
- #Disable directdraw vista drivers#
- #Disable directdraw vista driver#
- #Disable directdraw vista full#
- #Disable directdraw vista software#
- #Disable directdraw vista windows#
The SDK is meant for developing and debugging DirectX-based programs, but it comes with a fair suite of nifty utilities, one of which being the DirectX Control Panel: dxcpl.exe. Apparently they really don’t want us changing these settings.īut we don’t really want to change much – just the DirectX technologies, and in fact, just the 2D-based DirectDraw (since 3D is more or less irrelevant for BG1), and only for a short while.
#Disable directdraw vista driver#
The problem now is that if you try this with your NVidia card and Vista, you’ll just be staring at a disabled ‘Change Settings’ button and a terse message: 'Your current display driver does not allow changes to be made to hardware acceleration settings.' If you also try the old standby dxdiag, you might be surprised to know that the Disable buttons have been removed from the DirectX Features box on the Display tab. In Vista, the analogous experience is right-click on Desktop -> Personalize -> Display Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Troubleshoot -> Change Settings (I see you still haven’t hired a good user experience designer, Microsoft). In the glory days of XP, this simply meant right-click on Desktop -> Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Troubleshoot -> Hardware Acceleration slider (dear god that’s convoluted). Your Core 2 Duo or quad-core Xeon can use some exercise anyway. This is feasible if you’re doing this on a fast machine (and if you’re using a series-8 card in that box, I’d assume it’s pretty fast anyway) – after all, BG1 is a 10-year old game. Since the problem is obviously arising from the DirectX layer and its interaction with NVidia graphics hardware (boot into safe mode and run BG1 to verify this), another solution is to just kick NVidia out of the loop by disabling hardware acceleration for DirectDraw. 16-bit vs 32-bit color is somewhat noticeable, once at that scale.
#Disable directdraw vista full#
The game runs at 640 x 480, and is already quite pixelated when scaled up to full screen. This method works just fine, but was not ideal for me. This apparently routes around whatever strange bug NVidia managed to introduce in their graphics acceleration layer.
#Disable directdraw vista software#
The prevalent strategy, as noted in a forum post at Spellhold Studios, is to switch on Software Transparent BLT and use 16-bit color depth. These glitches are widely experienced.įor this very annoying problem, two workarounds are available. In some cases, the ‘fog of war’ on the unexplored regions of a map will be rectangular black boxes, rather than the ‘foggy’ darkness you’re used to. Further, on your character paper doll in the Inventory screen, giant black boxes obscure much of the figure. In essence, a number of items and sprites (items on the belt, the timepiece to the lower left corner, birds flying overhead, for example) will be surrounded by black outlines. Unfortunately it’s plagued by a number of graphics glitches when running on NVidia cards.
#Disable directdraw vista windows#
The Contextīaldur’s Gate 1 performs surprisingly well under Windows Vista, despite being a venerable (some might say, ‘ancient’) 10-year old RPG. Turn that off (temporarily, of course) and you’re good to go. Amongst the various configuration options available on that tab, the only one you care about is the box to turn on or turn off hardware acceleration. From within this control panel, pick DirectDraw on the upper tab bar. Instead of using the Personalization -> Display Settings control panel (as one might think to do based on Windows XP experience), the correct solution is to use the DirectX SDK and dxcpl.exe, the DirectX Control Panel (located within the SDK distribution under Utilities\bin\\. However, disabling hardware acceleration under Vista is apparently easier said than done. Another strategy, if your CPU is powerful enough to shoulder some 2D graphics work, is to temporarily turn off hardware acceleration for DirectDraw and avoid the bug entirely. One workaround is to use 16-bit color and software transparent BLT.
#Disable directdraw vista drivers#
If you have a series 8 NVidia graphics card (say, an 8600M GT) with current drivers (as of the time of this post, of course), you’re likely to see graphics glitches (screenshot 1) in Baldur’s Gate 1.
