Graphical problems during spell casting

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I've recently upgraded my PC and as tradition dictates, I've reinstalled my "Ancient Games" catalog first thing, including all the Infinity Engine games. Now I recently started replaying BG2 and I encountered a multitude of various sound and graphics bugs the majority of which could be squished by simply enabling 3D acceleration in the BGConfig and by disabling any advantage my Sound card might have had over one thats 10 years old.

However, as I recently begun replays of BG1 and PST I discovered that the same bugs that plauged me in BG2 are present as well but not so easily fixable.

Now whille a number of them are minor and can be fixed with varity of temporary bandaids(Such as enabling and disabling something in quick succession) I have since ran into a bug that prevents me from playing both games at all.

It seems that spells are just about the only thing in those two games that require any form of 3D animation, unfortunally neither game seems to be able to speak with my GFX card and as such, any casting of spells result in a screen full of graphical glitches, a complete stall of the game as my FPS somehow manages to drop to 0, and a subsequent crash if I do not exit the game fast enough.

I have tried to completly, and in part, to disable any from of 3D acceleration I can through the DXdiag but with no success. I am guessing that the problem can be solved by enabling Software "Blitting", "Transperancy" and "Mirroring" in the video options tab as doing this will fix all of the other graphical bugs I've encountered. Unfortunally enabling those options also leads to immidiate FPS death and I am not able to test it during a spellfight as the game will crash before I have time to change the options.

If anybody here has any experience in dealing with similar bugs or can figure out a way for IE and my GFX card to communicate better I'd be most happy to hear from you as I'd really hate to not be able to replay these games.

My system specs are as follows:
Intel Core 2Quad Q9450 2.6GHz 12MB S-775
ASUS P5N-T Deluxe 780I SLI S-775
4GB DDR2 PC6400 800MHz 1. Part (4x1GB)
SLI - 2x 512MB GeF 9800GTX DDR3
RAID - 500GB (2x250GB 7200rpm) SATA2
80mm Arctic Cooling AF8025 PWM 12dB-21dB
750W Energon EPS-750 120mm
Arctic Cooling Alpine 7 S-775
20x Pioneer DVD/RW DL Sort
Creative SB XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro

 

Edit: somehow I missed the lines where you told that disabling Direct3D did not work. My apologies.

 

Are you using Vista? If so, try running the game as an administrator, that usually helps with older games.

 

Have you tried changing the hardware acceleration setting to a lower value? I had the same problem, but solved it by disabling Direct3D in dxdiag. Perhaps I have diffferent game settings as well, I'm not sure.

 

i experienced similar crashes to desktop, when using some spells. it doesn't always happen, there's just a small chance it does every time i use that spell. I'd be surprised if this could be fixed, but happy to hear if it can.

 

I had problems with the spells too. It wouldn't show the spells just a black box but they still did damage.

 

W's 98se, gf4 ti4600 = same problem. Only fix I found on this platform was to decrease HW acceleration.

 

Tried disabling SLI? I run 3-way SLI with 3 9800GTX's as well, and I've experienced problems when running in SLI mode playing those butt old games. Also, it might be an idea to change the color scheme used for playing that specific game, since vista has a hard time adjusting to the older games automatically. Right click the shortcut and click 'compatibility', then select 'run in 256 colors' under setting. Don't forget to click 'run as admin' under privilege settings under the compatibility pane as well.