A macbook pro perchance? Others have had similar issues, but the cause is not yet known. It certainly looks like some sort of graphic memory corruption issue though, and MBPs are known to have heat issues, so you may want to try a temperature monitor to check on that.

I have a different problem. Whenever I am in a game (doesn't happen all of the time) it suddenly glitches and my graphics go haywire and I cannot make out even a planet. It seems like it is distorting every image and I have to restart my computer entirely. I am also running a mac book pro with a x1600.

I agree with Kryo, laptops really are not meant for gaming. Sure, there are laptops that are built for gaming but even those can get very hot. More then likely your laptop is getting too hot, you might not experience heating issues but the more load intensive the game is on the system the harder everything has to work, which can raise temperatures pretty drastically without you even realizing this change. Which can be pretty common in laptops. I had a pretty good laptop a few years ago that I played games like Half Life 2 on. It was a Mobile AMD XP 2ghz, 1gig of ram, and built on ATI Card with 128mb of memory. My system never ran that hot, unless I tried to play my games. While playing, my laptop would get extremely hot on the bottom, hot enough to probably burn my skin if I left it on my lap. So I suggest you get a program to monitor your system temperatures and post what it reads out. More then likely, your GPU is getting over heated and isn't rendering properly.

Tony, from the looks of it your laptop should easily run this game even on the highest of settings. Like in my previous post, I think you should try to get some software to monitor the temperatures. You can try to turn down your graphical settings to the minimal settings and see if it does the exact same thing as it did before with the highest settings. I would assume that if it acts the same no matter what level of settings you put it at, that you might have some sort of drivers problem. If it seems to work better with lowest graphics and will gradually seem to get worse, then I can only assume your laptop is heating up too much.

Good luck with the problems, I wish I had ways to fix the problems for good but there really isn't much to do for solutions. You can always try to get one of those laptop coolers for it to sit on, but that would be getting into things I don't really know anything about. So I couldn't really tell you what would be best to get if you wanted to try that.