Curse

Kaziro · Jun 03, 2005, 06:09 AM // 06:09

I'm running on P4 2.4 ghz, 1.5 gig ddr ram and have a PowerColor ATI Radeon 9800 PRO which by far, exceed game requirements. I was surprised to find that on the bare minimum settings, I had graphics problems in guild wars...

Graphics corruption ----> Brown branches become green, Green fuzzy wuzzy squares popping here and there, People's heads becoming sticks and so forth.

I've spent the past 24 hours trying every damn method to get rid of this problem. Formatting my computer didn't help at all, neither did trying very ATI catalyst driver from 5.1 to 5.5 help. I tried many other clone ATI drivers and that didn't help either. Wasn't my power supply either, as a Rad 9800 only needs 300 Watts and I have 500.

After half a day of frustration, I just let the game run, and observed my rig. I found that when I ran guild wars, my video card heated up higher than normal. Thus I went to my other home computer and ripped out all the fans and put it into my computer. The comp I was running guildwars on now has 5 fans. I also took off the computer casing and put a gigantic portable fan blowing straight at my video card. Heat should not be a problem. Eagerly I turned on the computer, and guess what, it still didn't work, but the situation wasn't as bad as before as there was less of the graphic graffiti.

I "F"ed around with my bios, all the voltage setting ands stuff, but increasing the voltage only made things worse.

As a last resort, I went to get this program called ATI Tool, an overclocker and tweaker for ATI based cards. I got it to underclock my card, and finally, it worked... The war was over, a triumphant victory I celebrated, as guild wars now runs on 1024X768 res with highest settings, 4X AA. Smooth as hell, no flick no tears, no funny multi color rainbow PoS. My stock unclocked vid card was set at 350 core / 350 mem , After setting it to 350 core and 300 mem, there were no problems at all.

Turns out to be a 9800 overheat problem caused by the mem settings. ATI Tool can be downloaded at www.guru3d.com . I'm currently using a clone ATI driver as well, DNA 3.6.5.1 which seems to work perfectly fine. Hope this helps other users out there, cause I can empathize with paying for a game which you so wanna play, installing it, and only to find out that it doesn't run like it should...

Game on!

aeroclown · Jun 03, 2005, 07:26 AM // 07:26

This should be stickyed

Kaziro · Jun 03, 2005, 09:44 AM // 09:44

Hmmmm with ATI Tool, I forced the graphics to run on 6X AA and 16X Trilinear AF.
My Audigy EAX settings set to Theatre.
Playing Guild Wars is like watching a movie now...