Bizarre & Selective Hard-Crashes in Gaming
NeonSpyder
"Das est NTLDR?" Join Date: 2003-07-03 Member: 17913Members
"Das est NTLDR?" Join Date: 2003-07-03 Member: 17913Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Yes! It's another computer help thread by me! Wow!</div>Okay so my computer works 100% most of the time, not crashing not doing any abnormal behaviour or anything.
Some games work 100% and never ever crash, these might include TF2, Supreme Commander, Civ4, GalCiv2 and many others.
Some games however crash consistently after about... 10 minutes of play. These include: (The recently purchased) Demigod and Dawn of Discovery. Both games performing well visually on whatever setting I put them at but regularly crashing to a black screen with stuttering audio. I cannot ctrl-alt-del my way out of this crash, nor does anything work to recover the system save for a hard and manual reset.
I have no idea why this is happening. I've updated to the latest nvidia drivers, updated to the latest sound card drivers, done a memtest (without a single error), disabled sound hardware acceleration completely (because this fixed SimCity 4 crash problems but has no effect on anything else. sadly.)
So... since my computer checks out but these games continue to crash on me...
I must stress that *some* games always work perfectly fine without any problems at all but *some other* games ALWAYS crash after a few minutes. Why the hell would it do that? If it was a memory problem (which it isn't, says the memtest.) then it would be more random whenever that memory sector were fondled by the application.
I have to suspect it's some kind of specific video/audio request made by the game that the drivers I have respond to with "OH MY GOD everything burns now" and then a crash :(
Heeelp meeeee.
(Boy, it would have been nice if it were something simple like NTLDR?)
**Edit: System Specs:**
Windows XP SP3
Nforce 780i Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHZ (4cpus)
8800 GT @ stock settings
HDA Xposion 7.1 audio card
2GB ram
Running Applications:
AVG free anti virus 8.5
Sygate Personal Firewall
That's about it aside from the usual network processes, audio config etc.
Some games work 100% and never ever crash, these might include TF2, Supreme Commander, Civ4, GalCiv2 and many others.
Some games however crash consistently after about... 10 minutes of play. These include: (The recently purchased) Demigod and Dawn of Discovery. Both games performing well visually on whatever setting I put them at but regularly crashing to a black screen with stuttering audio. I cannot ctrl-alt-del my way out of this crash, nor does anything work to recover the system save for a hard and manual reset.
I have no idea why this is happening. I've updated to the latest nvidia drivers, updated to the latest sound card drivers, done a memtest (without a single error), disabled sound hardware acceleration completely (because this fixed SimCity 4 crash problems but has no effect on anything else. sadly.)
So... since my computer checks out but these games continue to crash on me...
I must stress that *some* games always work perfectly fine without any problems at all but *some other* games ALWAYS crash after a few minutes. Why the hell would it do that? If it was a memory problem (which it isn't, says the memtest.) then it would be more random whenever that memory sector were fondled by the application.
I have to suspect it's some kind of specific video/audio request made by the game that the drivers I have respond to with "OH MY GOD everything burns now" and then a crash :(
Heeelp meeeee.
(Boy, it would have been nice if it were something simple like NTLDR?)
**Edit: System Specs:**
Windows XP SP3
Nforce 780i Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHZ (4cpus)
8800 GT @ stock settings
HDA Xposion 7.1 audio card
2GB ram
Running Applications:
AVG free anti virus 8.5
Sygate Personal Firewall
That's about it aside from the usual network processes, audio config etc.
Comments
Seems you did a good job updating your drivers. Not sure if updating DirectX would do something, but trying couldn't hurt I guess. Same goes with compatibility mode if you're under Vista. Sadly no quick solution comes to mind right now, but I'll continue to think about it!
If RAM passes, Backup your stuff and re-install your OS with all the latest drivers.
If it still isn't working, you have a hardware fault somewhere.
-Edit-
Try your games BEFORE you install Antivirus and Firewall software. Just in case.
Here's the wikipedia articles relating to programmable GPU shaders, in case anyone cares:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#2000_to_present" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_proc...2000_to_present</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader_%28realtime,_logical%29" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader_%28realtime,_logical%29</a>
I would suggest running something like <a href="http://www.memtest.org/" target="_blank">memtest86</a> and/or <a href="http://www.sisoftware.co.uk" target="_blank">Sandra</a> for 24 hours or so to see if that shows up any issues.
Most problems I had of this kind were heat and/or memory related.
I hope this helps you on your way to a solution.
It sounds like some weird kink in the games themselves that is stressing something weird. Forum hunting might help to see if others are having similar issues.
I remember back when Mirror's Edge came out updating to the "most recent" drivers actually borked everything, like Left4Dead. So, I actually reverted to drivers that were a little older, but apparently more stable. I've since never updated to the most recent Nvidia Drivers, even if they are recommended, and tend to stick with the last stable build before the current one. Try a small roll-back. It sounds like the games that are borked are requesting bleeding edge drivers, so they just might work.
Then again, I don't play games the week (or even month at times) they come out, which is often why Nvidia has to drop out new drivers to add in stuff the shiny new Crysis games want.
I loaded up dawn of discovery (which consistently crashed before) and put it at the lowest possible settings of everything incl. resolution.
I slowly ramped up the graphic effects to where I had them before but I left V-Sync off when it was on before. The game didn't crash for the three hours or so I let it run... so wondering if v-sync was the culprit I loaded up Demigod without v-sync enabled (but at regular graphics) and the thing crashed again after 5 minutes of just letting it sit there, the same way it's crashed every other time.
Demigod isn't even a graphically intense game? I've got company of heroes running at max settings and supreme commander and the like. While there's some fps slowdown (duh) there's no suggestion it will crash.
Demigod for example is running *fine*, there's no graphical slowdown of FPS or any indication it's taxing the system.. hell Dawn of Discovery was giving some chuggy FPS with the higher settings and a city full of paralax mapped buildings but it didn't crash this time.
Arrr why so complicated :(
Heat could be the issue and still be game specific because some games better utilize the GPU and keep it busy at absolutely all times. While others simply keep it very busy and occassionally leave it idle for a few milliseconds while they generate commands for it.
Drivers could also be the issue. If that's the case, newer drivers are not always the answer (although on a long enough timeline they are). I've seen my share of bugs that are 100% definitely a driver problem and a lot of times it doesn't come down to what features a game uses so much as it matters what features they use a lot more than other games and which they stress at the same time.
If I were you, I'd take your case off, put a big ass house fan next to your video card and run it full blast. To possibly eliminate heat as an issue.
If that doesn't work. Try rolling your drivers back 6 months, 12 months, etc... to see if there's a happy set in there somewhere. If that fixes it, then all you can do is complain to nvidia and bounce around a bit with driver versions until you find one you're happy with that also works.
Yeah. Go forum searching about Left4Dead and nvidia Drivers.
It has to do with multi-core rendering. Source basically sucks at it (or at least did). So, when Nvidia started opening their drivers to it, L4D would try it, mess up, and then spit the workload onto the CPU creating bizarre and random FPS drops. You can either get old drivers or setup your L4D run to turn off that feature. Unless Nvidia/Valve has remedied it recently. I just leave in the extra console command.
Demigod and DofDesc aren't graphically intensive like say Crysis, but they are more recent. Thus, they are probably built using certain expectations in the hardware and rendering powers that CoH and the like (while more intensive) didn't have as available. Thus, it sounds more like something buggy in newer features in the drivers than anything else. Also, never underestimate the power of inefficient code, particle effects, and reflections/shadows. They are subtle, but eat your rendering cycles like WHOA. Thus, why even if it doesn't SEEM to be more intensive, you might have to run stuff at lower settings.
Something else to check out is if your card needs new firmware. Check with your card's manufacturer. That would be eVGA or whoever build the card itself.
I then ran MSCONFIG and turned on selective startup, leaving all the startup applications off including wireless, anti virus and firewall. The games worked.
They worked.
So... I turned on anti-virus, firewall, wireless application and...
Games still work at full/proper resolution/settings without any hiccups or crashing whatsoever. I played Dawn of Discovery for about 2 hours before the game told me to "Go take a coffee break" because I had been playing for 2 hours. :D
Demigod can run at full res without any problems either.
I am soooo haaapppeeeeey
It wasn't the ram (Memtest+ said so)
It wasn't the drivers (no change, plus not the solution)
It wasn't a heat issue
It was some kind of application conflict. Somehow. I have no idea *why* or how it's working like this or why it wasn't working with some of those applications loaded, but talk about the most OBSCURE possible conflict.
You know who eventually gave me this solution? I sent an email to ubisoft tech support, he sent me an email with some quasi-reasonable solution about drivers or something, it wasn't important or helpful but what WAS helpful was that in the footer of the email there was a list of 10 or so 'uncommon solutions' that were just copy-pasted there from some list they have. It was about the 10th one down the list, "Open msconfig, selective startup and disable all startup applications, then renable one at a time to solve." Whee!!
/thread
Glad you figured it out.
No it seems to be working with my anti-virus application running and loaded. It must have been some other application but I'm not sure which one it is. As far as I can tell AVG is not the culprit here.