hjf288 hjf288

Crashing quite often

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Crashing quite often

Nvklddm has stopped responding and was restarted

from Sins Forums
Hi, Ive been playing Sins of a solar empire since Beta 1 and been encountering the following problem on:

Windows Vista Ultimate
AMD Athlon XP 3800 Dual core
2gb DDR 400 Ram
Nvidia Nforce 4 chipset
BFG Tech Nvidia 7900GT Graphics card

Basically I start the game and can play but it will occassionaly freeze, the screen will turn black then eventually blue saying (!) No signal..

You can still hear the soundsa and music in the background and eventually the screen will come back up after a few seconds.

This will happen more and more often until eventually the game crashes stating to send a minidump - I have done this for Beta 1 but not for Beta 2 yet.

Ive tried using NVIDIA drivers ranging from 101.xx, 158.xx, 160.14.

None of them make a difference, I dont encounter this problem playing any other game though such as Alpha Prine, Quake IV, Quake wars Enemy territory, C&C 3 Tiberium Wars, BF 2142.

They all work fine, any assistance would be cool cheers.
technical
14,276 views 39 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
Found some information for people that might be having the same issues.

Here's some information from Nvidia from their forums on the subject:

Link: NVIDIA Statement on Vista TDR Errors

Seems like it is all based on an interaction between the drivers and the application.

Also, here's some information from Microsoft on the specifics of the driver resetting:

Link: Microsoft: Timeout Detection and Recovery of GPUs through WDDM

What's interesting here is that they give you the various DWORD values for the registry settings for this function. I believe this is what hjf288 is talking about way up top when he said he disabled this. Nothing I'd recommend anyone mess around with unless they really know what they are talking about with this sort of stuff.
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top
Aye sorry Im on holiday and havent played SINS much - Ever since moving to a 19" LCD from 32" LCD widescreen, My crashes have been less frequent but still there.

Disabling the TDR will hardlock your system when SINs crashes but it will allow you to play with no graphics restarts during the game although it will crash eventually.

I will submit a dxdiag and crash report when I get back from holiday, to the Ironclad guys - what version of the drivers are you using?
ObjectDock - Access shortcuts and frequently used applications from an animated dock.
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top
@hjf288 - If you're running your RAM at 1066 or higher (even if they aren't overclocked), try dropping it down to 800 and see what happens.

It looks like a lot of the issues could be related to fast(er) RAM. In some cases it turns out to be bad RAM, but in my case by severely under-clocking my RAM I haven't had any issues yet (in the little testing I've done... I'll know more tonight/this weekend).

Basically, it looks like there's some sort of issue between how the TDR (read: Vista) reacts with the Nvidia drivers when an application does "something" that it doesn't like. It's like the drivers aren't able to keep their memory allocation in order.
Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top
Err mate Im running DDR 400 - its pretty old school but Memtest and Windows memory diagnostics say its A.Ok and like I say it only occurs in Sins.

Ironclad did mention a bit when they released the patch that there was some more safeguards in order to prevent null buffers or something but it was unable to be fixed due to the fact it looks like an nvidia driver bug.

Ive filed a bug report with nvidia just waiting to test the latest drivers and latest sins patch out .
Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top
Hello,
Just got beta 3. Having problems the first time I played it crashed the first time i went to colonize a planet. The second time the game was just weird. I had forgot to uninstall beta 2 before I installed beta 3. I have tried deleting beta 3 twice but there always seems to be something left when I start a new game. When I go to Stardock I can never get it to uninstall the present version. Any help on how to completely uninstall the game so that I can install a clean version?
Thanks in advance
Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top

Start with this: after uninstalling just delete everything in the Sins directory. If that doesn't work for you let us know and we'll do our best to track it down.

Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
Lamb, I used the unistall in Stardock and it uninstalled the current Beta2. Try the unistall of the Beta3 and I bet it will unistall any Beta version you have. Then reinstall. That's waht I did and beta 2 unistalled and Beta 3 installed fine almost 2 hours into my first game.

Good Luck
Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top
same issue here... now I normally preach to people that this sort of crash is usually a hardware issue, as it is caused by your video card crashing (and instead of it freezing the system like on XP, vista terminates the graphics driver and power cycles the video card, you can hear the fan stopping and starting again on the video card if you listen closely when its caused by a hardware issue, like heating.. I don't know if it does the same when its a software issue though).

This CAN however happen due to a game issue. Specific games at specific instances... And this is what i am having now... a rock solid system (so it isn't the hardware) getting those crashes on a core2duo E8400 with P35 mobo, 4GB of ram, and a 7900GS video card.

I am getting my 8800GTS 512MB tomorrow, hopefully it fixes it...

This usually occurs when I have a capital ship select, and I am zooming in or out, a red line towards the current target is ALWAYS present at the exact moment of the crash... so it might be related, it is also usually when the beam weapons fire... The only other place it happens is when finishing a level in the dark avatar official campaign in galciv2. when it loads the next level it crashes the video card as well...

Anyone know of a specific graphical option you can disable to avoid it? Usually such game specific crashes can be circumvented by disabling a certain visual option...
Reply #35 from Sins Forums Top
I have yet to narrow down the exact feature that triggers this phenomenon. But I disabled ALL the "effects" and turned off anti aliasing (completely) and I haven't had a single crash since...

Occasionally I will get flickering of the menu for a few seconds (which used to predate a crash before..)

But it will go away after a second or two at most and the game continues fine...

I will fiddle with the options, turning on one feature at a time until I find out which one it is that causes this.

(this reminds me the time NWN2 had an infinite loop bug in its "shiny water" function)
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
This has been driving me mad all day. I have a 7800gtx, Athlon X2 4200 and 2gb ram with vista 32, and have just found what works for me (at the moment). Normally a few hours into a med map things will really crawl, especially when zooming in and out, things turn to a slideshow, but after trying all the effects options I seem to have found that turning off 'planet rings' gets things moving again.

Hopefully this will get some of you unstuck, it is very frustrating to be able to run graphically intensive games with no problem (COD4), but getting crippled by a non graphically full on game like this.
Reply #37 from Sins Forums Top
I disabled ALL effects and anti aliasing (but kept all the textures and stuff at max and the res at 1920) and all crashing stopped.
I replaced my 7900GS with an 8800GTS 512MB and reenabled all effects and it was also not crashing...
I can only imagine that this is a vram issue. That or a specific effect is causing the crash on 7 series geforce
Reply #38 from Sins Forums Top
I dont know about that. I have nvidia 8500gt with 512mb, updated the drivers upon getting this game, and this game is constantly crashing my video card. I have loads of fun playing this game, but woe betide me if i dont save often. Maybe I just need to fiddle with the video options in the game, but I just hate not getting the full effect of the game.
Reply #39 from Sins Forums Top
Did you disable all the effects and AA?
In options the first four tabs are "user interface, video, sound, effects". Disable AA in video, and in effects (that lists a bunch of effects like "bloom" and "sky boxes" etc...) disable all those effects (and set all the textures to highest) and it should stop the crashing...