Something rotten in cerulean hills...

[adRyft]

My client seems to lock up when I enter many sections of the game that feature "jungle" style terrain. Particularly The Captives, but also Where There's Smoke or Gladewatch, I start getting huge lag spikes that make the game unplayable. Bad enough that it's hard to type coherently, or even access the menu to quit the game.

I've not had any problems with other quests, like Kobold Assault... never gives me any problems, despite the similar terrain style.

I've recently reinstalled the game, and that didn't seem to help.

I've tried running the game on very low graphical settings, and that didn't help, either.

Previously, I'd been having some issues with video drivers, and I thought that was hammered out fairly effectively, as the game runs smoothly when not having the above described problem. However, the symptoms are... well, similar. The horrible lag will often be accompanied by severe graphical errors after I come out of the lag.

When this happens, the lag and graphical errors will persist after I leave the area and go back to town. However, if I log out and return, the problem is usually gone unless I enter a problem area again.

Any idea why this might be happening?

(Edited for clarity, and to add some key information that I later thought of.)

[adRyft]

I thought perhaps some trippy pictures of my client might be appreciated for those with a good (or bad?) sense of humor.

Enjoy. Or, point and laugh. At your option.

http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/6...shot00000t.jpg
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/346...nshot00001.jpg
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/351...shot00002s.jpg
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/584...shot00003v.jpg
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/9...shot00008l.jpg

[Symar-FangofLloth]

I remember seeing issues like this before.
It's showing the wrong textures.
I forget the fix though.... I've not been around the forums in a long time prior to the "Free" update. It might've been a reinstall, or it might be a graphcis card going bad.

[Cedwin]

Looks like the graphics card, or the drivers. You didn't mention what type of graphics card you have, but you could try getting an older version of the drivers. Newer drivers tend to cause those types of problems in games that are built and tested with older drivers.

[adRyft]

I have an nVidia GeForce 7600 GT (AGP). I'm using the current version of Omega Drivers.

It currently runs any other game that I play, except this one. No glitches, hiccups, or problems running games like CoD: Modern Warfare, Fallout 3, etc.

I experimented a lot with older and newer drivers, with not much success at getting the game to run, until settling on this third party package that someone in another thread suggested. The guy who writes Omega drivers basically tweaks nVidia and ATI drivers for stability with older cards, as I understand it. The Omega drivers seemed to do the trick, for the longest time.

Interesting twist of fate, tonight...

The problem I've got has been becoming steadily worse. I've tried a few more things, without much success:

-Playing with the engine speed and connection speed functions in the troubleshooting menu
-Reverting to default controls, and uninstalling my Saitek Cyborg Command Unit gamepad.
-Updating the drivers for the Saitek gamepad.
-Uninstalling anything I could get away with, scrubbing out internet cookies, checking for registry errors, etc... basically cleaning up my system. Everything except a defrag, which I might still do soon.

On a whim, I tried windowed mode.

But I get graphical errors like crazy, but no lag at all. Especially in that Captives quest, which had crazy slashes of grey all across my screen, and the chat text went crooked. But I was able to finish it, all the way through, which I wasn't able to do before. Most of the graphical errors seemed to go away once I recalled to town.

Any idea if this points to something, in particular?