Flickering textures in Windows 7 and Vista

[Atomic_Skull]

It's not something specific to my PC. I've seen the exact same bug with FFXI on many different PCs with various graphics cards. After some testing I've found that It's actually caused by Windows Vista and Windows 7 forcing applications which use a pixel shader version lower than 2.0 to use 2.0 instead ( FFXI uses Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 1.0).

You can however force ATI's graphics drivers to be limited to a specific pixel shader version regardless of what the video card actually supports using the pixelshaderversion and vertexshaderversion registry values. When the video card is limited to Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 1.0 the problem completely goes away. Although this is hardly a "fix" for the problem because it limits *all* applications to Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 1.0 and disables Windows Aero (as well as any games that need pixel shaders and vertex shaders higher than 1.0)