Yesterday I downloaded the demo of Bet on Soldier, a crappy, futuristic first person shooter with mediocre graphics and laughably poor voice acting. There were a couple of other problems with the game: waypoints on the map which the characters were saying were yellow were actually green, and after I shot one particular enemy, he stood upright in mid air instead of falling to the ground. Point is, this game was not quite ready for prime time, and was pretty unstable, as can be expected since it is only a beta and the game is supposed to be released at the end of the month.
I had gotten through about 3 minutes of the game, when all of a sudden, as I pressed the Use key to operate one of the games ammo stations, the screen went black, then it was garbled a little bit, and for about 5 seconds after that the sound just kept looping and then my computer rebooted. When it rebooted, the entire screen was just garbled graphics. So I turned my computer off and restarted. This time, the command line boot screen text was fine, but as soon as I got into windows there was distortion again. Picture the sort of colorful blocky garbled crap you would see if an old arcade game you were playing just f'ed up. What I am seeing now is basically red vertical lines running down the screen, and in some windows, there is a fairly solid pink or red textured fill across the entire window.
I uninstalled the drivers, and when I use just the default windows VGA drivers, there is no distortion. Of course, those drivers suck and my computer is as slow as hell. I tried reinstalling the latest drivers, and also tried installing older drivers but still have the same problem. If the display on 2D windows is readable but with a lot of colorful distortion, 3D games are totally undecipherable. So the question is, could that game actually have screwed up my graphics card somehow? Could it have just corrupted some setting in windows or is there a chance that it actually damaged the hardware? I have an MSI 6600GT PCI express and I was not oveclocking it or otherwise messing with it in any way. Does anyone have any idea how I might go about fixing this?
I had gotten through about 3 minutes of the game, when all of a sudden, as I pressed the Use key to operate one of the games ammo stations, the screen went black, then it was garbled a little bit, and for about 5 seconds after that the sound just kept looping and then my computer rebooted. When it rebooted, the entire screen was just garbled graphics. So I turned my computer off and restarted. This time, the command line boot screen text was fine, but as soon as I got into windows there was distortion again. Picture the sort of colorful blocky garbled crap you would see if an old arcade game you were playing just f'ed up. What I am seeing now is basically red vertical lines running down the screen, and in some windows, there is a fairly solid pink or red textured fill across the entire window.
I uninstalled the drivers, and when I use just the default windows VGA drivers, there is no distortion. Of course, those drivers suck and my computer is as slow as hell. I tried reinstalling the latest drivers, and also tried installing older drivers but still have the same problem. If the display on 2D windows is readable but with a lot of colorful distortion, 3D games are totally undecipherable. So the question is, could that game actually have screwed up my graphics card somehow? Could it have just corrupted some setting in windows or is there a chance that it actually damaged the hardware? I have an MSI 6600GT PCI express and I was not oveclocking it or otherwise messing with it in any way. Does anyone have any idea how I might go about fixing this?