The final battle was every bit as vicious as I thought it would be and seemed downright impossible at first. It was exasperating to see my expensively assembled army reduced to terrified sheep and burnt to a crisp even before I had a chance to make a move.

Fortunately, some canny spellcasting saw the defenders of Endoria emerge victorious even if the only ones to survive were three black dragons.

King’s Bounty: The Legend is a typical Russian-developed game in that it was pretty buggy initially. However, Katauri Interactive and 1c deserve a lot of credit for pushing out patches to fix issues.

And typical of most game patches, the readme files for KB:TL’s patches can be a source of comedy. For example, the 1.6.5 readme proudly boasts “No more crashes on FX5xxx video cards” while the readme for the final 1.7 patch meekly suggests “Possible game crashes on video cards FX5xxx series are avoided.”

Though the game runs pretty stably now, some gamers continue to suffer problems. The main complaint about KB:TL is it really taxes graphics cards on some systems. Common symptoms including system temperature rising dramatically, graphics card and system fans going into overdrive and graphics cards shutting down. One gamer went so far as to suggest the game may have fried his GPU.

There are two curious things about the situation. First, KB:TL, while a good-looking game, has pretty reasonable system requirements. I’m playing the game with most graphics settings maxed out without any problems on a system with a lowly 512MB 9600 GT graphics card. The second thing that needs to be pointed out is gamers who are reporting their graphics card are overheating while playing KB:TL note they have no such problems playing games that are more graphics-intensive (e.g. Crysis Warhead).

As with most PC tech problems, there are various folk remedies suggested online including disabling antialiasing (AA) and vertical synchronisation (vsync) in the in-game options.

From what I can tell, though, the problem is most likely due to dodgy nVidia graphics drivers. For whatever reason, KB:TL doesn’t seem to like the newer drivers.

This wouldn’t be the first time nVidia’s graphics drivers have caused serious problems. The company pulled its 196.75 graphics driver from its site in March after numerous reports of graphics cards overheating. It was suspected the driver’s fan-control was faulty which resulted in graphics cards overheating as fans failed to kick in.

For what it’s worth, I can confirm KB:TL runs perfectly with nVidia’s 182.50 drivers from April 2009. I’ve not had a single crash or graphical error, and my modest hardware seems to be handling the game just fine. As ambient temperatures tend to be scorching locally, my system is extremely susceptible to overheating yet I’ve not had any problems playing the game.

Rolling back graphics drivers may not be a palatable solution for those who need the latest drivers for performance boosts in the latest games but it’s the only thing that seems to work for KB:TL.

The bigger question here is what the hell is happening over at nVidia? I’ve stuck with company since the GeForce 2 and even gone further in choosing nForce motherboards for my past few PCs. As far as I was concerned, the main reason to choose nVidia over ATI previously was driver stability but it does appear the pendulum has swung the other way.

7000 gold and useful bonuses! Woo hoo!