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Visual glitches in DS LOA

blockhead's picture

I recently installed Dungeon Siege Legends of Aranna. I used to play it ages ago, in XP. Now I have win7 and different hardware, which is apparently a problem.

I have weird visual glitches. Here are links to two screnshots:

http://i.imgur.com/Q3Ekaoh.png
http://i.imgur.com/sFtWxGZ.png

I've been researching. I've read of things like making sure not to use a video card driver with "tnl" after it, installing diectx 9 andusing "bltonly=true" in the shortcut. These I have tried and they have not made any difference.

I am clueless. Can I have a clue please? Thank you.

Hi Blockhead, I have never seen what your screen shots show and I use windows 7. Could you enlighten us on the system hardware you have and exactly what video card you are using and the version of the video card driver. Also the size of your monitor and the screen resolution you have it set at. Any and all information will give us a better chance of figuring out what the issue is.

Thanks,
Elf

Is it, by chance, the Steam version?
I remember seeing posts revolving around the Steam version of Dungeon Siege 2 having similar issues. I don't actually have the answer, and I know this isn't DS2, but perhaps it will help narrow it down.

Have you tried the solution in this thread? It seems very similar to yours.
https://www.siegetheday.org/?q=node/3090

One wish I have for this site is a means to do even basic searches. I had to use google to find this solution, even though it actually was posted here.

blockhead's picture

Wow, thank you all for the replies.
Bare elf, as to the requested info, it's a Toshiba laptop, 64-bit, running a sort of dual graphics card: Intel HD Graphics 4600 and Nvidia GeForce GT 740M.
The respective driver versions are: Intel: 10.18.10.3282 (8/26/2013) and Nvidia: 9.18.13.1141 (3/7/2013).
The monitor is around 15 inches across and runs at 1600x900.

This is not the Steam version. It's a version on a CD bought some years ago, which did run fine on a previous machine.

The thread mentioned later seems familiar, yes. I had already tried running DS just on the Intel card (most games run better on that, go figure) and the Nvidia with identical results. The first half of the thread was things I'd already tried. The second half of the thread has me confused and will require time to figure out. For example: I can't see that renaming an exe would effect anything?

blockhead wrote:

The thread mentioned later seems familiar, yes. I had already tried running DS just on the Intel card (most games run better on that, go figure) and the Nvidia with identical results. The first half of the thread was things I'd already tried. The second half of the thread has me confused and will require time to figure out. For example: I can't see that renaming an exe would effect anything?


What it means that in their wisdom (or lack thereof), NVidia has preset settings for a lot of games which they believe will provide a superior gaming experience. Except all of these settings are no doubt correlated in a laboratory using super computers as they forget that 99% of PCs have vastly different capabilities to each other.

You know how to use the NVidia control panel I assume.

Open the control panel and click on Manage 3D settings.
Where it says Ï Want to Use the following 3D settings; click the Program Settings.
For 1. Select a program to customize and scroll down the list until you find Dungeon Siege (Dungeonsiege.exe). Please note that Legends of Aranna still uses a Dungeonsiege.exe and you may well find 2 of them in the list if you play DS1 as well.

You'll see various settings for Anisotropic filtering, Antialiasing, etc., which in theory has been preconfigured to make the game perform the best with NVidia cards.

Now the issue is that there's no way to disable a setting. It unhelpfully informs you that you cannot remove a NVidia provided setting configuration.

Now when you rename an exe, it won't appear in the list! So if you use a renamed exe to start Legends of Aranna, it won't be affected by the settings NVidia has selected for it. That's the first thing I would try and then try the optimal settings.

Alternatively you could play around with all the settings and see what happens.

However if you have tried running it with the Intel HD Graphics card and still had issues, this may still not help.

I also remember discussion about many older games having difficulties using modern dual or quad core cpus. The Dungeon Siege series utilize the CPU much more than they do the Graphics Card, which is why they run so well on Intel HD Graphic Cards, most of the fancy features of high end Graphics Cards are lost on them. I don't know if this applies to Dungeon Siege or not. As I said before there's heaps of very useful advice in the forums but hard to find without a search feature.

blockhead's picture

My control panel does not match what you described. This has happened before, so it almost feels normal. Tongue

Thing is, i actually have the exe set to use the non-nvidia card, as that ends up working best for all but one other game. Go figure.

I copied the exe to one with a different name (safer than a rename?) and ran that. Same problem.