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thedott
thedott
Join Date 03/2006
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Technical Issue - LCD Monitor & DVI Connection

November 17, 2007 3:17:52 PM from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
I've got a quirky technical issue. I recently purchased a ViewSonic VX1940W LCD monitor, and I attached it to my system via the DVI connector. When I start Sins (Beta 4), the game is randomly minimized with the Desktop coming into focus. I can click on the taskbar to restore Sins, but the game will continue repeating this behavior until I can access the main menu. At that time, it seems to stablize. Until now (i.e. when I was using my original 19" VGA monitor), I've had no problems with Sins.

This problem doesn't occur when running the game in window mode.

System configuration is:

AMD 3000+ Athlon 64
MSI K8N Neo4 Mobo
1GB RAM
MSI 256MB GeForce 6600
Windows XP SP2
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thedott
Warp4th
Join Date 11/2007
+2
Reply #1 November 17, 2007 5:02:29 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
If your old monitor was a CRT one, the refresh rate setting in Sins is probably 85 Hz, try lowering it to 60 Hz, since LCD screens do not support (nor require) high refresh rates.
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thedott
thedott
Join Date 03/2006
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Reply #2 November 17, 2007 6:11:43 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Thanks for the reply. In the settings, Sins says it's set to 60Hz and is the only available option.
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thedott
thedott
Join Date 03/2006
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Reply #3 November 17, 2007 7:45:55 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
I've been tinkering, and I found the cause of the problem: Folding@Home. I've disabled it, and everything works as normal. This makes sense. When Sins starts playing the intro video, the CPU utilization drops enough for the Folding process to become the active one resulting in the change of focus back to the Desktop.
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thedott
eetmorsqrls
Join Date 02/2007
+25
Reply #4 November 17, 2007 7:53:20 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
eeek! big words!
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thedott
Blair Fraser
Join Date 10/2006
+292 moderator
Reply #5 November 17, 2007 7:56:29 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
Good find theDott! I'll add that to my list of problem fixes
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thedott
lordkosc
Join Date 12/2006
+6
Reply #6 November 17, 2007 8:08:44 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
have you updated your drivers? also does your display driver says its connected to the viewsonic VX1940W? sometimes it might say default plug and play monitor, and that causes problems in some games...
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thedott
thedott
Join Date 03/2006
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Reply #7 November 19, 2007 9:12:44 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums
eeek! big words!


All I can say is that I'm a computer engineer living life as a programmer  

Blair, thanks, I'm glad that I can help  . (It stumpped me for a while till I noticed the problem with another game during its intro video sequence and started thinking about what all I had installed since playing them.)

Lordkosc, thanks for the advice. I thought about this too but the drivers were reporting everything correctly so I figured it had to be something else.
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