Farcry with i9300 and go6800

In Farcry, the ground sometimes doesn't get drawn, like, the green ground isn't drawn in grassy areas, although the shrubs and weeds and stuff are drawn. Sometimes on the beaches, big patches of sand aren't drawn. By aren't drawn, I mean there is a black area instead of what is supposed to be there.

Is this a driver issue? I'm using the stock drivers, 67.71

 

I would try downloading the newest drivers from dell's website, they are the 77.24 ones, which are located here

 

thanks, but do I have to uninstall the previous driver before i install this new one?

 

I would uninstall the drivers you have, then install the latest drivers from Dell. I would also download the latest patch for FarCry.

 

Okay, bad news. While playing Farcry, the game froze. I used crtl+alt+del to see what was up. I got a message about an error reading memory or something. It looked like what I was getting on my old desktop, which has been rendered useless (it freezes when i try to do anything stressful, like run an antivirus scan, play a game, even flash based games in a browser, and when I tried to reformat it, so its useless now). I am VERY SCARED. I've had my i9300 for only 4 days, and I'm afraid it'll start to mess up like the old desktop.

The similarity of the problem begs the question of whether or not something I did to both of them caused this. As far as I can tell, the problems with the desktop began with installing The Bard's Tale (game, several GB game). With the i9300, the problem occurred playing Farcry (several GB game). Both I was playing with a nocd crack. I'm not sure how this would cause memory or harddrive problems though, as I'm sure I'm not the only one to ever have tried a game with a nocd crack.

Any insight to the problem is appreciated.

 

Only 4 days you have had this notebook?

DEFINITELY run memtest for at least a few hours, and see if there are any problems!!! Sounds like you may have a few bad memory banks!

 

for memtest, can i make a CD-R out of it? or does it have to be a floppy? because I don't have a floppy drive. if I can make a CD-R out of it, i'll run memtest over night

 

okay, I made a bootable CD for memtest, and have been running it for 9 hours. i've passed 20 series of 9 tests so far if i'm reading it correctly. how will I know when it's finished testing all my memory? how long will this take? the display suggests it might be testing 108K memory per round, and at that rate, it'll take about a year to finish testing 1GB of ram. am I doing something wrong?

 

Well, if you haven't run into any problems yet....

Try doing a Windows repair. Put in the windows cd, boot from it, and repair your installation. If that doesn't fix it, I'd call dell and have the laptop replaced or repaired.

 

Well, how long should I run memtest to be sure my memory is okay? If it's not the memory, and not Windows, what else could it be? Thanks for your help so far.

 

Before doing anything too drastic, let me ask a question: Are we tlking about the full version of Far Cry with the latest patch applied? Because the demos and older versions of the game have major issues with the Go6800 that produce graphical glitches very similar to what you've reported, but it's been fixed with the latest patches.

 

i don't know the version, but i doubt its the newest one. it's got a nocd crack. a friend gave it to me so i could test my computer's performance, and i'm glad to report i could play it at 1440x900 with the absolute highest settings of everything, including AA and AF that it allowed me to configure and it runs smoothly. the glitches don't bother me too much, it's just some patches sand/grass not showing up.

what bothers me is the error i got about reading memory, because i'm afraid i got defective memory. running memtest, i've gotten 30 passes after about 13 hours of running it, and no errors, but i'm not sure how much of my memory has been tested, so i don't know how much longer i should let memtest run for. i'm running memtest32 v3.2

 

If you've seen no errors after 13 hours and 30 passes of memtest, your memory is more than likely fine.

I'm fairly certain there wa a memory leakage in some version of FarCry. I think patching to the latest version would solve all of your problems. However, your no-CD patch would stop working and you'd have to get a new one. Or, you know, break down and shell out $20 for the game.

 

Thanks for the help, I was hoping desperately there wasn't something wrong with my memory. I might buy Farcry, it's pretty good, but right now the only game I'll definately buy is Elderscrolls 4: Oblivion, when it comes out this winter. That game is basically why I bought the Dell Inspiron 9300 over the IBM/Lenovo T43.