need a little computer help...

so AoC is running fairly well for me, but I just recently started getting a weird bug with the spell animations. Before, when my DT cast one of her buffs, I'd get like a column of black blood forming up around her. Now, the black blood is kind of... horizontally stretched. It's kind of like a slanty smear across the screen. This just started today. Most of the other spells I saw people doing had the same problem... whatever the spell effect was supposed to be, it just looks like a horizontal stretched out slash of color. Other than the recent patch, the only thing I could think of that's changed recently for me is that I installed the beta nvidia drivers (175.63).

anyone have any idea what might cause this? my graphics card is a 7900 gs, and i'm running aoc on medium with bloom off and aa at 4x.

AAx4? That's pretty bold on an older card, although I guess I've heard higher AA makes for better framerates for some odd reason.

You can try two things:

1. Make sure the new beta drivers didn't change anything in your settings.

2. Make a new character who will not get instanced into the level 20 crowd. If you're still getting the same weird shearing effect, roll back your drivers to the last stable version.

It's entirely possible what you're seeing is a graphical glitch brought on by the server load, and it may have nothing to do with you. #2 might help explain that away. If #1 and 2 fail to help, set your graphics settings to the bare minimum and see if it fixes the error. If so, slowly build up your settings back to where you want them, and see if an in-game setting is causes your glitch.

I'm seeing quite a few bugs cropping up in the OB, so I'm not entirely convinced this thing you're seeing is on you.

yeah, oddly enough the aa helped my framerate. i thought it was weird too. thanks for the tips, i'll tweak things around a bit and see what i can come up with.