alt tab minimize back to black screen and auto save ?

[Sweed]

Ok I installed a radeon 9550 card this week (what an improvement over my onboard chipset!) and have this problem. If CMBB minimizes it comes back with a black screen. Sounds and everything are still there but the picture never comes back. I did try a couple of solutions suggested that I found in a search (alt B to bring up the scn report in 2d and then continue to the 3d screen and resetting the refresh rate on the monitor) but no luck. There was also a suggestion to roll back to a previous version of the catalyst program that runs the card but this is something I don't want to do. Also all drivers are up to date as I took them off the website and not the install cd.

Of course the easy solution is to not minimize the game and the problem is solved. To tell the truth

I never minimize the game while playing but what happened was my Norton auto updated and the computer went to desktop to let me know and I couldn't get back the game picture and so lost a turn of movement orders.

I am wondering though if anyone knows how often the autosave feature works and if it might save me from losing a turn in progress. In other words if I know it kicks in every 10 or 20 minutes could I just leave the game set for the 10 or 20 minutes and them come back and kill it with cntrl/alt/delete and have the turn autosaved?

system:

xp sp2

512 ram

60g HD 40g open

radeon 9550 128mb 128bit

Sorry for the long post but wanted to get in all the details. Appreciate any feedback anyone can give.

[Schrullenhaft]

What color depth are you running your desktop at; 16-bit or 24/32-bit ? Perhaps changing this while you're Alt-Tab'd out of CM may help with the videocard refreshing the 3D screen. This is just something to experiment with, I don't know of any particular problems with the Catalyst drivers and color depths.

I don't know how often CM auto-saves. I can't remember properly if it even saves orders already issued in the current turn or not. However I would assume that waiting 10 minutes would probably be sufficient for an auto-save to occur (it may do it even more frequently).

One thing to remember with drivers, and especially video drivers, is that the newest/latest version may not be the best set of drivers. Though we often recommend getting the latest drivers on this forum (in the hope that a bug has been squashed), often newer video drivers may not have the best quality or performance. On occasion new (or even old) bugs are introduced with newer drivers that weren't present with older ones (usually introduced for the sake of 'performance tuning' on the driver). Rolling back to a previous Catalyst may not be the worst thing, unless you're specifically aware of a bug being fixed in a newer driver that is an issue to you. To be honest there most likely won't be a solution trying an older Catalyst (especially since the Radeon 9550 may not be supported by too many older Catalyst drivers).

[Sweed]

Thanks for the response and suggestions. Desktop is running at 32 bit color. I believe the onboard intel chip was running at 24 so maybe that will help, I'll have to try it out.

[Sweed]

Tried the color depth and it worked like a charm, thanks again Schrullenhaft. Not sure why but I switched to 16 bit minimized and the game came back.

Then switched back to 32 bit and minimized again and

now it comes back at 32 also. Don't know why just glad it's working.