hooligan on 1/9/2002 at 18:27

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Whenever I try to play Thief, Thief 2, System Shock 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, Dues Ex, NHL 2002, Madden's NFL 2003, FIFA 2002, or Unreal (games I want to play of course) the game loads but all I see is a black screen with shards and triangles, so it is unplayable. The game loads ok to the menu screen although it off centered toward the right. When I start the game is when I get the garbage on the screen. I have no problems with such games as Max Payne, Ghost Recon, MOH, RTCW, SOF.

I have noticed in games like Dues Ex and Unreal that have tje Safe Mode option, that when I check "disable 3d sound hardware", the game runs ok with no video problems but it runs in a small window. If I try to resize the screen to full screen option, I get the garbled, irregular triangles/tears all over the screen. Could someone in the name of God tell me what could possibly be the problem? I have played all the Thief series and System Shock 2 on on older computer that I had which was Windows 98, with a Voodoo 3 card, and I believe an Aureal sound card. The games ran perfectly fine. With my new system I built, I have had problems with these games.

Oh and I need to say that I have all updated drivers for sound, video, monitor, win. xp (NTFS partition), DirectX 8.1. I've tried lowering and disabling sound and video hardware, forcing vsync off, changing agp aperature size, all kind of fiddlings and its driving me mad!
Running directx.diag shows now problems and using compatablility mode in XP does not work!


Ok here is what I got:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Asus A7V266-E motherboard
AMD Athlon(TM) XP1700+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1477MHz
512MB DDR RAM
NVIDIA GeForce3 video card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
SyncMaster 905DF Monitor


Thanks,

Mario