Okay so this is a post that has little to do with Sprite Lamp. In fact, it’s probably not interesting to most people who have subscribed – sorry about that. It’s about an obscure problem I had today that I seem to have fixed, but couldn’t really find anything about it online. So I post it here, on the off chance that someone else has the problem and maybe googles their way to this page, and maybe can waste slightly less time on it than I did.

I’m using a Surface Pro 2 (the 256GB model, though I doubt that matters), and was going to do some work in Unity3D. I hadn’t run Unity for a little while, and when I fired it up today, it had some problems. Specifically, lots of messed up visual stuff. Unfortunately I didn’t get a screenshot, but to my eye it looked like some fairly low level VRAM corruption of some kind… within the Unity Editor, various things were messed up, including button and other UI graphics being busted, text was garbled and screwy, and various texture previews were busted. Interestingly, it seemed to also screw up some of the actual game assets when rendering in the viewport.

Anyway, I tried the usual raindances, restarted Unity, restarted Windows, etc. to no avail. My graphics drivers were up to date, so that seemed all good. However! Long story short, a couple of people have reported that using Intel’s generic drivers rather than the ones Microsoft provides with Windows Update can help with some gaming applications (plus it gives you a control panel to mess with certain options), and I had actually done this on my Surface some time ago – but, I had since reinstalled the OS and obliterated the changes. Also, Unity never used to have this problem… curious. So, I got myself over to Intel’s driver page, navigated to the HD4400 area, and got the drivers from there. And that seems to have fixed it! Happy Unity shader editing since then, and all is well in the world. So if, by chance, I’m not the only person to have ever had this issue, and one of the other poor souls happen to wander here in their confusion, there you go. It’s what worked for me, anyway.