Well, the video card issues seem to have been resolved, and then in a way that allowed me to hold on to the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850. which is good; this new idea I’m chasing will need as much video performance as possible.

Of course, getting things to work was something of a task. It ultimately required removing all ATI software and drivers from the system, running a program to clean up any driver “remnants,” and then installing new Catalyst drivers (version 8.7) from a hotfix I managed to unearth from the Sapphire website.

Of course, that was only most of a solution.

Neverwinter Nights isn’t exactly a new game, and so does not require or support some of the newer graphics features that modern video cards can deliver. In most cases, of is easy to correct for this; in the case of an ATI card, using Catalyst’s control center to set all the advanced 3D features to be “application controlled” (where possible — “off” where necessary) will typically do the trick.

So I did this.

Neverwinter Nights started up just fine, loaded the test module just fine (a good sign: the module loading process had been where I’d been having issues) and displayed the scenery graphics just fine. But: no character models were visible.

Frak.

A bit of Googling turned up a solution I wouldn’t have expected, however. It seems that with this video card and driver set, it is the case that the Catalyst A.I. is apparently necessary to run in its advanced mode. That struck me as unusual when I first read it, but making the change worked…the characters were visible during the next test run.

Apparently this also has something to do with a setting in the game concerning environmental mapping onto character models; since I had this mode enabled (it maps “real time” reflections onto metallic surfaces on each character’s armour or clothing), that may also have had something to do with the missing models.

Eh, whatever. It works now, which was the goal. ATI drivers have never really played nice with BioWare titles, so I’ll probably have to monitor the situation like a hawk in the future. And there is this pesky issue with the mouse cursor’s repainting that I still have to sort out.

But it works!

I hate being beaten by a computer problem, so it’s nice to have put this one to rest.