 was the first "official" 8800 driver. The problem exists both in the 96.89 and 97.02 driver. So basically, the oldest possible driver for the 8800 has the bug. The thing that's really interesting is that the game works fine with the current linux driver in Wine. That leads me to believe that there is either just a bug in the windows driver base, or that the linux driver is not implementing a problematic feature that the windows driver has. I guess another possibility is that Wine's implementation of D3D is allowing things to work correctly. Yup, the game is old. It came out in 1999, and I have fond memories of playing it on my 3dfx Voodoo 2s. It's pretty obvious that Nvidia isn't actively supporting older games. It's a shame. Interestingly enough the game runs fine with the latest nvidia driver and my old 6600gt. Unfortunately, the 6600 doesn't have enough horsepower to run the game very well at my monitor's native res.
HA HA HA HA!! My first reaction when I saw this post was WTF??!! I did not realize some people still play that game! Talk about old! I think the card is too powerful for that game and the drivers don't support that old of a game. Your 8800 GTS must of posted somthing on a pop-up window saying "I know this dude did not put in Asheron's Call! Please Remove Disk and put something in worth Rendering!!":funny: Just kidding, by the way. That game must be more gpu intensive than Crysis. c:
I actually got a pretty good chuckle out of reading these responses. I'll admit it's a pretty dated game. But like UO, AC keeps drawing people back for nostalgia value. A bunch of us users have been going around in circles between Turbine (the developer), Nvidia, and various motherboard manufacturers. As per standard procedure, no one wants to acknowledge the issue, or even worse, points the finger in the other direction. I guess it's another classic game that falls victim to lack of backwards compatibility. It's actually pretty sad. I'm not saying that AC is a universal classic that people will want to be playing 20 years from now, but there are some true bona fide classics like Thief 2 that both ATI and Nvidia have broken support for. Hopefully down the road people will come up with some sort of hardware emulation for these games like they have done for old dos games that have sound systems that are incompatible with modern sound cards.
