Translucent Fish
 

I have downloaded each of the 4 betas and still see the same problem. All of the fish are translucent - the top half of the fish can be seen but the bottom half, not at all. The background looks great - just the fish look wierd. I am running an ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro 256MB at 1680x1050x32 on a Dell Inspiron 530s running WinXP. According to the Catalyst Control Center, the driver packaging version is 8.42-070914a-053349C-Dell. Any ideas?

Flagging this as a driver issue.

Can you check out Dell's website and see if they have an update for the driver for your laptop? If this were a regular PC, then you could skip Dell altogether and go straight to ATI's website and download the latest driver. But because it's a laptop, you usually have to use a Dell-branded version of the ATI driver as it has special settings for your laptop. Unfortunately, laptop manufacturers don't feel the need to spend extra time keeping drivers up to date.

There are also some websites around which have newer ATI drivers which have been modified to work with certain laptops.

Translucent Fish
 

Thanks for the update. Actually the Inspiron 530s in a slimline tower - not a laptop. I will check out the ATI website for the latest driver.

Oops. :)

I had same issue untill updating my driver from ATI

Starting with the Nov 2007 release, ATI drivers were causing this exact same problem with the fish in v2.6. The October 2008 update finally fixed it, but most laptop manufacturers haven't bothered to follow suit, so a lot of Laptop owners are up a creek still. You might try petitioning the manufacturer (or one of these laptop tweak sites) to try bringing the laptop drivers up to date with the current ATI release.

Desktop users merely need to update from the ATI site and this will fix their problem.

ATI, general
 

My laptop is a HP / Compaq nc8430. It has an ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 256mg card.
I had some errors with MA 3 so I deleted all ATI drivers and "uninstalled" the video card.
Attempting to load the drivers from ATI failed. (Diver dated Oct 15 2008 version 8.10) ATI gives the user a compatibility checker rather than the drivers initially. In my case it immediately informed me that I could not continue and directed me to HP for their version of the ATI drivers.
HP had the drivers and they loaded fine. Release date on theirs was Oct 5 2007 and version 8.45

The interesting part is MS Critical Updates.
Just before I began having problems I performed the update and included optional hardware updates. This was absolutely the problem in my case.
MS provides an update created by ATI that will load on an HP however, the patch date is March 2007 yet there is no indication or documentation what the thing is supposed to do or fix.

I have now run the routine three times tonight.
From ATI, they send you to HP
HP, loads and everything runs fine.
Load that patch from MS: MA3 has an immediate critical failure if left at the native resolution of 1680x1050. MA3 will run at 1024x786 but error on any higher setting. The failure message is generic. All other screen savers run but only allow a resolution of 1024x768.
Ignore the update from MS / ATI, everything ran fine even on multi monitors and a projector

Unfortunately MS updates like that generally stink. It doesn't supprise me that this happened. Thanks for the info specific to this version though. :TU:

No promises but (for the X1600) you could try the Omega driver: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati.php

I've seen that MS driver crash another laptop running MA3. My advice it to not use it, it causes way too many problems.

Thats what caught my eye. Regardless of driver version numbers look at the release dates.
MS is giving a patch that is older than the original driver or ATI's fixed driver. It is essentially rolling back the driver in someway and apparently breaking what was working fine without it