MMO Gamers

     The last four MMOs I’ve played were Everquest 2, Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea and currently Vanguard. Both Everquest 2 and Tabula Rasa I played on a notebook and my desktop PC with no problems graphically, other than TR needing some optimizing.

     Pirates of the Burning Sea I played on my desktop and it did have one graphics glitch that installation of the beta Nvidia drivers + switching off anti-aliasing corrected until a patch was released.

     Vanguard has had plenty of graphics issues, at least for me. Some common ones I experience;

1. After chunking the animations will stop. So my horse will no longer be galloping or the griffon flapping its wings. This is happening less frequently since last patch. It used to happen every time I chunked, now it’s every 2nd or 3rd. /flush corrects this.
2. Game screen will freeze. I can still hear myself running and hear combat going on around me but the screen itself has locked up. /flush corrects this.
3. Lately when I level I crash to desktop. Not sure what the problem is or what the solution is. I’ve heard it has to do with the game automatically sending an image of your character to the website. If that’s the case I haven’t been able to find an option to disallow this.
4. Random crashes to desktop, usually during combat.
5. Screen resolution seems to change so that my screen is filled with text, each letter about 3 inches in size. /flush fixes this.

     When I say common issues I mean every time I play all of these things will happen. So if I play for three hours and it should happen twice each, that’s 10 graphics bugs in a 3 hour session, 4 of them fatal.

     The reason I’ve listed the last four games I’ve played on my current setup is to show that of these games, Vanguard is the only one to cause me so much grief. But what I’m trying to determine is whether it’s all a problem with the game or whether some of it is at my end. Vanguard has the best graphics of the four, and I’d assume the most stressful on my graphics card. So I question whether some of it’s due to overheating. I’m considering adding more cooling fans. I’m also considering updating my card, an 8600GT with 512 VRAM to something more powerful, or running two 8600’s in SLI.

     Anyone else having these sorts of graphics issues? Am I the only one?