Posted February 17, 2014
Hey all, this is a warning I wanted to pass along to anyone who owns a Radeon HD series card who's interested in this game. I have not found anyone else after days of searching on the 'net who has experienced this problem to the same degree I have, but I feel it is my duty to warn everyone regardless.
After installing Jade Empire & trying to run it, I noticed a number of graphical errors that eventually resulted in the first ever Blue Screen I've had on this PC, after nearly a year of heavy usage. I turned off every special feature available in my ATI Catalyst Control Center, tried running the game again & again, the PC Blue Screen'd on me. After doing some more research online, I found out that 2k Games' support site-
http://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/201334043-When-playing-Jade-Empire-I-encounter-graphical-corruption
reports that texture corruption can occur when playing the game with ATI cards. I made the .ini file change that they recommend & then the game seemed to play fine for a number of hours. However, the next day I started to see the same kind of graphical corruption occur in *all* my programs & games, even including web browsers & the main Windows Desktop. I was able to try different ATI drivers with no effect and eventually the problem got so bad that the screen would go black minutes after booting to the desktop. Essentially the PC became completely unusable. Being a PC tech myself with 17 years of experience, I decided to troubleshoot the unit by replacing the graphics card with another.
The PC now runs completely fine with no corruption or crashing. Though I have not yet tried playing Jade Empire again. So, it seems that this game caused texture corruption to such a degree that it damaged my Radeon HD7850's video memory, rendering it broken.
I'm not badmouthing the game itself or GOG. I just wanted the community to be aware this is a serious potential problem.
After installing Jade Empire & trying to run it, I noticed a number of graphical errors that eventually resulted in the first ever Blue Screen I've had on this PC, after nearly a year of heavy usage. I turned off every special feature available in my ATI Catalyst Control Center, tried running the game again & again, the PC Blue Screen'd on me. After doing some more research online, I found out that 2k Games' support site-
http://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/201334043-When-playing-Jade-Empire-I-encounter-graphical-corruption
reports that texture corruption can occur when playing the game with ATI cards. I made the .ini file change that they recommend & then the game seemed to play fine for a number of hours. However, the next day I started to see the same kind of graphical corruption occur in *all* my programs & games, even including web browsers & the main Windows Desktop. I was able to try different ATI drivers with no effect and eventually the problem got so bad that the screen would go black minutes after booting to the desktop. Essentially the PC became completely unusable. Being a PC tech myself with 17 years of experience, I decided to troubleshoot the unit by replacing the graphics card with another.
The PC now runs completely fine with no corruption or crashing. Though I have not yet tried playing Jade Empire again. So, it seems that this game caused texture corruption to such a degree that it damaged my Radeon HD7850's video memory, rendering it broken.
I'm not badmouthing the game itself or GOG. I just wanted the community to be aware this is a serious potential problem.