Hi everyone, I have a little problem with GK3 (GOG version). For some reason the game doesn't display the text that pops up when you hover the cursor over buttons (just a white box); the text from the option menus that tells you the settings you're using, e.g. renderer settings, resolution settings; and the names of the save games in the save/restore menus. Of course everything displays correctly in software renderer mode, but it's ugly as heck and doesn't run as smoothly.
I'm using an ATI Radeon HD 4850 on Win 7 64-bit, running DirectX 11. DxDiag shows DirectDraw, Direct3D and AGP texture accelerations are all enabled.
Does anyone know what's going on? I scanned through the topics in the GK forums here but I didn't find anything similar to what I'm facing. I really don't want to use the software mode. Thanks for any help!
P.S attached a screenshot with problem areas circled in red. An oddity that captions work just fine.

I actually had the same thing occur when I first started to play the game. I have an ATI 4890 and also run Windows 7 64-bit. The problem seemed to go away one day though, and hasn't returned. It may have been when I moved the LOD (Level of detail) slider to the maximum setting, as that was one of the things I noticed after having played a while. Sorry that I can't be more specific as I really wasn't paying attention to the text at the time, as I was rapidly adjusting settings for another reason, only to later find that the text had returned.

I see. May I know what was the reason that made you adjust your settings? I just might be able to fix this following in your footsteps.
Thanks.

Well originally, I was getting a lot of flickering on the main character. I read that sometimes ATI cards had issues with GK3. One solution was to run in software mode. I posted a message here about it. Basically, I turned off "Incremental Rendering". That allowed me to run in hardware mode without the flickering. It was a bit slower but worked. Unfortunately, running in hardware mode was causing the pop-up text to become blanked out. Even the text entry for saved games was invisible. I decided to accept this and continue play in hardware mode.
As time went on, I kept updating the ATI drivers as they were released and eventually I looked up the "LOD" option. Facepalming myself for my silly oversight, I upped the level of detail slider and improved the graphical quality. I believe that it was around this time that the text returned, but I cannot recall if it was before or after this change.
The only modification that I have applied to the game is forcing the resolution to 1920x1080. I have been using this since I began playing, both during the flickering issues, the invisible text and afterwards.
You might try contacting "The Collector". He hangs out here and at The Sierra Help Pages. He's usually quite knowledgeable about these sort of things.

I already did all those fixes, upping resolution, turning off incremental rendering, and maxing LOD.
I just updated my drivers. Now the save menu texts appear after I click on them once, and I have text in the menu options, but floating text is still missing, which is the most important feature.
Bleargh. Yeah I've seen The Collector helping out with the GK issues here and I've already browsed the Sierra Help Pages. Still no go man.

This happens to me when I try to force anti aliasing using Radeon-Pro.

If I don't force it, text is always good. But sometimes when the camera is at a certain location screen becomes black for a few nanoseconds every second while Gabriel is speaking.

By the way. Everyone should be forcing 8x or 16x anisotropic filtering. It makes a very big difference in graphic quality.