Pattern in smoke when saber touches wall???

[Chiles4]

I don't know if this has been posted about before but I can't believe I'm only one to experience this. When my lightsaber touches a wall, the smoke and sparks are kind of pixelated with a quilt-like pattern visible in it. It looks really cheesy! This started when I switched from a Kyro 2 to a GF3 Ti 200.

 

I've tried 23.11 and 29.42 drivers and they do exactly the same thing. I'm using the 4.38 VIA drivers with Win98SE. It appears to be an nvidia-only problem. Anyone else experiencing the same thing?

[Sith.Apprentice]

I get that to like a discolored square patching kinda thing I have no clue how to fix this wish I knew

[Wembly]

Yep, i got that same funny effect after d/l-ing the new drivers

[Methedrine]

Im running GeForce2 and I get the same thing.

Don't worry about it. It won't take any enjoyment out of the game.

After a couple of hours, you won't even notice it.

[Chiles4]

Got the answer off an Nvidia forum. I was running at 16-bit color depth and getting the "cheesy" pattern. As soon as I forced 32-bit in the Nvidia driver panel as well as in JK2, the smoke returned to "normal".

 

Are you guys running in 16-bit mode? If your rig has the power try switching to 32-bit. The smoke just kind of bugged me because it looked fine on the Kyro 2 which, btw, always renders internally at 32bit.

 

I'm kinda surprised that I hadn't seen a post about this before. It's the first time I've ever seen a really noticeable difference between 16-bit and 32-bit color depth.