Need technical help with Empire Total War

[///M-Spec]

I just bought the retail DVD version of Empire Total War and I'm having serious graphics issues.

Many objects in the game appear half rendered. Other objects such as weapons disappear entirely. This happens at multiple detail settings and multiple resolutions. At certain settings, the game just freaks out, draws a bunch of cyan colored junk on the screen and crashes. The game works with all settings off at min resolution, but it looks like crap and I'm not willing to play the game this way.

I am running the latest version of the game on Vista 64.

I have the latest version of the nvidia drivers installed.

My box is a bone stock Dell XPS 630i. No OC.

Video card is a GTS 240. OEM version of the old 9800 GTS.

All other games run flawlessly. Modern Warfare, World in Conflict, Mass Effect, NFS Shift, Medieval 2 Total War all run great.

Sega tech support is hopeless. Total War forums are too cluttered for me to get useful info on my specific problem.

Any ideas?


M

 

[Gabkicks]

i would wonder if it was overheating, but you say other games run fine? sounds like you are getting artifacts, and those come from either not having enough power getting to graphics card, or if the graphics card is too hot. Try upping the fanspeed of the gpu and see if that changes anything.

 

[///M-Spec]

Solved it.

Turns out nvidia drivers and Empire Total War do play well together. Lots of bugs no matter what version you run. I got an older version (the one that shipped with my Dell) to work if I turn off the PhysX GPU driver.

Can't believe I'm having driver compatibility problems in this day in age What next? I need to flip some dip switches on my video card and set it for the right IRQ?

Pretty good game now that I have it working.


M