Hi Everyone, I made a post last August with a technical problem but despite some extremely helpful advice never found out what was causing the problem – until now I think. To recap, in some of my PC games I was getting what I described as large translucent swirling snowflakes mainly in outdoor scenes. This annoyed me in the extreme and ruined all immersion. The worst culprits were the original Assassin’s Creed – the one set in the Holy Land and the original Call of Juarez – the cowboy shooter. Other games had the problem occasionally but not to the same extent. I completely replaced every component to isolate the problem to no avail – I then realized I had enough spare kit to build another rig so now have two gaming rigs (bit greedy in a recession) – I’ll put the specs at the end. Anyway, I was playing around with Assassin’s Creed recently and found the .ini file hidden in the Users\Documents\AppData etc location. I started to experiment with the various settings and found if I turned off “particles” by setting it to zero the snowflakes disappeared. This setting controls dust clouds, chimney smoke etc so I’ve lost those effects unfortunately which added to the realism. I then went back to Call of Juarez and after some digging found a video.scr file which is the equivalent of an .ini file. By changing “post process” from normal to simple I managed to get rid of the snowflakes here also. Unfortunately as well as removing all the smoke etc effects it also ruins all the transparency effects so glass windows and water are all black and it doesn’t look very realistic. What I can’t understand is why this is happening on my two systems when they are so different? One is LGA 775, the other LGA 1366 – one uses a Radeon, the other a GeForce – one uses DDR2 memory, the other DDR3. I bought another copy of Call of Juarez but the snowflakes were the same so I’ve ruled out a faulty copy of the software. I’ve trawled the games forums and the internet and can’t find anyone with the same problem as me. The only similarity between my systems is they both use 64 bit operating systems – one uses Vista Home Basic 64 bit the other Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit (these are effectively the same operating system technologically as I understand it). I’m wondering if this could be the source of the problem so if I were to play them on a 32 bit system (and waste half my RAM) it would disappear and I could my particle effects back without the glitches. Has anyone experienced similar problems with 64 bit systems having problems rendering particle effects. Can anyone confirm or deny my hypothesis? Any help would be appreciated as this has issue has been driving me daft for ages. System specs: Main rig CPU: Core i7 920 DO stepping (at stock speed) RAM: 6GB OCZ Gold DDR 3 1600Mhz GPU: 2GB Palit GeForce GTX 285 (at stock speed with up to date drivers) Hard Disc: 300GB WD Velociraptor PSU: 1250W Enermax Revolution 85+ Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58 UD3R Sound card: Asus Xonar DX Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit Case: Antec 1200 Back up rig CPU: Core2 Quad Q6600 GO stepping (overclocked to 3.4Ghz) RAM: 4GB Corsair Dominator DDR 2 1333Mhz GPU: 1GB Sapphire Radeon 4870 (at stock speeds with up to date drivers) Hard Disc: 640GB WD Caviar Black PSU: 650W Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro Motherboard: Asus P5Q-E Sound card: Creative X-Fi Soundblaster Operating system: Windows Vista Home Basic 64 bit Case: Antec 600 P.s – I’ve just thought of some additional points 1) Both systems use Antec cases with extra fans installed so overheating is not an issue 2) All software – operating system and games – is fully legal – I don’t use pirate rubbish 3) I use up to date virus software which I disable along with many background services when gaming 4) I use driver sweeper to get a clean install of graphics drivers – I’ve also tried using older drivers but with no success Thanks in advance Mag
