Weird blury thing

[Warlord 11]

First off, this is not an EB bug, but I was hoping people here could help me. If this should not be here, feel free to delete this.

I have been experiencing a weird bug thing. When playing RTW (any mod, even vanilla) both the campaign map and the units on the battlefield are blurred. A couple of days ago, this went away. Everything was normal, and the game ran as well as normal, even though I had the graphics on the highest settings. It went away now, and I am back to blurry. I have tried everything I could think of to fix this, but I don't know how. Can anyone here help me?

Me:


Normal peoples:

[antisocialmunky]

Ick, it look like a problem with 3D texture sizes. Have you tinkered with your video card driver's setting to try and fix it? You could reinstall it. Its weird that its periodic like that. Another program may be messing with your driver settings or they could be corrupt.

Can you post your computer specs and your video card's driver name and number?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Yeah, I had that happen with my monitor too when I was using a different CPU last year. I updated drivers and never could fix it. Sorry I couldn't bring more promising info to the thread.

[Warlord 11]

Ick, it look like a problem with 3D texture sizes. Have you tinkered with your video card driver's setting to try and fix it? You could reinstall it. Its weird that its periodic like that. Another program may be messing with your driver settings or they could be corrupt.

Can you post your computer specs and your video card's driver name and number?

I didn't touch my video card, yet. Actually I am afraid I will mess things up more, as I don't really know what I am doing. If you could tell me exactly how, it would help a lot.

As for my specs: how do I find 'em? I found my video card: a "Radeon X300 SE 128MB hypermemory" and a "Radeon X300 SE 128MB hypermemory secondary" but I can't seem to find the rest.

I feel really dumb when it comes to this stuff as I have no idea what I am doing. But I really want to see the beauty of EB again! Thank you very much for your help!

[hoom]

Hypermemory is the most likely culprit.
You have a laptop, right?
Secondary = if you plugged in a seperate monitor, it plugs into the secondary interface.

Hypermemory uses main system memory to boost the total available to these low end graphics cards, but main system memory is slow and the CPU probably gets priority on its use.

So what I would expect to be happening here is that the game wants xMB of ram for the graphics plus yMB of ram for the game itself plus Windows & other programs running want zMB ram for itself but x+y+z are a bigger number than the total available and the graphics drivers sacrifice some of its section at the expense of your visuals.

Suggest checking the driver settings in the ATI driver control panel.
Also possibly there is a setting in the BIOS where you can dedicate more ram to the graphics?
Also see if it makes any difference what other programs are running in the background (less other programs should = better graphics)

[antisocialmunky]

I'm agreeing with hoom for the time being. Hyper memory is just a cheap way to have bigger numbers on the box...

I'd ask on a forum like www.hardforum.com or in the tech. help forum on this site to get more responses.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

It happened on my Dell desktop pretty much right out of the box. It was a new pretty nice one 9 months ago also. The screen was one of those flat ones though.

[hoom]

The screen itself has nothing to do with that.
Its the graphics card not putting out full quality textures.
Question is why though.

[Casuir]

Look like its using mipmaps, most likely its run out of texture memory as hoom pointed out. I had a similar problem though in my case it was disappearing textures, I got rid of it by resizing the textures for the new cities. Dunno how you'd get rid of it if its occouring in the stock game, there may be an option in your bios to increase video memory, try that.

[Intranetusa]

I had this problem also. I went into my computer, right click properties, went into Device manager, and turned off my integrated graphics. (I have both integrated & a video card)...for some reason the integrated graphics had activated and was creating a 2nd monitor.

[antisocialmunky]

Yes, if both the integrated and the X300 are using the memory, there won't be too much to go around. Many integrated graphic solutions can actually lock a chunk of memory from use by everything else. You might need to access your bios(usually press delete before the windows load screen on boot up) and turn it off if you can't through software.

[Warlord 11]

Hypermemory is the most likely culprit.
You have a laptop, right?

Nope, actually. The video card came with the computer.

Suggest checking the driver settings in the ATI driver control panel.

How exactly do I do that?

Also possibly there is a setting in the BIOS where you can dedicate more ram to the graphics?

I tried but couldn't find a setting that does this.

I'm agreeing with hoom for the time being. Hyper memory is just a cheap way to have bigger numbers on the box...

I'd ask on a forum like www.hardforum.com or in the tech. help forum on this site to get more responses.

I made a thread here: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=82802

It happened on my Dell desktop pretty much right out of the box. It was a new pretty nice one 9 months ago also. The screen was one of those flat ones though.

Me too...

[Boyar Son]

Oh your just experiencing what would happen if your graphic settings are low.

Thats all

OMG! Warlord 11 that was my graphic card (is your computer dell?) but how did get your graphics to take aways the blur?? I spent just about 2 years out of the whole time I had the game with that type of graphics.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

One other thing, I remember that at times, it was much much worse than others. Often it was not so bad right when I'd start off (but sometimes it was from the start) and it would get a lot worse. Sometimes it was just awful, and even the skins of the strat map units were just unrecognizable and they were just a mess. But it's exactly the problem Warlord has posted images of. For sure.

[LordCurlyton]

Reading things like this just makes me more glad I have a solid, if dated (3.5 years and counting), computer. Nice 2.7 GHz P4, GeForce Ti 4200 (512 Mb I believe), 17" flat screen. Can run EB on Large Battle size and with almost all graphics at highest with no problem, at least until the memory leak starts eating its way thru my memory (I am WELL acquainted with the buzzing sound when the memory allocated to running my wireless connection gets eaten, or some other similarly important background function). The other apps, they try and fight, but the RTW memory leak is just too strong for them.

[antisocialmunky]

Oh your just experiencing what would happen if your graphic settings are low.

Thats all

OMG! Warlord 11 that was my graphic card (is your computer dell?) but how did get your graphics to take aways the blur?? I spent just about 2 years out of the whole time I had the game with that type of graphics.

He said that it went away and then came back...

Warlord, if you don't know how to turn off the integrated graphics, oyu might want to shut down all the programs running in the background like antivirus and firewall(if you're disconnected from the internet of course). That may give you enough ram to make it look nice.

[hoom]

The video card came with the computer.

Oh dear. Hypermemory (& the Nvidia equivalent) is bottom of the low end cheap graphic cards.
I thought it was only used by integrated/laptop graphics

[Imperator]

I have the same problem but what I do is hit Exit (brings up list), video options, and change my map resulution (if its high, I set it down, if low I set it high). Then when the map reloads it even worse! But then I repeat the process (so the video settings are the same as when they began) and suddenly it looks clean! Don't ask me how it works but it works for me. Try it and tell me if you can too, I'm kinda curious...

[mAIOR]

I have the same problem but only in EB... I don't know why I tried everything but nothing seems to work. Is the EB team using more detailed textures than other mods in the Campaign map by any chance??

Cheers...

[antisocialmunky]

EB loads alot more data into memory, they use nearly all the unit slots and have several hundred barrackes.

[mAIOR]

It's not that... it's only in the campaign map the battles go fine and I have maxed out settings...


Cheers...

[Casuir]

I have the same problem but only in EB... I don't know why I tried everything but nothing seems to work. Is the EB team using more detailed textures than other mods in the Campaign map by any chance??

Cheers...

The textures for the new cities are a ridiculous size, 1024*1024 for the cities and 512*512 for the walls iirc, plus they all have explicit alpha's. You could fit the textures for 56 units into the 5 files used so I'd imagine they'd have an effect on performance.

[Warlord 11]

I have the same problem but what I do is hit Exit (brings up list), video options, and change my map resulution (if its high, I set it down, if low I set it high). Then when the map reloads it even worse! But then I repeat the process (so the video settings are the same as when they began) and suddenly it looks clean! Don't ask me how it works but it works for me. Try it and tell me if you can too, I'm kinda curious...

It didn't seem to work, I'm afraid. It might have made it slightly better, but not very much.

I think I am going to just get a new video card.

[hoom]

Probably best to try a newer driver first.
Go to http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html & download the latest drivers.
You may have an uninstall link in the Start menu, in which case you should generally uninstall before installing the new drivers.

BTW, in answer to 'how to open the driver control centre?'
Normally if you right click on the desktop, you can either do Properties at the bottom or if its there at the top ATI Catalyst Control Centre.
The latter should at least be there after updating.

[Warlord 11]

Probably best to try a newer driver first.
Go to http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html & download the latest drivers.
You may have an uninstall link in the Start menu, in which case you should generally uninstall before installing the new drivers.

BTW, in answer to 'how to open the driver control centre?'
Normally if you right click on the desktop, you can either do Properties at the bottom or if its there at the top ATI Catalyst Control Centre.
The latter should at least be there after updating.

I tried... Didn't fix it. I should get a new video card anyway though.

Thank you for you help, nontheless!

[antisocialmunky]

Get a Geforce 7600 if you want a cheap good card. Try to aim for EVGA since they are one of the best companies for video cards. YOu might want to get one of the Geforce 8800 cards if you want the high end.