Certain textures flicker in Windows 7 and Windows Vista

[Atomic_Skull]

Why would an unstable network connection cause graphical glitches like we see here? It makes no sense.

To describe the bug, imagine looking at a bird (a roc). Look at the feathers, now imagine that the game can't make up its mind about which feathers are supposed to be on top of other feathers, so it changes continuously. Like way back when some games had z-buffer issues that caused the game to display things even if they were in reality obstructed by other, closer objects.

If anything, suggesting that this error is related to wireless networks indicates that you have no real idea about what sort of problem this is-

I'm not using a wireless router but what you said basically.

I've already figured out the cause as stated in my original post. The problem is that SE will have to fix their damn game to get rid of the problem because there's nothing the user can do except limit his graphics card to Shader Model v1.4 or less using the registry settings (you can do this with ATI cards, not sure about Nvidia) or use a video card that only supports shader model 1.4, assuming you can even get a Vista/Win7 driver for it, and that's NOT an acceptable solution because it disables Windows Aero and anything else that needs Shader Model 2.0 or higher.

I think the problem might be related to Windows 7 and Windows Vista not having "real" DirectX 8. It's my understanding that in Windows Vista and Windows 7 D3D8.dll is a wrapper. Basically it's emulating DirectX 8 by converting the API calls into DirextX 9