Boo Radley Posted July 17, 2003 Share Posted July 17, 2003 I first ran into this problem about a year ago when I installed a new graphics driver and a newer version of DirectX. I got weird tiling in the game where sky and foliage would become somewhat transposed at the edges. It had something to do with transparency issues as I recall. After I had my machine reformatted last week, I installed a newer driver and DirectX v. 9 (in that order). Now I've got the weird tiling. Last time, i was told to install an earlier version of DirectX and it worked. My question is do I need to install DirectX BEFORE I install the newer graphics driver? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted July 17, 2003 Share Posted July 17, 2003 Going to an earlier version of DirectX is almost impossible without reformatting the hard drive. Depending on which version of Windows you have, there is a minimum version of DirectX that the OS comes with (Win98 DirectX 5.0, Win98SE DirectX 6.1, WinME DirectX 7.1, Win2K DirectX 7.0, WinXP DirectX 8.1). Generally I wouldn't imagine that changing your DirectX version would have such an impact on the graphics. Though there are 'bugs' in DirectX, I don't know if they would result in such graphic anomalys. Drivers (and especially games) are ususually written to support some sort of minimum DirectX version. You'll usually find this info when you download the video driver (audio drivers are also in the same camp - they're often written for some minimum version of DirectX). I suggest installing DirectX first before installing a driver that needs that version. You could probably do it either way, but that's my preference. I don't think that 'order' of installation should make a difference once both of them are installed (before playing a game). There's a possibility that some video driver installers may check the DirectX version before installing, but most don't. The idea is usually to match all of the new features in the video driver with what is supported in a particular version of DirectX. So installing an older version of DirectX usually shouldn't solve any problems, though it may terminate the support of certain driver features (which could be to blame for the problem). When it comes to DirectX, check the version of the video driver you want to install and see what minimum version of DirectX it requires. Most of the larger chipset vendor's latest drivers (ATI & Nvidia) require DirectX 9.x, though it is possible that the driver may work with an earlier version of DirectX (but it may cause otherproblems if you use an 'unsupported' version of DirectX). Games will require a particular version of DirectX to run properly since many graphical effects were written to be supported by a minimum version of DirectX. In CM's case you could probably get away with DirectX 6.1 or ealier (though CMBB recommends DirectX 8.x or later). Newer versions of DirectX do fix some previous bugs and also add some of their own. Boiling down to a point here... The problems that you're seeing are more likely related to a buggy video driver than a buggy version of DirectX. It's possible that by changing to an older version of DirectX that you're disabling certain routines in the driver that force something of a 'compatibility mode' that fixes the problem. That however is a guess, but I rarely see the need to change DirectX versions, especially back dating them. I would usually suspect the video driver first, in which case you may want to try an earlier version of the driver (which may have different bugs or may have the same bug present) before attempting to back date the DirectX install. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jarmo Posted July 17, 2003 Share Posted July 17, 2003 Yeah, DX first, then the driver. Uninstall the old driver first. Reinstalling older DX overwrites some portions of your current DX, but not all. You'll end up with a mixed monster. Might work fine anyway though. If you really want to uninstall DX9, you'll pretty much need to reinstall windows. -- edit. how the '#&%? does schrull do it??? [ July 18, 2003, 03:55 AM: Message edited by: Jarmo ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boo Radley Posted July 18, 2003 Author Share Posted July 18, 2003 OK, I've uninstalled the driver once before I think, but I can't find the directions I wrote down. How would I go about doing it? I have a Compaq Presario with Win98. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rlh1138 Posted July 19, 2003 Share Posted July 19, 2003 Drifting from the topic only a bit... I recently had a HD reformat that led to my installing DirectX 9 as part of the rebuild. I'd been on DirectX 8xx. I then put the latest NVIDIA driver back on as well. (For my GeoF Ti4200). Lo and behold, CMBO would now not 'take' any graphics setting (during first startup), and got me into a problem described on another thread awhile back, of whether 3D Direct, or something like that, was being recognized. In spite of trying various suggestions, I was eventually forced to go back a model # in NVIDIA drivers in order to keep playing CMBO(. So... my point.. as near as I can tell, it was the combo of DirectX and the video drivers that messed up, cause I was using that video driver with DirectX 8 with no problem before the reinstall. Since I can't go back in DirectX versions, (afaik) I'm stuck with the older video drivers, which don't happen to work with a PhotoShop plugin I want/need to use. Rats!! I'm waiting for NVIDIA to release a newer driver and try my luck with that. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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