Graphical issue, hard to describe

So I had a support ticket for this item but (after updating my driver fully) I was told that my issue was being "escalated for further review" and that i could expect to be contacted directly for further assistance, which I assume is a nice way of saying "we dont know, and cant be ***** to fix it now." so I decided to un-outsource it to the forums (did you see what i did ther?)

basically what happens is, in areas with running water graphics, the graphics sans HUD frequently cascades on itself like the ending of solitare where the cards constantly replicate as they move. here is a ss of it:


The ss makes the glitch look trivial in comparison to the usual obscuring of all vision it inflicts. (ironically taking a screenshot seems to "refresh" the screen until something moves (which is like .0001 of a second, but it does give me a flashing glance of whats in front of me, like groping through the dark with only a lightning storm to give you a clue of where you are going... isnt childhood fun?)
I tried to upload the contents of the diagnostic .txt file with code tags but the forums got mad at me and made me re-type this whole thing so I'll wait on that until im advised to do otherwise...
I run a brand newish HP Pavilion g6 (admittedly, a little less fly than a g6) with nondedicated intel card (1024mb video mem) on Windows 7 64bit OS and i feel like it should be able to run a 7 year old game at a little better than at min settings at 1366 x 768 x_x

Unfortunately, integrated Intel video is good for displaying your desktop and not a hell of a lot more.

It's not so much that it doesn't have the raw power to do so.
It's just that the Intel video has absolutely atrocious (with a capital ATROCIOUS) OpenGL support. Moreover, OGL stresses video cards quite differently than DirectX does.

You can try upgrading your video drivers to the latest Intel drivers. But that's no guarantee that it'll fix it. And as you're on a laptop, telling you to get another graphics card is a severe no-go.

If you can try again to provide the info requested in this thread, it'd probably help.


Also, when was the last time you shut down and blasted the dust out of the machine?

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

the text file for the coh helper log is too big, even when split in two. id have to segment it some other time.

I got my laptop new about a month ago. my room is of average dust amount so i think we are safe from heat here.

intel chips have been standard in laptops lately and the quality of the dedicated cards in notebooks has been tanking. Ive run some high end games that my older pc wont run (deus ex 3 comes to mind). the old desktop runs coh better, though. (at 1280x768 resolution)

Hi,

u seemingly missed parts of Hyperstrikes Post.

CoH is known to run bad on integrated intel Graphic Chips cause of OpenGL.

And if other Games run fine then it does not matter!

As Hyperstrike stated most Games use DirectX for Graphic.

So if any u can compare it only to Games which run on OpenGL too, and those will have similar Problems then.

Its just OpenGL isnt well supported from those Chips and theres nothing we can do about it beside buying PC/Laptops that dont use Intel Chips or bugging those Intel Chips Providers for better Support.

Greetings

Also, water effects in this game can behave funny.
If you have water effects enabled, and on anything below medium or high, they will cause graphical warping to anything in the foreground of your screen when water is in the background. The fix is to raise water settings or disable them.

Edit:
It looks like heat waves/after-images around the actual image in the circumstances I mentioned.

It's sad about OpenGL as well.

I would love to see a challenger to Windows(because it's bloated and tries to do too much now), and DirectX is a Microsoft thing so Windows is apparently always going to be the gaming choice so long as OpenGL can't do the job as good and no other competing graphics software comes out.

As with everything, it depends on the quality of the driver.

OpenGL existed long before Direct3D and it took until DirectX 9 to catch up to the 2D/3D feature set of OpenGL. That's one of the reasons id used it since QuakeGL.

nVidia embraced OpenGL during nVidia's earliest days, back when 3dfx Voodoo cards were all the rage, with complete drivers. ATI on the other hand only had enough OpenGL support to run GLQuake, Quake II or whatever the current id 3D engine needed, which is why it was called a miniport driver.

OpenGL is faster then DirectX versions before 10. For DirectX versions 10 and 11 the speed is about the same.

However since Microsoft doesn't support Windows XP any more you can't use those versions of DirectX on it.

Anybody know how I can get the latest DirectX version update on Windows 7?
I get conflicting results sometimes, like with dxdiag it says I have DirectX 11 but at least some other programs say I only have DirectX 10. I have a Nvidia GTX 465 which is capable of DirectX 11 as well.

My work laptop does the same thing in underground instances, mostly in Praetorian underground-themed missions. Intel HD3000. Now I know what to try and correct it, at least.