I just got a new laptop, a Dell Studio XPS M1340. It has a Geforce 9500M video card in it. It runs great mostly, I love it, but there's one thing:
Many of the 2d images in 3d games are rendered incorrectly. Not all the time, not as soon as I start the game, but usually after some 3d rendering has taken place. I've tested this so far in Bioshock, Counterstrike: Source, and Modern Warfare 2.
In Bioshock, nothing too major; the buttons on the menus are cut off. It is exactly what it sounds like, the buttons are missing the last 1/4th of themselves. I wouldn't have really noticed or cared if this was the only problem. But it continues.
In Modern Warfare 2, after playing a few rounds, the rank insignias on the after-game intermission screen get all garbled and the mouse cursor turns into a gray rectangle with dark gray bars running through it-- but you can faintly see the mouse cursor underneath. I tried to get pictures of this but it decided to not happen when I last played it. So on to CS:S.
In Counterstrike: Source, many of the icons on the minimap are weird, and many... I think they're sprites, but I dunno. Whatever they are, they display with x's or half circles on them, or yellow letters. Come to think of it, they seem to correspond to icons that are supposed to be displayed on the minimap, but for whatever reason they're blown up and plastered on random walls in the game. Below are some examples. I don't have comparison shots to show you what the game is supposed to look like, but if you've played CS you should see what I'm talking about. I'll try to be descriptive.
check out the left side of the picture. The yellow rectangle with black inside of it is the bomb. It's supposed to have a yellow circle emanating from it. You can see a small part of that circle, and the rest is replaced by two blue half-circles. Wtf m8.
Same thing, but this time it's a red x and a half circle.
This time the bomb is planted. It's supposed to have a red circle. Instead it looks like a yellow peace sign with the bottom cut off, and you can faintly see what looks like smoke to the left of the bomb. There's not supposed to be smoke on the minimap. You can also kinda see one of two yellow A's (split in half like most everything else) in the lower left hand part of the image. They're replacing what's supposed to be a red arrow pointing towards the bomb site.
This is the buy menu. Notice the edges of the screen. Those are little pieces of squished minimap sprites, and they are definitely not supposed to be there. Sometimes it looks like this, sometimes there's some sort of grayish background behind the right half of the buy menu, and sometimes it looks like a LCD monitor does when you break it with a hard punch-- but only around the edges of the menu.
I can't figure it out. I have the latest drivers for the video card and everything else, all the 3d stuff runs real smoothly, no other real problems. I tried googling for any sort of problems with this laptop or this video card, but nothing useful came up. I'd be really grateful for any working suggestions.
Oh, I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium. I thought it might be the OS, but my girlfriend is running the same OS and same games on her desktop with none of these problems. *shrug* I dunno.
