ROF ICE Wierd Graphics Problem

[Mike Dora]

Well I finally broke down and got ROF ICE. It looks very nice - but not for long! After only a few seconds' "flight" I start getting some wierd graphics effects, such as those shown in the attachments. First I start seeing non-terrain tiles on the terrain, as in screenie 1:

 

 

 

Then the whole scenery goes kind of turquoisey, as in capture 2:

 

 

 

When I try to exit, I find that the text has turned to garbage too:

 

 

 

Finally, when I go back into the menus, a variant of the problem persists:

 

 

 

As you can imagine this is incredibly frustrating. Is this a known problem (it must surely be by now, at this stage in the ROF development process), how can I resolve it?

 

Tech info: I'm running ROF ICE v1.014. OS is Win XP v2002 SP3, system has Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, E8500 @ 3.16GHz, 3Gb RAM, and graphics card is NVidia GeForce 9800 GT.

 

Any ideas anyone?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

[+Erik]

If you have another video card I'd try swapping it out. The artifacts you're seeing can be caused by a bad video card, driver, or memory.

[Mike Dora]

If you have another video card I'd try swapping it out. The artifacts you're seeing can be caused by a bad video card, driver, or memory.

 

Thanks, but not sure I get that Erik, ROF ICE is the only program to suffer these snags, every other program on my system runs just fine. That surely tends to point to it being a program-related issue?

[+Erik]

In the ROF options under graphic settings make sure the settings are optimal for your card. The artifact rendering is related to how your card handles and processes rendering like OpenGL and the like.

[Mike Dora]

In the ROF options under graphic settings make sure the settings are optimal for your card. The artifact rendering is related to how your card handles and processes rendering like OpenGL and the like.

 

Thanks Erik, but how can I figure out those optimal settings? ROF seems very lacking in such advice.

 

Mike

[Tamper]

If I had to guess, you have one (or more) of three things there (or some combination thereof):

 

1. The video card is too tasked with RoF to keep up. (try making user all your settings are absolute minimum and see if it improves at all)

2. You have a power supply that cannot keep up with the load your system and video card combined are placing on it.

3. You have a problem with airflow (heat) - the harder the system has to run, the more heat it produces.

 

You don't really say what your RoF video settings are, what your system temps are like when this happens, what wattage your PSU is, or how much memory that 9800GT has on it - they were made in both 512M and 1G varieties, I believe.

 

These are all important things when you have issues like the pics you posted. Also, drivers can do that, too - might run fine on everything else, but one game. The thing is, that's a fairly conservative rig you have there -and RoF's producers have *grossly* underestimated the system 'minimum requirements'. Your machine is having to work hard to do RoF, I bet - and maybe much harder than the other games you play (you also don't say which other games).

 

It is not the "SLI problem" someone suggested before (uhhh, you're not running SLI - but I guess they overlooked that; besides that people wrongly blame SLI all the time because they don't know what they're talking about). I'd also venture it's not a bad graphics card, either. There's a lot of stuff that can cause video corruption like this, and affect only one game. I've seen memory set at the wrong speed do it - only in one game. Speaking of which, you also don't mention if you've done any overclocking or fiddling in the BIOS on the machine...everything pretty much stock, or ?

 

HTH

[+JediMaster]

Try checking the fan on the video card. It's possible this is the only thing you run that works your card this hard and it might be overheating due to dust build up and/or video card fan problems. Make sure you have recent video drivers too.

 

 

[Mike Dora]

OK Everyone,

 

Thanks due to VonHelton over at the ROF forum for reminding me to update my video card drivers. Update done, problem seems to be solved.

 

I've also been able to verify that all my older, favourite programs still work with the new drivers. I confess to a reluctance to update drivers until absolutely necessary, because of past traumas of "losing" favourite older sims after such updates (remember Red Baron 2 & European Air War probs with new drivers?)

 

Hovever this time all seems to be well. I think I even detect a slight improvement in OFF performance!

 

Thanks again

 

Mike