Alright I have been having this problem since I purchased DA when it was released. The game starts up fine no problems until I actually start playing. before to long usually about 20 - 30 turns if i'm just starting a new map or about 4 or 5 if loading an autosave the game starts having major graphics problems. Various things have happened:
1) The whole screen starts rapidly flashing black with the only a nice little square around the mouse left clear. The game still plays I just can't see anything except on the edges of the mouse. When this happens I usually have somewhere on the order of 10 - 12 turns before the game unceremoniously dumps me back to my desktop. oh yeah no error message or anything.
OR
2) Things start to go missing. Example being looking at the colony screen, assigning build slots etc. some tiles are blank (white) while others show the terrain but do not show the boxes that indicate the tiles as useable. Once again the game is still running I just can't tell which of the tiles are useable and I can't even see buildings that are already there. This also happens to a much lesser degree in the galactic view with the occasional tile going white, usually over a fleet. Whenever this happens white boxes also begin replacing some but not all of the text on screen (example look left at the menu bars the button for screen shots would still exist but both words would be replaced by a single solid white box). When this happens I usually only have about 3-4 turns before I'm back at my desktop with no error message or anything to explain why.
OR
3) and this is my favorite. everything is going along fine and then the top of the control panel dissapears, taking off about a third of the mini-map and the screen freezes. at this point I can still Alt-Tab to my desktop but instead of seeing 1280x1024 in 32 bit color I am seeing 800x600 in 8 bit (kinda reminds me of the black and white macs we used in elementary school) the only explanation I can think of is the game crashed the graphics card. I have no problems using the task manager to end the game process. then I have no problem opening the desktop properties window, going to settings. Then what I have to do is switch to the second monitor 2. (Default Monitor) on RADEON X300/X550 Series Secondary and set that to 1280x1024x32 and apply the settings, oh yeah there is no actual second monitor hooked up so nothing happens. Then I can switch back to the primary monitor slot 1. Plug and Play Monitor on RADEON X300/X550 Series and can then set that to 1280x1024x32.
As far as adjusting video settings i have turned the entire game to it's lowest settings and that doesn't seem to help it actually seems to make it worse. I have also turned anti-aliasing off wich seems to help.
Here are my systems specs:
Dell Dimension 8400
Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800FSB
2x512 memory
Radeon X300 graphics card
Seagate 160G Serial ATA 8MB cache Hard Drive
Windows XP Home
Thanks in advance for any help
