Visuals suddenly stop refreshing

[Cyph]

Hi all,

I have an issue where the visuals (graphics), whether it be in a window or full screen, suddenly stops refreshing. I can hear the sound effects and music real time but the screen stops. Even stranger is if the mouse cursor is hovered over a GUI element, such as a text box or button, the cursor is refreshed based on the location (i.e. a move cursor or drag cursor). Attempting to then move the GUI element yields no results. Only restarting EQ resolves the issue.

Originally I thought this issue was to do with the ResetDevice Failure error I've been experiencing (), but I've resolved that issue and this still occurs. The frequency of this particular issue can be frequent and reoccurring, every few minutes, or never during a few hours play session.

Has anyone had this happen to them or heard about it before? Is there a fix or any advice that may assist me?

[Qaedain]

What GPU and driver?

[Cyph]

Radeon 5850, 10.7 driver

[Cyph]

I'm going to try running EQ using a single core (as suggested in the associated thread here on the forums). I'll add another response after sufficient testing time.

[Rasterburn]

I play this game on a Sapphire Radeon 5870, so perhaps I can offer a suggestion or two...

(1) First, open up msconfig (Start --> Run --> msconfig) and in the Start Up options, disable the ATI Tray Tools applet. It will be there on the list, starting with the letters "CLI" in its name. Just un-check the little box next to it, and then save and reboot. The ATI tray icon will no longer load with Windows and MANY of your games and apps will become a lot more stable. The ATI Tray Tools have been buggy for the past five years, so just get rid of them altogether. Your video driver will still function normally and you can adjust it by right-clicking anywhere on your desktop. In short, you don't need the tray tools.

(2) If you are running a pair of video cards in Crossfire setup, then you will need to disable Crossfire prior to launching certain older games. They simply do not know how to communicate properly with multi-GPU setups and can exhibit all sorts of graphical anomalies.

(3) Open up your eqclient.ini file and look for the following lines within it:

[VideoMode]
Width= (full-screen width) *
Height= (full-screen height) *
WidthWindowed= (windowed width) *
HeightWindowed= (windowed width) *
WindowedWidth= (windowed width) *
WindowedHeight= (windowed height) *
FullscreenBitsPerPixel=32
FullscreenRefreshRate=0
ScreenMode=FULL


See all of those lines that I marked with an asterisk..? In place of the stuff in the parentheses, enter your desktop width and desktop height for ALL of those numbers... including the windowed variables. For example, my desktop runs on an HD monitor at 1920x1080 resolution. So in my own eqclient.ini file, that section looks like this:

[VideoMode]
Width=1920
Height=1080
WidthWindowed=1920
HeightWindowed=1080
WindowedWidth=1920
WindowedHeight=1080
FullscreenBitsPerPixel=32
FullscreenRefreshRate=0
ScreenMode=FULL

Note that this is just a working example. You will need to edit your own file and replace "1920" and "1080" with whatever numbers are appropriate for your system.

After making all of those changes, let me know if you are still having any problems.

[Cyph]

Thanks for the reply Rasterburn.

I've limited the game to using only one core and so far I haven't had any issues. I'll repost if that changes, lets hope not!