Possible fix for graphic curruption/on screen artifacts

[thewoozle]

There's a rare issue that come up, that doesn't seem directly related to Civ IV, with little black triangles on the screen and spikey graphic artifacts raising from points on models or the 'ground' to the top or side of the screen. In some cases, the polygons (triangles) look like the normal skin of the model, but are sticking out at a 90-degree angle. It's usually being put-off as overheating, but in my case, anyway, it's different. as the curruption is axactly the same after resets or cool-down and doesn't change over time.

After tweaking BIOS, drivers, settings, and reinstalling anything that came to mind, I found this hint (Specific to the Nvidia 6800):

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/gefo...ng/default.asp

Once you’ve got everything turned on, you’ll now want to boot up a few games or any other graphics-intensive programs that you have such as 3DMark to check for artifacts. If you see lots of artifacts or any other form of corruption on the screen, that means your card won’t run properly with all pixel and vertex pipelines enabled and you’ll have to disable them with RivaTuner.

Here's Rivatuner:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163

(Note, I'm at work and can't wait to try one more tweak, when I get home).. hopefully it will help or at least be an education.

[thewoozle]

Ah HAH! I went through the guide above and finally, set my AGP from 8X to 4X and poof, the artifacts went away, like magic.