Weird graphical glitches in Baldur's Gate II

[Ika]

I've been getting some strange graphical glitches in Baldur's Gate II recently. When I installed it and first loaded it, some of the icons (say, quick item icons and spell icons), effects (such as "chunky death" animations), and other stuff (like the white text that shows up sometimes on-screen) would have a strange black box around it or would go completely black sometimes. Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot as an example of this...

I went into the Config and looked around; I noticed that my game was playing on 16-bit windowed, so I switched that into 32-bit. Since then, the black boxes have disappeared, but another problem persisted. I'll let the screenshots do the talking...

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Aflac/ScreenShot004.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Aflac/ScreenShot005.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Aflac/ScreenShot006.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Aflac/ScreenShot007.jpg <- very visible in this one
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Aflac/ScreenShot008.jpg

See the strange boxes? I've never gotten those before and I don't know what's going on.

I'm running BG2 Windowed in 1024x768 resolution, 32-bit, 64-bit Vista HPremium, and an self-overclocked 8800GTS 320mb. Can anyone shed some light? It's not really that big of a problem anymore, but it's annoying sometimes.

EDIT: by the way, mods, I wasn't sure if this belonged in VC&G or PC Gaming, so please move the topic if it belongs more in PC Gaming.

 

[kmmatney]

Does it look OK in full screen? Some games just don't run well (or were never meant to be run) in windowed mode.

 

[alcoholbob]

Make sure 3D acceleration is turned off in the configuration settings, and also 3D animations (although I'm not certain if you have to turn it off or not). Baldur's Gate always had problems with GPU rendering, although any of this can easily be handled by the CPU in today's age and date (hell I ran the game in software mode on a 233MHz Pentium 2...and that was the top end when the game was released).

 

[Ika]

Problem persists in full screen, with 3d acceleration turned off, and with 3d animations turned off. Actually, the black box problem came back, and I got a screenie of what it looks like... it happened when I turned 3d hardware acceleration on, which is kind of odd.

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Aflac/ScreenShot009.jpg

You can see the black box around the Lilarcor white text and the black boxes surrounding the formations.

I did find an option for "Disable Vertex Padding", which is supposed to help my "gridlines" problem. I turned it on and it seemed to help a bit. So far I haven't gotten it to look better than with 3d animations and hardware acceleration on.

This problem is odd, though - BG2 runs fine on both my old Dell (P4 1.8ghz, 6800NU) and my laptop (C2D T7300, 8400GS), but strangely, not my desktop.

 

[Fenixgoon]

try running in XP compatibility mode? could be vista video drivers/8800

 

[alcoholbob]

Baldur's Gate 2 works fine for me in Vista (back when I had a 7800GT). Have you tried installing the newest patches from Bioware?

It's possible part of the problem is your 8800 series card, from what I can tell it renders things differently from previous generations (read: it cheats) and it looks completely different on the same settings vs my old 7800GT on a lot of older games I have (the IQ isn't flattering to say the least). It's possible this is part of the problem--the GPU architecture.

 

[Ika]

The thing is, BG2 works just fine on my laptop (which is 32-bit Vista HPremium), and my guess is that the 8400GS architecture is the same as the 8800GTS architecture (though I could be wrong on this point). I guess I'll just have to deal with it.

 

[bryanW1995]

hey, did you ever find a good fix for the haste bug? I've never been able to conclusively prove to myself that any of the available fixes actually "fixed" anything.

 

[aka1nas]

Do you have AA enabled? I've seen that effect with older games that aren't compatible with some AA modes. I can't remember if it's SS or MS that typically causes that effect.

 

[alcoholbob]

What's the haste bug?

 

[spotty]

Haha I'm glad I found this thread. Those hideous seam tiles were making me not want to play BG1 again...
Aflac, I don't know if you fixed it, but I have a 6600GT and I had the exact same problem as soon as I turned 3D Acceleration / Animations on. I followed aka1nas' suggestion and turned off anti-aliasing from the NVIDIA toolbar and it went away. sweet deal!

edit: my apologies to anyone who takes offense at necromancy