Dear community, dear tech support,
I recently purchased and started playing Galactic Civilization III on my Dell Workstation [Intel Core i7-2720QM (2,20GHz, 6MB Cache, Quad Core), AMD FirePro M5950 Mobility Pro graphics card (1GB GDDR5), 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel RAM]. For reference and to preempt comments that my set-up is outdated: On the same machine I have played 100+ hours of Total War Attila, 25+ hours of X-COM 2, several hours of the Endless Space 2 Alpha and many more games with higher graphic requirements than Galactic Civ III, without any issues.
When starting Galactic Civ III for the first time the display on my screen shifted upwards by some millimeters, meaning that part of the taskbar was displayed at the top of the screen, which persisted after I closed Galactic Civ III and only returned to normal after I restarted the laptop. I changed the resolution in-game, which seemed to take care of the problem. Then after playing about 2 hours, the display shifted upwards again and a couple of seconds later I got a white screen with thin black vertical lines which did not respond. The exterior of the laptop was warm, but not unusually so (it has gotten much hotter after several hours of Total War Attila in the past).
After shutting off the laptop, restarting and doing some trouble-shooting in Linux and Windows Safe-Mode using a projector, connected via HDMI, as screen, I'm relatively certain that my graphics card and screen are dead (the on-board graphics unit is still working).
I'm not attributing any blame here - but I'd be really curious about what happened. Was this my graphics card dying an age-induced death that coincided with me playing Galactic Civ III, or is there a problem with the game?
Cheers,
PS: I've also posted this in the steam community hub, here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/4/340412122420903798/