I have an ATI HD 5700 on Windows 7 - 64 bit. Similar issue. The game and music load and all the flat graphics work fine, but in the game zoom in level, I get a weird 3-D effect where a get polygon geometric shapes shooting out of the visible terrain like a spotlight into space. I can move my sovereign around, found a city, etc., but I can't see exactly what's going on. I've installed the 10.8 drivers, uninstalled and reinstalled the game, and run about 50 combinations of video settings to no avail. It doens't actually crash, the graphics are just messed-up.
I was in the same situation ! ( my post above)
I even cross check with my other games and I did found that "King Arthur" experience the same problems with my current version of Catalyst. ( Brought King Arthur on 1st MAR 2010 , no problems and worked just fine back then ...)
I'm pretty sure it's problem with the "newer" verions of Catalyst on my laptop ! Also in my case, 10.8 is no help at all ! also did eveything like every other gamers on this topic would, to fix the problem and still didn't work.
So, I uninstalled and reinstalled Elemental .... and uninstall all Catalyst driver and programs etc.... I'm running with Intel chipset graphic driver auto selected by windows. THE GAME IS FINALLY WORKING NOW, NO MORE POLYGON SHOTTING AROUND !!! Still needs to test how Elemental will work under this state, without the "better" ATI graphic driver... (King Arthur runs like a turtle at the moment... will see how Elemental reacts... )
But for the moment .... GAME TIME [e digicons]:grin:[/e] !!! untill I hit any more troubles later on, fingers cross ....( hope the developers to come up with some fix in later updates... to work with Catalyst... )