Nvidia GeForce 8500 Graphics Card?

[fairy]

Since installing TS2 on this new computer, my game's been fine. However, over the past few days there's been some very odd graphics glitches. I haven't been able to take any photos of them because the game becomes basically unplayable. I used my Google-fu, but I couldn't find any problems that were closely related to mine (as in, not just a black screen or not as serious as there just being blue, red and green banana splits across the screen).

The best way to describe it is the trees having brick textures and the main control panel being skewed everywhere, and blurry pixels covering the screen. During gameplay today, I sent a sim to the secret lot in Takemizu Village, and when I had paused the game and went back to the desktop to quickly check something and went back, I noticed the game going extremely weird. I figured it would get better if I just reloaded another lot (and I honestly didn't want to use the task manager to quit the game and lose my save), and it did. When the vacation ended and the family of sims returned to their house, the loading screen went odd again. When the house loaded after a few moments, the game went completely insane. Textures were everywhere, things skewing up and down and everything seems like a kid had come along and rubbed the screen with paint. I quickly tried to save (I wasn't sure if the game saved before the sims left the vacation) the game, but in the process the screen went black, and as I was coming back to my desk (I'd walked away to give it some time) the screen flashed the same blue you'd find on a blue screen of death, along with the white text, but then it suddenly went black again and rebooted.

I was momentarily stunned after seeing the blue screen, but then quickly sat down and waited for it to load up. After some research on MTS2, I found the graphics card I have (NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT) apparently has compatibility issues with TS2. I thought I'd done fine so far (and I have 2 gigabytes of RAM), seeing as a week ago my game was fine. I've played much longer than I had today (two weeks ago I was sick, so I spent about six hours playing), because I'd only opened up TS2 at about half past five and this happened at about seven. Do I need to purchase a new graphics card or just give my CC folder a clean out to ease the load on the graphics card? (BTW, I have 1.38 gigabytes of CC).

Thanks very much for the help! Apologies for my idiocy, I will try to contain myself from now on, but I am quite worried about my game and computer.

[witch]

Have you updated your drivers?

[fairy]

Well, I updated them a few months ago, and I heard that because NVIDIA doesn't make the 8500 cards anymore so they won't update them. I'm not altogether graphics-card savvy, but I'm pretty sure I have the latest update. I just googled for updates but couldn't find any later updates. Thanks for replying so quickly. 

[Solowren]

There was an issue with NVidia's new drivers not controlling the fans properly, which would cause overheating. If I were you, I'd Google that and see which driver had the problem, then see which driver you have. If you have the bad one, roll back to the old driver.

[fairy]

I did what you recommended (Google is my best friend!), but I don't think I have the one that caused overheating. Thanks very much, though, it gave me some more insight. I must have an older update, but there's a chance my card overheated anyway because it was quite hot yesterday (even though the day before it was chilly and I had no graphics problems when the game was running), so it may have overheated. I will probably buy a fan, limit my game playing time or just choose to not have TS2 running on a hot day. It'll be winter soon, so that's good.

Thank you again for your help!

[Witchboy]

You can get updated drivers for your card at nvidia.

http://www.nvidia.com/

The latest release is 197.13 & dated 3-25-2010.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_197.13_whql.html

Supported Products

GeForce 300 series:
GT 320, GT 340, GT 330

GeForce 200 series:
GTX 285, GTS 240, G210, GT 230, GTX 275, GTS 250, 205, GT 220, 210, GTX 260, GT 240, GTX 295, GTX 280

GeForce 100 series:
G 100, GT 130, GT 140, GT 120

GeForce 9 series:
9600 GSO, 9800 GT, 9400, 9300 GS, 9800 GTX/GTX+, 9600 GT, 9200, 9500 GT, 9400 GT, 9600 GS, 9300, 9500 GS, 9800 GX2, 9300 GE

GeForce 8 series:
8600 GT, 8500 GT, 8800 Ultra, 8300 GS, 8800 GTX, 8200, 8400, 8300, 8800 GT, 8100 / nForce 720a, 8600 GTS, 8800 GTS, 8400 SE, 8800 GS, 8800 GTS 512, 8600 GS, 8400 GS

GeForce 7 series:
7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a, 7950 GX2, 7500 LE, 7050 PV / NVIDIA nForce 630a, 7550 LE, 7050 / NVIDIA nForce 610i, 7100 / NVIDIA nForce 620i, 7600 GS, 7100 / NVIDIA nForce 630i, 7900 GT/GTO, 7950 GT, 7050 / NVIDIA nForce 630i, 7900 GS, 7800 GTX, 7350 LE, 7300 LE, 7900 GTX, 7600 LE, 7300 SE / 7200 GS, 7650 GS, 7600 GT, 7800 GS, 7300 GT, 7100 GS, 7150 / NVIDIA nForce 630i, 7800 SLI, 7300 GS

GeForce 6 series:
6150 LE, 6600, 6200 A-LE, 6100 nForce 405, 6800 LE, 6200 TurboCache, 6600 GT, 6100 nForce 420, 6150SE nForce 430, 6150LE / Quadro NVS 210S, 6250, 6700 XL, 6800 GS, 6600 LE, 6600 VE, 6150, 6200 LE, 6800 XE, 6800 Ultra, 6100 nForce 400, 6800 GS/XT, 6100, 6800 XT, 6200, 6800, 6610 XL, 6800 GT, 6500, 6200SE TurboCache

ION series:
ION, ION LE

[fairy]

I'll get that and see how I go. Currently the weather's good, air-conditioner's on, so I'll pop onto the site and download that and boot up TS2. Hopefully it will behave itself. Thank you for the link, when I'd googled around for NVIDIA updates it only had links for buying the actual cards. Thanks again to everyone who helped me!

[Liz]

If you need to do further Googling on this, fairy, I'd recommend searching specifically for "NVIDIA drivers" and not just "updates". NVIDIA's graphics cards are notorious for causing this sort of problem in TS2, and it seems the drivers are almost always to blame. Either updating or rolling back to a previous one usually does rectify the problem.

(It couldn't hurt to hit that fan with a little compressed air, though, just to make sure the overheating isn't due to a simple buildup of household dust.)

[fairy]

Oh, it's all okay now thanks.  The suggestions from everyone were great help, and yours too is appreciated. I loaded up the game after cleaning out some CC (I was going to anyway), and the temperature in the room was quite cold, and the game ran smoothly. I updated the drivers, and I'll have a look at the drivers to see if they've got a build up of dust.

[Lerf]

If it makes you feel any better, I had the graphics card on my then month old computer replaced because it over heated one night for no reason we could see.  We mentioned it to our Major Computer Geek friend and he immediately told us about the NVidia drivers problem.  Luckily the card was under warranty, but of course it was out of stock so the whole thing took four agonizing days to fix while I was stuck on my old computer. 

Bleh.