Graphical Corruption on Character

[Damage]

Hi.

Bought Aquaria through Steam today, plays just fine but there's a noticeable and kinda nasty graphical glitch which is spoiling the experience a bit.

It only occurs consistently on the main character, although it also happened on the "mysterious face" image during the intro sequence. Everything else, the backgrounds, fish, other creatures etc seem fine.

Let me show you:



and here's the character blown up so you can see the issue more clearly.



I'm running XP Pro SP3 on a Radeon X1950 Pro with the latest Catalyst drivers installed. Not seen this problem on any other games. Tried disabling VSync and Frame Buffer Effects, doesn't help. I'm running the game at 1280x1024, if I pick a lower resolution the problem is far more noticeable.

Having just started playing it's a bit off-putting, and I'd love to be able to fix the issue before it starts to annoy me too much... Or starts cropping up on other in-game characters!

I've scanned the entire support board and I could find nobody else reporting the same problem. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Alphasoldier]

This is indeed new, have you tried reinstalling it?

I'd also suggest to go to the Aquaria\gfx\naija folder and check if the graphics files there are intact, if so, I'm not sure what may cause it.

[Align]

Might also want to try the usual Steam stuff; verify integrity, defrag, and maybe even delete specific files to try and have them auto-redownloaded (may want to backup them first of course).

[Damage]

Having played a bit further I've found the corruption happens on other characters too, including the "alternate" character you play as near the start. I've reinstalled and verified and it makes no difference, it definitely appears to be a rendering issue rather than a file corruption issue, as the graphical glitch isn't static, the lines appear and disappear constantly as the character is animated.

I have seen this before, incidentally, many, many years and PCs ago on some of the very early SVGA games, if you ran at too high a resolution on some of the early graphics cards you'd get corruption and artifacts a bit like this. However, I'm confident my X1950 Pro isn't struggling here, it can handle Crysis well enough.

Thanks for your suggestions, anyway, I'll keep playing around from my end but if you think of any other possible causes I'd love to hear them.

[Alec]

My guess would be some video card/driver problem, as that seems to be what trips people up 90% of the time.

You stated that you had the latest catalyst drivers, but it might be worth seeing if there's an even newer update or if anyone else has complained about them. (in which case reverting to an earlier version might help)

[MeatBomb]

I'm having the same issue on Vista 64, Steam version of the game.  I'm using a similar card, Radeon X1950 XTX.  My drivers are over a year old and the corruption is identical.  It can also be seen during cut-scenes on certain sprites and even on the main menu.  It's always the same sprites that are glitched out.

It really sucks having bought what looked to be a beautiful game, to having it a garbled up after ponying up for it.

I remember the demo didn't have this issue.   And I'm pretty sure I've had this card since '06.  Was there a demo out before then?  I should really prefer not to roll back my drivers a couple years in order to play.

Maybe I'll download the demo again and see if there's corruption in it.

EDIT :  The corruption is present in the demo.  Guess I should have replayed it before taking the plunge (punny).     

[Damage]

Ok, let me update you on my progress, which might help narrow things down. Since my initial problems back in October, I've now upgraded to a new PC with Windows 7 x64, and a rather gorgeous Radeon 5850, which is all rather groovy, even if the system did cost me £900!  More importantly, the graphical glitches in Aquaria have gone. Whilst I could give W7 credit, my money is far more on the change of both graphics card and the Drivers / Catalyst that go with it.

My Radeon X1950 was a great card, good value for money and lasted me a long time, but I did have issues on certain games. Odd graphical glitches, artifacts that would appear the longer I played, and even some fairly dramatic video corruption. My X1950 AGP was fairly prone, the PCI-E version I replaced it with early 2009 wasn't nearly so bad, but both still had issues, and weren't improving with time, either.

I've had ATI cards since day one, but they've always been a bit temperamental, especially as the cards age. I think ATI are pretty heavy on pushing forward, which is why they slap the label "legacy" on drivers for anything over a generation old.

So here's the short answer. I suspect it's a problem either with that generation of card, or with the generation of drivers for it.

I doubt ATI have actually updated the driver for the old cards in quite some time, new versions of the Catalyst may come out but in effect anything Radeon 2XXX or below is going to be using older drivers, and ATI aren't going to waste any time keeping them up to date.

Best and easiest solution, to be honest, is to upgrade your card if you can. If you're running Vista 64 and into gaming, it's really the only way. A 3XXX series, something like the 3850, you can get for around £50-£70. It's that or, unfortunately, live with the fact that the X1950, while once a great card, was released in 2005-2006, so it's getting on for five years old. In gaming terms, that's a lifetime. 

Hope this is of use, glad to know it wasn't just me having problems, but as the only two people reporting it and we both (at the time of the problem) were using X1950s, I think it's pretty clear where the trouble lies.

Good luck!

D 

[MeatBomb]

Updated drivers don't help.  Guess I should cut my losses at $20, as I really can't afford a new graphics card. 

[JJops]

I bought this great game today and had the same graphic issue, but I found how to fix it or at least it worked for me.

My graphic card is also x1950xtx so this surely is x1xxx problem or just ati driver problem.

But about the fix, I tried every settings both game's and catalyst's.

So these are the configs that worked for me:

On catalyst 3D:

• set every setting to " use application settings"
• disable catalyst A.I.
• mipmap detail level: performance
• wait for vertical sync: Off, unless aplication specifiec
• adaptive anti-aliasing: off
• Triple buffering: off

For the game settings: enable Vsync and frame buffer effects.

You can also try decreasing resolution or try windowed, but for me the game's default settings worked fine after setting catalyst right.


Hope this helps people who still have old ati card