Problem With Video Corruption

[Larry Stephens]

Since running version 8.2, I've experienced periodic problems with video corruption. The game will be playing fine when, all of a sudden, the grass will flash from green to bright blue and then back again. When the grass goes back to green, however, the roads are blue and the smoke graphics are discoloured as well. I can still play the game but it's *very* distracting. If I exit the game and re-start, the graphics will be fine - at least for awhile.

This happens even from a cold boot with anti-virus software turned off and with no other applications running in the background. Anyone experienced this or have any ideas what may be going on? I'm running XP on a 3 gig desktop with 512 meg of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 video card. Would appreciate any advice.

[TheChin]

This happened to me with a Radeon 8500 card. It might be a Catalyst driver issue. Do you have the latest? It's sad to say, but some of the high end graphics cards have their drivers overtuned for 3d at the expense of 2d. You could always turn down your color depth on your desktop a notch and see if that stabilizes the palette.

[Voriax]

You might want to try the video hardware acceleration setting. Go to control panel -> display -> settings -> advanced -> troubleshooting and experiment with the hardware acceleration slider.

Voriax

[BruceAZ]

I hate to open an old issue but SPWAW has always been a memory hog. My old system had 256MB in Ram with a 1.8 P4 Chip with a fast video card with 128MB chip memory. This system played all games great except SPWAW. To solve the problem, I use to save after every turn and as soon as the small tactical screen in the lower right hand corner started to black out during turns, I shut the system down and restarted the game. This was my "signal" that the game will crash in the next 3 or 4 turns. This worked for me every time.

I have recently purchased a new Dell "Game Master" that has one gig of RAM. It has yet to crash even after playing for 3 hours straight! I could never do that before and the small map never goes black.

Good luck.

Recon
Semper Fi

[tmac]

Larry-
My experiences with this same issue always seemed to fall back on another program (typically a virus scan or auto updater) running in the background while SPWAW is onscreen. It really was a problem for me until I made sure those things weren't functioning while I play, and since then it doesn' happen to me at all.
Try it, it may be your issue.
Good luck,
Tim

[Larry Stephens]

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond.

Turning down the colour from 32 bit to 16 bit seems to have done the trick. I've been able to play for 90 minutes straight without any graphics problems and usually the glitch shows up within 15 minutes. The Catalyst drivers I'm running with the ATI card date back to December 2003. All the software I'm running is pretty stable, however, so I'm reluctant to change them unless I've run out of options.

Thanks again for your interest and support.

[Grim Reaper]

I'm having the same problem and I'm also using Radeon 9800, so it seems to be only radeon owners problem. Does any non-radeon user have this problem?

[Larry Stephens]

I'm also beginning to think it may be a problem with the ATI card. Despite my previous post where I indicated that my graphics problem seemed to have been resolved by turning down the colour from 32 bit to 16 bit, the problem has not gone away at all. The corruption continues even from a cold boot with nothing else running in the background. Although not a fix, I have noticed that when I use the 'Alt Tab' key combination to leave and re-enter the game, the colours are restored to normal (at least for a while).

Out of curiousity, are you using the latest Radeon drivers? I suppose it could also be one of the settings on the video card but, if so, I have no idea which one might be associated with flashing colours.

[proberts]

further to some recent posts on this subject i use an nvidia 5700 ultra and had the same problem after much checking i found the problem my cpu was running at 28-34% occupancy with nothing running at first thought it was spyware but it was a program called CISVC.EXE ( Microsoft Index Service Helper, )
a service that monitors the memory usage of Microsoft Indexing Service (cidaemon.exe) and automatically re-starts cidaemon.exe if it uses more than 40 MB of memory
i closed this down by stopping indexing services and all is well
8.20 seems to be very good the ai seems better anyway and the graphics crisper
regards phil

[Larry Stephens]

Thanks for the reply. Before checking out your suggestion, I downloaded and installed the latest Catalyst 4.7 drivers from ATI but they didn't resolve my graphics problem.

I had thought that I had already shut down all of the indexing under XP but, after loading Task Manager, I did find that CISVC.EXE was running. I removed CISVC.EXE from the list of active processes and, so far at least, I haven't experienced a recurrence of the flashing colours. Hopefully, this is the end of it.