It's probably worth mentioning that the sprite generator does not work on 100% of all graphics cards able to run Rome, because some cards don't support the (slightly more advanced) features it uses. That was one of several reasons why we decided to pregenerate the sprites rather than generating them on the fly at load time.

Almost all NVidia AGP cards do work, and so do most ATI cards after the Radeon 8500. Quite a few of the built-in graphics solutions don't cut the mustard, as they say, and the lesser graphics manufacturers are a mixed bag.