I don't know if it has really occurred to anyone else to make mention of this, but I'm seeing a bit of a pattern here involving NVIDIA cards and whether the drivers are up to date. At least one person got ZE working by downgrading the graphics drivers, so I think it might be worthwhile to look into that as a possible solution if updating the drivers is not helping. It might be a dead end, but it'd be worth a shot to see what happens. I know it's natural (even for myself) to feel weird about downgrading graphics drivers, which could be why we have only one such reported success with downgrading them. I also realize that some actually benefit from updating their drivers, but it only appears to work for certain series. I'm only thinking out loud here, but the graphics driver version seems to be the most common hangup, which is complicated by the fact that different series are able to run ZE using different driver versions, which may not be the most up to date.
More thinking out loud (hopefully I'm not totally wrong on this):
- OS appears to be irrelevant, but that's just as well since the last three Windows releases are essentially Windows NT 5 (XP), 6 (Vista), and 7 (...7 Surprise!
). Vista/7 does appear to be a problem on the surface, but that's a bit of an assumption, and the graphics driver version issue would point to this not being the case.
- .NET Framework versions aren't really being reported, but so far doesn't appear to matter as long as you have 1.1.
- 32 or 64 bit architecture. This leads us back to drivers. Honestly, I continue to get the impression that 64 bit drivers haven't matured yet (though I haven't really kept track in recent months), thus why I'll stick with 32 bit, at least, until I begin planning out my next system. Back to the issue, though, I couldn't say either way on this, but I'm not seeing any strong indication that 64 bit architecture in itself is a problem.
Granted, I'm no authority on computers, but these are the conclusions I'm drawing utilizing some of the knowledge I've built up over the years while attempting to intuitively sort the data. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about something that would indicate a problem could be caused directly by one of the issues I'm trying to narrow down. It'll help solve the problems at their source. I'm merely attempting to cut through the clutter, if you will.
Now, the real reason I'd intended to post was to mention something important regarding the driver version listed for my entry. Catalyst 10.2 is known to be a bit problematic (I've witnessed it for myself as well as hearing it from at least one other.), so I wouldn't advise using it. I'm currently on Catalyst 10.6, and ZE runs fine. I just wanted to mention this because 10.2 was causing both KotOR 2 and War for Cybertron (possibly others as well, but I can't recall them) to crash immediately upon running. I suppose it also helps knowing updating ATI drivers to 10.6 doesn't hurt anything. At least, that's how it is with the Radeon 3870, the only card I can really speak for currently.
