A gray world?

[Roland]

I seem to have a graphical problem that doesn't want to be fixed too easily. Basically, any city that I enter - particularly Windurst - will look normal for roughly twenty minutes before going "gray." By which I mean everything except shrubs, trees, NPCs, and PCs melds into a colorless void type thing. The objects are still there; I can still enter doors, target things, and so on and so forth, but I can't see anything then just a blank screen (with the aforementioned anomalies). Outdoors, this isn't a problem. Although West Ronfaurre and Sarutabaruta are the only outdoor areas I've been to yet, they seem to work fine. As soon as I zone into a city, though, or shortly thereafter, the game becomes pretty much unplayable. Trying to run around Windurst Waters without actually being able to, um, see anything is a moderately frustrating experience.

So far as I can tell, it isn't my hardware causing the problem...I meet or exceed all the recommended specs (Pentium 4 2.26 ghz, Geforce FX 5900 Ultra, 512 DDR, etc.), so...I don't know, heh. I've tried fiddling around with the configuration - bump mapping on, bump mapping off, screwing around with the resolutions, the works - but either I'm missing something or it just doesn't do anything.

So....anyone know what's up? The FAQ doesn't seem to mention anything even remotely related, and search doesn't pick up anything. I emailed customer service, but having jazzed with SoE and Verant for far too long, I guess I have a kicked puppy mindset about the whole thing.

Thank you!

[Kafeen]

Tried disabling the fog tables. That seems to be the usual fix for grayness problems?

[hmaon]

I had the same problem but it went away, apparently after I turned off bump mapping. If that doesn't work for you, I don't know... :confused:
This is on a 5200ultra video card.

[Star8urst]

I have this problem too, bump mapping seems not to fix it.

[Junior]

I had this same problem.....almost chucked my comp out the window. I was able to fix the problem by going back to a 40+ nvidia driver. The 50+ drivers caused the problem for me. I also have the 5900. Hope it helps

[AKosygin]

For me it was a different problem: Cooling.

There is a side panel fan above my video card CPU and heat sink. The video card has a fan, but when I disconnect the fan on the side panel of my computer (the one above my video card), the video card would heat up and that graying would occur where there is a loss in rendering. Then when I reconnected it, it would lessen (takes longer for it to happen), then I changed the direction of the fan from taking air out, to moving air in over the card, and the problem went away.

I have yet to encounter the gray problem, but for me it was video card cooling that was the cause.

Bump Map: Bump mapping also takes a lot of VPU (Video Processing Unit) power, so turning it off may have caused it to work less thus less heat. Or it may truely be a video processing problem and not heat related. You might want to play with the video settings, if that doesn't solve the problem, try opening your case and put a nice fan cooling your case and see if that solves the problem.

REMOTE DESKTOP and REMOTE CONTROL programs:
If you have Windows XP's Remote Desktop or pcAnywhere, UNINSTALL/DISABLE the programs! They require a video card emulation used by the remote computer that interferes with some nVidia video cards drivers. After the cooling problem was solved, I installed pcAnywhere on one machine and Terminal Service on the other, FFXI started having problems including Blue Screen of Death. After I uninstalled/disabled them respectively, it went away.

The Windows XP Remote Desktop option can be found under the Properties of "My Computer" under something like remote control.

[Akai Tsumoto]

turn off bump mapping