- 2.8ghz E machine
- s3 pro savage integrated video card 32mb?
- XP home
- OpenGL
- Don't run EAX
- (Halflife)
- Steam
- Beta 5

I've had a problem where I can't see other peoples paint sprays and such wierdness. In the place of their paint all I see is a red splotch thing. (I'll get a screen shot of it). Also, from time to time my screen will flash completely red and all the map textures will be jumbled up, and here is the REALY strange thing. As a marine, I can shine my flashlight on the messed up textures and they turn back to normal. Also, when it gets jumbled the text of the net graph and in the console turns into something that looks like machine code.

I've been told that I have a corrupted file in my NS folder, I've also been told that my vid card is over heating. I think I've disproven these theories as I've completely reinstalled HL and NS many times, and bios tells me that my card temp is fine.

If anyone has a clue I would appreciate it.
-attrition

also for the spray thing I do have cl_download and cl_upload set to 1

Well, that seems strange, the only thing I could think of, would be your video card.. It is a pretty old card.
Maybe try using a different video card.

OK the red paint splotch thing is the default decal that will show instead of another clients spray decal if you don't have it. I've no idea why but sometimes I get them & sometimes I see the decals properly. It might be a server specific thing though. Try setting cl_allowdownload 1 & cl_download_ingame 1 and play on a few different servers & see if it helps. There isn't any proper fix for this as far as I know other than play on servers with sv_allowupload 1 & those 2 commands.

About the corrupt textures since they fix when they come under a dynamic light it doesn't appear that the files are corrupt. I used to be able to corrupt my textures on models & the map when I alt-tabbed back when I had a GeForce 1 but it fixed in a later driver release. All I can suggest is make sure you have the latest drivers for your motherboard since it appears you have an onboard graphics card.

Onboard graphics cards are in general useless for 3D games. Doesn't matter how fast your CPU is or how much RAM you have (although more RAM does help as the GPU will steal a chunk of your RAM for itself so if you have 512MB of RAM it will show up as 480MB if you click properties on 'My Computer'). If you are thinking of installing a proper graphics card then check if your machine has an AGP slot first as the majority of graphics cards are AGP cards (AGP slot is brown & always nearest your CPU on the motherboard and is shorter than the white PCI ones) however you can buy PCI Graphics cards. Personally I would wait until early next year when prices generally drop after the Christmas period and the latest & greatest games are out.

Thanks, that seems like great advice, however is there any way i could stress my video card and still get an accurate reading from bios? I was thinking about it and I really dont know if the card is over heating or not because I dont have any way to test the cards temperature in the middle of a game.

Additionaly, If I have one AGP slot available is there any thing I have to worry about as far as my power suply goes? I dont really know alot about computer hardware and I wouldnt know how to get the best bang for my buck as far as these things goes.

No, you shouldn't have any problems with a video card. I personally prefer ATI or nVidia, but it really doesn't matter as you shouldn't have anything to worry about power wise..

Ignore - find an intel integrated graphics card - they rock.