Help! My new video card drivers are corrupting game colors!

I originally posted this in the forums of CPU (Computer Power User) Magazine's website, but so far, I haven't gotten any responses. So I figured I'll copy and paste the message here - maybe one of you fellas can help a fellow Ravener out.

Originally posted on http://www.cpumag.com:[/i]
Hi everyone,

I frequently play Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb on my computer, which has an ASUS GeForceFX 5200-based video card. Things were fine until recently, and then all hell broke loose. Here's the story:

Due to some minor problems (Bink Video files and some MPEG files weren't playing), I upgraded my video driver to version 52.16 from the ASUS website. Now those video files play fine, and everything works fine (including all my other games) - EXCEPT for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. Now, when I play IJET, for some reason some of the colors (certain shades of yellow, silver and a few others) show up as BRIGHT RED. Certain other colors also show up in shades of purple too, but the most noticeable corruption is when things turn red. For example, the Emperor's throne and the Nazi submarine look like they're covered in layers of red rust - part gold/silver, part red. Terracotta statues (which are normally gray with reddish seams) have purplish arms.

I have already reformatted my hard drive at one point and also installed the patch from LucasArts' website. I have tried every possible combination of resolution and color depth (640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 paired with 16 or 32 bit textures). I've tried looking through video card setting, and anything else I can think of. I am at my wits end. What do I do now? Help!!!!

Desperately yours,
Moishe

Click to expand...

Refer my post titled "Graphics Problems with FX5900 " further down this board.
I had exactly the same problems as you when I switched from a GF4 Ti4600 using the Det 45.23 drivers to a FX5900 using both the 52.16 and 53.03 drivers.
I believe the problem is with the Forceware drivers. When I tried the 45.23's with my FX5900 the "red" problem went away but then they gave me problems with OpenGL games that were not there when using my old card.
So, now that I have a FX5900 I am using the 52.16 drivers and have just had to put up with the graphics color problems with the game. Hopefully nVidia will fix the problem with some future driver releases.
My suggestion is to use the 45.23's with yur FX5200 and see how they work with any other games you have, but I believe they will solve your "red" problem

cheers

Thanks for responding. Yes, I know for a fact that using the older drivers helps - when I originally installed the card, I used the driver that came on the CD (I don't remember the exact version number, but it was somewhere in the 40's). The color was fine, but the videos wouldn't play - e.g. the LucasArts and Collective logos, the screenshot of the next level which is shown while it is loading, the plane/zeppelin/ship's path shown as a red line on the map in true Indy tradition, etc.

I had been hoping it would be just a setting or two that needed tweaking, but oh well... thanks for your help - I guess I'll dig out my CD and install the older drivers again.

Are you sure that it was your video card drivers that were giving you problems running Bink video files ??

Are you running Windows XP as your operating system ?

With the September 2002 update to Windows XP (known as Service Pack 1), Microsoft no longer distributes any version of the Indeo codecs with its operating system. This only affects users with new PCs that are shipping with Windows XP Service Pack 1, or clean installs of Windows XP SP1 on an older system. Installation upgrades of SP1 and the use of Windows Update does not remove existing Indeo codecs from your system.
I was having trouble running and installing games that were using certain video files. Once I installed the Indeo XP Codec package all was well.
Hope this may be of some further assistance to you. Just remember that Indeo XP is a 32-bit driver codec intended for Windows XP systems only, and will not install on other operating systems.

cheers