Display issues when playing games

[Jan]

Hey there!

This is my first post in this section, and here goes. My computer is quite old and features GeForce4 MX 420. I recently updated NVIDIA's drivers, and everything works great (well, as great as this graphic card can handle) but while playing games I get this strange and quite frankly annoying problem:

During video sequences the monitor only shows half of the picture, and it's being "stretched" so that it covers the whole screen. When I play the actual game, the whole picture is shown, and there are no such problems. This happens while playing "Prince of Persia 2" among others.

Can anyone help me? Why is this only happening while playing the video sequences? I'd be thankful for any replies.

[Celtboy]

Sounds like an issue with one of the following:

DirectX
OpenGL
Direct3D

or your drivers.

I'd download some older reference drivers for the card. I have an mx440 (or is it 420?) card. I don't have those problems. Only games I play: CS (and CS:Source), quake3, UT, HL2. Ghost Recon.

-Celt

[Jan]

There may be some problems with DirectX. I ran 'DirectX Diagnostic Tool' and tested Direct3D. The same problem occured; the spinning cube was cut off in the middle and stretched over the screen. But this only happened in the first phase of the test, the following two showed just fine.

Before the first phase of the test, I got a confirmation window with the following text:


This test will use hardware-accelerated Direct3D 7 interfaces


while before the next phases I got:


This test will use hardware-accelerated Direct3D 8 interfaces


and


This test will use hardware-accelerated Direct3D 9 interfaces


Might this have something to do with the problem? Thanks so much for replying!

[sage45]

What kind of monitor?

What are your desktop settings (1024x768, etc)?

What frequency is your monitor set to?

-sage-

[Jan]

What kind of monitor?

What are your desktop settings (1024x768, etc)?

What frequency is your monitor set to?

-sage-

I have a traditional CRT monitor (Compaq 7500), and I'm running on a 1280 by 1024 pixels resolution. The monitor is set to 60 Hertz.

[Celtboy]

if you got the same issue during a DxDiag test, I'd recommend reinstalling DX9.

-Celt

[Jan]

Well, I re-installed DirectX9c and the problem persists... I have no idea what might be wrong :confused:

[Celtboy]

what version of the drivers are you using?

[Jan]

Do you mean this: http://private.scanactive.com/uploads/directx.png?

[Celtboy]

yes. our setups appear to be identical. (Except I run 1600x1200 native res).

What version of dx do you have? (take a screenshot of that too...) :)

[Jan]

Here goes: http://private.scanactive.com/uploads/directx2.png

[Celtboy]

I'm running DX 9.0b, not 9.0c like you. You could try a downgrade.

-Celt

[Jan]

Yeah, it seems as lots of people has gotten problems while upgrading to DirectX 9.0c; it's supposedly much more unstable than 9.0b. This is mind, I tried to downgrade to 9.0b simply by installing it over 9.0c, but I got a message that said:

DirectX setup has determined that a newer version of DirectX is already installed. No installation was necessary.

So I'm pretty much stuck. There is no simple command to uninstall DirectX 9.0c and then install 9.0b. However, I found this link (http://www.3dcenter.org/downloads/directx-dx9uninstaller.php), but I'm a bit sceptic to use it. Do you have any recommendations?

[Jan]

Update: I actually got to revert DirectX to the original version that was installed on my computer after which I installed 9.0b. Unfortunately it didn't solve the problem, so I tried downgrading my display drivers instead. And to my surprise I was happy to realize that the problem was fixed! Yay!

It's quite funny how manufacturers encourage people to update all kinds of drivers, while the end result can actually be worse. Shouldn't updating drivers be a good thing or why does one do it?

Thanks again for your help!