Baldur's 2 Doesn't work anymore.

[DB4]

Well I recently purchased Baldur's 2 after enjoying the first one.
Well this is where the problem begins. Everything was fine with the old drivers. I have upgraded to the new drivers. Did an unistall with the new Unistaller, and now when I play Baldur's at any res with 3D support it is painfully slow and small black marks appera above the cursor and most buttons. Even the intro Black Isle anims play slowly. Anyone any ideas for settings. Software run fine but I am not happy with that.
System :
PIII 450 @ 504
128 PC133
G400 32MB DH

Dean

[gengi]

I had the same problem and had to revert to the old drivers.

[Gurm]

Win9x or Win2k?

- GUrm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Targon]

If you switch to software mode(turn off hardware acceleration in the config program), do you still have problems? The hardware acceleration for BG2 combined with the Matrox drivers is very broken(8 bit color while the program is set for 32 bit color). Some claim they arn't having a problem with the latest drivers, but I've seen some weird graphics problems beyond the color issue with 6.10 over the ones with 6.04.

[Grego]

I have used pd5.52 (with some glitches) pd6.04 and am currently using pd6.10. I also noticed the extreme decrease in speed with the new drivers, but I solved this by turning off "Use 3d acceleration" and keeping "3d animations" on, I dont think there is any difference in how it looks, but am not sure, there is however a big difference in performance. It works like a charm, so Im happy.

Grego



------------------
System:
Asus A7V rev. 1.01p bios 1004.a
AMD Thunderbird 800@800
SBLive retail with liveware 3.0
Matrox g400 MAX
LG Flatron 795FT 17" monitor
IBM 13.5 GB 7200 hdd
Pioneer 103-s dvdrom
Win98 1.st edition
directx 7.0a
128mb pc133 cas2 from Memory Card Technology

[DB4]

Hello

I use W98. I think for now I will do what you do Grego. It is a shame to not be able to play with 3D acceleration on such a new game with the latest drivers. Heres hoping that a fix will be sorted soon.

Cheers chaps.

Dean

[Heed]

Just to clarify, 3d in BG2 does almost nothing. Here's the official word on it:

"By turning on 3D mode in Baldurs Gate II you essentially turn on 3 effects.
All water is then rendered with a blending rather than a dithering effect,
as is the fog of war. All effects in the game that can be brightened or
blended will render faster. Fading from one color to another will happen
faster. There are no other changes to the way the rendering system works.

The differential in speed that you may notice is dependant on the video
card you use and what features it supports. Not all 3D accelerators will
notice an improvement and there are some video cards that will even render
it slower or not at all. Unlike games that have massive amounts of
polygons and require 3D accelerators to draw them really quickly, Baldurs
Gate II is a sprite based game. All graphics are drawn out on to flat
surfaces, not in a 3 dimensional environment, so the acceleration noticed
by other games may not be noticed in BG.

By:
Dan Morris
Senior Programmer - BG2"

I also experienced severe slowdown with the latest drivers, so I reverted to 6.04. It's really your call as to whether you find the new drivers more beneficial overall, or if you you prefer these three effects to be blended rather than dithered. I just switched back to 6.04 because I didn't feel like meesing about trying to figure out where the problem was (figured it was with opengl, but was feeling lazy).

Heed.