Weird graphics bug/lockups

[unmerged(164822)]

I have a problem that I hope some of you can help me with, as I can't really find an answer to it anywhere. I got East India Company the other day, and was really looking forward to it. I installed it and started it up, and I got a message about a new patch. I installed that too, and fired it up again. Everything looked like it worked fine, but then suddenly the graphics went completely berzerk, as it is. The screen got covered with something that looked like part of a texture, only it had the wrong colors on it. Like neon-green. It changed now and then, but it was still just random bits of an image with random colors. I tried to exit the game, but as I couldn't really see what I was doing it proved hard, alt-tabbing didn't really work either as the whole computer seemed to be completely bogged up with something. As mentioned, the game is patched to be up to date, and I also tried installing new graphics drivers, but neither helped. For the record I have a 9800 GTX+ GPU. I hope some of you can shed some light on this, as I have no idea what could be causing this and I'd like to play the game a little more than halfway through the tutorials before it goes nuts on me...

 

[delra]

Are you sure your game wasn't running in the background when you were installing the patch? Also you need the newest drivers for your card.

And since I have 9800 myself and experienced no problems whatsoever, I doubt it's your hardware that's guilty.

 

[unmerged(164822)]

I tried reinstalling the patch just to be sure, but the problem persists. This time after alt-tabbing out though, I got a message saying the display driver had stopped working, then the screen blacked out completely.

Display drivers are the newest ones straight from the Nvidia site.

 

[unmerged(140324)]

Hi! Does other games work? Maybe your graphics card is overheating if the game works some time before the troubles. One thing you could try is to downgrade your gfx drivers.

 

[unmerged(164822)]

Hi! Does other games work? Maybe your graphics card is overheating if the game works some time before the troubles. One thing you could try is to downgrade your gfx drivers.

I've been playing several other games lately with no problems at all, including Crysis which is still pretty taxing on the GPU. No problems. I also have a 24 cm fan on the side and another on the top of my cabinet, plus smaller fans in front and the back. To top it off I have a Zalman fan unit on my processor instead of the standard Intel unit. I checked my system temperatures both with and without load a while back, and although I can't remember the exact temperature readings I got, they were well within the limits, so I'd be surprised if overheating was the cause.

I tried with two different sets of drivers for my graphics card, but neither worked. Either way, the game seems to run fine for a few minutes, then it goes completely nuts on me for no apparent reason. You think it could be some graphics setting that makes it misbehave?


Edit: Although it would surprise me a lot with a 24 cm fan blowing directly at it, I guess it could technically happen that the GPU is overheating even if the rest of the system temperatures are ok. I can try to get some temperature readings while I play EIC and see, if I am able to access the temperature program at all after the game goes nuts.

 

[unmerged(189102)]

This is the exact same problem i have. Played Tuturial 1 fine, then into tuturial 2 and everything crashes. Graphics goes all haywire and blocks out, so unable to see any parts of the screen correctly.
I have updated all hardware drivers and are trying to play V1.06 of EIC.
I have no problems playing any other games.

System: AMD Phenom 9950 Quad Core
4 Gig Ram
9800 GTX+