Odd triangle artifacts. (ATI Radeon 4400)

[jwjohnson]

I seem to be having an issue after installing World Adventures, when I boot the game, large swahs of game space have these odd triangle regions, Like this:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-S4i7ts3N7nI/T9GBZejtDII/AAAAAAAAKRM/L-Au17TCnpM/s1044/Untitled.png

I have never had this issue prior to installing WA. I also have Pets, Ambitions, and Late Night. Previously installed with mods. I since uninstalled the game, removed the mods to a different folder, re-installed the game and ran it without mods. Still this issue occurs. All of my drivers are up to date, the game has been manually patched (I don't use EADM or Origin) to the newest version, and all the other game's dependencies are up-to-date.

Any help is greatly appreciated. :)

[Whiterudder]

As far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a Radeon 4400. There's one website predicting its release in 2008, and then not another mention of it anywhere - no benchmarks, reviews, pricing, nothing. So, I suspect you've misremembered the model number, or got components mixed up. :)

There is a known issue with a recent ATI driver update causing this problem, so if you have updated your drivers in the last few months, you might want to rollback. There is also a huge and ongoing problem with many, many people underestimating TS3's system requirements and playing it on insufficient hardware - so if you could double-check your GPU model number so it can be checked against the Game Help:TS3 System Requirements, that would be helpful.

[jwjohnson]

Card name: ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series
Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Chip type: ATI display adapter (0x954F)
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Display Memory: 3830 MB
Dedicated Memory: 1015 MB
Shared Memory: 2815 MB
Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (59Hz)

I'll try to revert the driver. Odd because before I got WA today the game worked fine.

[Whiterudder]

Right, I will never understand why the model info on Radeon cards is so damn nonspecific at times. However, following a bit of research it seems that any 4300/4500 card is going to be similar to the 4350 and 4550, both of which are unsupported for all iterations of TS3 (see link above). Most likely, installing WA just tipped things over the edge from "card can just about cope" to "card gives up" - so it's the latter of the two problems I mentioned in my previous post, unfortunately.

Uninstalling WA might get you back to a situation where you can play again. Uninstalling Pets would probably help even more; beyond that, see Game Help:Onboard Graphics for more options which may improve your game performance back to a playable level.