Dawn of War II - sometimes works!

[BenjaminHill]

Very strange when running any of the Dawn of War 2 games under parallels - it always launches, about 30% of the time runs great with decent FPS, but the rest of the time the graphics freak out.

As soon as the actual rendering engine kicks in, you can see that the ground textures are all checkerboarded - it looks like some of the shading is working but the textures are either missing or being calculated wrong. Within a minute it freezes up.

I've tried disabling all effects and setting rendering to minimums, but it doesn't seem to help (or hurt). When it works, it works fine even with effects and a decent resolution, and never freezes. When it doesn't work, I do a lot of rebooting (both inside and out) and sometimes it helps, sometimes not.

Inside: Win7 64b DirectX 11 (all up to date). Steam purchased game.
Outside: OSX 10.7.3 2.2 GHz i7

The THQ folks weren't any help:

"Unfortunately, the Parallels Display Adapter doesn't meet the game's minimum system requirements. Honestly, I surprised the game launches at all. The game requires a Shader Model 3 video card (the equivalent of NVIDIA 6600GT 128MB or ATI X1600 128MB or better)."

... which I know is wrong because when it works, it runs very smoothly!

 

[serv]

Benjamin,

First of all I'd give the VM two cores and at least 2Gb of memory (if not already).
Could also bump video memory to 512Mb and see if it makes any difference.

Then I'd seek for configuration.lua (text file) which game uses (can't point you to exact location, seen it in different places). 'screenwidth' and 'screenheight' parameters should be set to one of standard resolutions like 1280x800, not some seemingly random dimensions the game detected due to then-current Parallels' window size. Try starting the game after setting that resolution in Windows manually via desktop preferences.