Grid and radius rings not showing up

[atomicvampire 0]

I've recently re-installed SC4 Deluxe and noted a graphical issue I never had before.  Neither the grid, nor the hospital and school radius rings, show up.  When I press the show grid hotkey, the screen flashes a little and a long diagonal shadow shows up.  So far I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling my video drivers, tested it on a fresh and patched install, run dxdiag and found no errors, and I can't seem to find the problem.  Any suggestions?

System specs:

P4 2.8ghz

768MB RAM

1.5GB pagefile

GeForce 6600GT 128MB

Included before and after photos of shadow that shows up when I press the show grid hotkey.

[atomicvampire 0]

Sorry, forgot to mention that I also tinkered with the in-game display settings and the only change that made a difference was switching to software rendering. The grid and radius rings show up on software rendering, which is why I suspected it might have something to do with DirectX or my display drivers.

[Luka 0]

SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME JUST NOW. it just happened all of a sudden, while i was playing. i should mention that i had recently added sim metro life arena, and ndex windspear arena (w/e its called). I had also been messing with the display settings. PLEASE HELP

[Luka 0]

solved. simply pressed reset to defaults in graphics settings. no clue what did it, but it works now!

[david1314 44]

Sim City will prioritize out some visual rendering on slower machines. The most common bug that comes with this is the highways not displaying properly in region-satalite view.

It's a matter of getting the display to a playable level and compromising with the rest...it should have been fixed by maxis before it ever became a problem with a more in depth video setting panel.

I think city detail and texture detail are the biggest factors in this. Unfortunately, each is in fact a suite of settings so you cannot pick and choose which textures and which details you want to see better and which you don't so much care about (i.e. in Flightsim, you can alter land and water details independently of each other).

Oh, also shadows are another big one (I think this is the one that sets my system over the limit).

If you have a slow machine, you have two choices:

1. a game that looks good

2. a game that's playable

Although, I'm kinda concerned about the specs on atomic's machine. They are higher than mine across the board and shouldn't have such performance-related problems. I would ask if you have other items taxing your video card (like a second monitor or one of many poorly programed audio apps with 'visualizations' running in background).

It is without a doubt video related though (as pointed out software rendering fixes the problem).

BTW, atomic, thanks for the post...you gave system stats, pictures, and a good run-down of your problem. BRAVO! I wish everyone did that with their questions.