Vital comp specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 4GB RAM Win7 64-Bit (used to be WinXP SP3 and that worked just fine) Adequate HDD GeForce 7950GT, BIOS 5.71.22.42.51, driver 258.96 (latest WHQL) Dual-screen CRT setup (obviously only one screen used for SCII) SC2 1.1.0 When running SC2 at a resolution other than 1280x1024, I see little "blits" in various pieces of the screen; small rectangular chunks of corrupted graphics, mostly one color but with some pixels of magenta or green. They are not reproduced on screenshots (oddly), but happen in places such as the following: - Places that used to be light, but are now black (the letterbox areas during cutscenes, and the selected unit area in-game, are the two biggest offenders, and the artifacts appear in a rather regular "grid") - Shadows (the artifacts here are greyish) - Water (the artifacts are either black or blue, with some purple/green dots) - UI elements like buttons and window borders - Random places in cutscenes All of these areas seem to deal with extra rendering steps like transparencies, antialiasing, etc. The grid gave me the idea that maybe the graphics engine or card wasn't properly clearing pixels at some stage of the rendering, so i boosted the graphics to 1280x1024 (my native desktop res is 1152x864) and that clears the artifacts but slows my FPS to a measly 11 (at 1024x768 I get >100) Obviously I have no screenshots as the artifacts haven't been reproduced on any screenshot I've been able to capture. Please help. If all else fails I still have the WinXP partition, but I'd much prefer to get this working in Windows 7.
Chances are the reason screen caps aren't working right are for 1 of 2 reasons: Back in the day, nVidia would cheat on image quality test by sending all screenshot request to Windows software DX renderer. Only way to get a real screen shot in that case is to use some external program (not print screen)... I do not know of a good one. SC2 could be sending the screenshot request to the software DirectX renderer itself. Case in point, an external program would be required in this case too. My experience with video cards when they start doing what you described is that they are only a few steps from RIP. Your card is old, lets face facts that its a valid possibility. You didn't specify if your card was AGP or PCIe (yeah, they made this card AGP). You also didn't post the make and model of your motherboard and BIOS version, which are also extremely important. Another possibility is that the motherboard slot your card is installed into needs to be cleaned. Get some caned air and blow it out (and blowing out the entire system is a good idea too). You said things worked fine under XP SP3, but you haven't provided any information as to what drivers, etc, where installed on the XP SP3 system. The 1.1.1 patch did just come out too.. did that effect anything at all when installed? Some other things to try: disable one monitor and play StarCraft 2 on only one screen, does that change anything? 7 series nVidia cards shouldn't support PhysX acceleration but... check you nVidia control panel settings and make sure PhysX settings are completely disabled if there are any! Post a dxdiag of the system so I can gather additional details. To run dxdiag=> Windows_logo_key+r, dxdiag. If you have 64-bit windows, click the button at the button that says "Run 64-bit DxDiag," Then save all the data by clicking "Save All Information..." zip/rar the text file and attach it to the post. Instructions on how to zip here. To create a rar file, first download and install winRAR then read this guide here. Since you have a 64-bit system, it is super important that you post a 64-bit DXdiag!
