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Video Driver Issue causing hangs and bluescreen

CrimsonHarvest

Join Date 12/2004

Video Driver Issue causing hangs and bluescreen

I'm not kidding

I'm using a Geforce 7900 GS with driver version 169.25 on 32-bit Vista, playing at 1920x1080. I have also tried beta drivers 169.28.

About once an hour or so playing the screen will hang. The music and sound effects continue playing, and after about 20 seconds the screen goes black and then comes back and everything works again. Windows informs me that my video driver crashed and had to be restarted. Sometimes this crashes the game completely, sometimes it causes a bluescreen.

There's no obvious event in-game that precedes this behavior, so it's unpredictable and I can't reproduce it at will. Because it happens so uncommonly it's very hard to find the problem, because after changing a setting I have to play for an hour or two to see it happen again.

Any ideas?

Oh and here's my DXDiag.

technical

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If the devs know, then that sucks. Really sucks. I'm trying that older version of the driver (I'm not playing anything else new either, so I'm not missing anything by rolling back)

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I get the same thing with 169.25; I guess it is time to roll-back... note that I am using a 7950GT.

Is it your graphics card that its possiable to unlock 3 extra pipes?

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BTW, The link for the old driver is for visa 32. The link for 64 is:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_97.46.html

...will update if the old one for 64 works.

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This doesn't look like a Vista or 7x series only problem. I'm running on XP 32bit with the new 8800GT and I just had driver 169.21 crash twice within 45 minutes today.

My computer has been rock solid with no crashes of any kind before this. I had played the game for at least 20 hours with no incident before today.

I don't think rolling back to old drivers is going to be of any help to me. They were all written well before my card hit the market. Will they even work at all? Does anyone know of a new beta driver that works?

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to all with the driver crashing download the driver stated before (97.somthin) i had the crashing and hanging all the time, now i played 2 and half hours with no problems what so ever so it does fix your problems WOOT

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I rolled back and the game has been working....however the sound is "shaky" now. Anyone else had sound issues after rolling back?

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None what-so-ever. Runs like a dream. Just finished a 3 hour game with 7 star systems.

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I'd like to get an official word from Stardock or Ironclad on this. If they are working on a fix for it in their code or if they think it's solely an Nvidia problem and the only solution is to use an old driver and hope Nvidia fixes it sometime in the future.

My problem is I can't use the old driver that works. It doesn't support the newer Nvidia cards so I'm screwed.

This is a game breaking problem for me as it kicks me to my desktop with the message saying my display driver has stopped working and puts me into 800x600 res with 16 colors and then it hard locks my computer.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

This doesn't look like a Vista or 7x series only problem. I'm running on XP 32bit with the new 8800GT and I just had driver 169.21 crash twice within 45 minutes today.

I've had no isses at all myself with my 8800GT/169.21 on XP SP2.

In any case, if people are having "Display driver stopped working and could not be recovered" (generally this indicates a buffer-flipping crash), it's a video driver issue--something nVidia has to fix. We dealt with similar issues before with GC2, and got them to fix it in 101.41. Their Vista drivers have been spotty from the start.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

This is a driver issue and there's nothing we can do about it. Nvidia is investigating on their end, but it would probably help if you sent them support tickets with more data on it. (Don't ask me where, though. I went over their site yesterday and couldn't find out.)

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Just an FYI I use an elsa 7950gtx 512mb on windows xp sp2 using the 91.47 drivers.

These drivers while older work well with everything. They aren't perfect as some newer games such as sins of a solar empire might develop graphical artifacts after several hours (3 to 6 hours) of game play when certain special effects are used repeatedly (it's a shader bug in the drivers that occurs when shaders are used in a certain way). This can be fixed by saving and restarting the game. This only happens to a few games and most work perfectly (Unreal tournament 3 comes to mind).

I use such an old driver because I do a lot of animation and graphics work on my system and these drivers work the best for my 3d apps. I've noticed that later drivers have had various serious issues with them such as lock ups or worse for certain games and or introducing unacceptable visual bugs in my 3d apps. Sometimes rolling back to an older driver is actually a good thing when it comes to video cards. It has always been like this with nvidia cards since the early days. Eventually they get it right but lately they have not done so well.

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Yarlen,

I put in a ticket yesterday with Nvida. I got a reply back from them:
> Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer Care.
>
> I understand that you are experiencing crashes while playing a game called
> Sins of a Solar Empire, with GeForce 8600 graphics card, any display driver
> other than display driver version 97.xx.
>
> The issue you are experiencing does not seem to be a known issue with the
> latest display driver. However, please let me know following information in
> order to assist you better:
>
> 1) What are the different display drivers you have tried installing?
> 2) What is the exact procedure you followed to install the latest beta
> display driver?
> 3) Are you experiencing this issue while playing any other game in your
> computer?
> 4) What is the amount of power supply you have in your computer?
> 5) Do you have an onboard graphics adapter?
>
> Also, please perform the following steps:
>
> 1) Click on the Start button
> 2) In the search field, type in "msinfo32" and then press the OK button
> 3) This will bring up the Microsoft System Information Utility. Click on
> File and then save to save this information to your hard drive. You may give
> it any name you choose.
> 4) Once the file has saved on your hard drive, attach it to this support
> request so that we may review your system configuration.
>
> I look forward to your reply in order to help you better.
>
> Regards,
> NVIDIA Customer Care

Apparently he did not read hardly a word I wrote or the drop down selects from the form where I put what video card and what drivers I am using. I have a 7950gx2 using 163.71 drivers on Vista64 with 8gb of ram and an AMD X2 6000... Better yet, he did not even look at the DXDIAG.txt file I sent with my support ticket.

You guys rule for the fact that you talk to us. Glad you guys are at least aware of the problem.

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Actually as a programmer I can say this most likely is NOT a drive issue; My XP/Gforce crashes in multiplayer into BSoD quite often, and the diagnosis is always "the driver was stuck in an infinite loop".

If it would be a driver issue, every single game would have the same problems.

Before patching to 1.02 I had no trouble at all. It might be nice to know if the developers touched the graphics pipeline into 1.02.

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Actually I experience identical issues not only in Sins of a Solar Empire, but also in Crysis and Call of Duty 4 on my 8600 gt on XP SP2 with the 169.21 drivers.

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I had this issue with both the 169.25 and 169.28 drivers. It was solved when I updated to the 173.65 beta drivers found here:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1846

I'm using a GeForce 7950GT on Vista 32-bit.

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GURU3d recommends you don't install these Beta drivers if you have a SLI configuration.

I have 2 7800GTX running Vista Ultimate 32bit having the same issue: black screen then a Windows error stating that the video driver has stopped. Happens frequently.. I really love this game but the random video lockups have to be addressed! I have all the Source games and COD4 with latest WHQL Nvidia driver and none of them crash like SOASE does. I guess we'll have to wait for official 173.xx's to come out.

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Actually I experience identical issues not only in Sins of a Solar Empire, but also in Crysis and Call of Duty 4 on my 8600 gt on XP SP2 with the 169.21 drivers.

Like you, I have the XP/SP2 OS. I recently updated my nVidia drivers from 162.18 (June 2007) to 169.21(December 2007).

Zero problem. I very recently played 8 hours on ICO without any glitch.

Since I merely have a 6800 videocard, I turned off AA : all other visual settings are at max. quality. Have you tried with a no-AA setting?

Also, I play in a 1360 x 768 window on a 1440 x 900 desktop (17-inch widescreen).

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EDIT: Please delete.

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http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_97.46.html
Works for Vista 64. No crashes, played for 2 hours last night.

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Ive talked to people on TS that also have this problem, so heres the Submit Nvidia Ticket and let them know about this problem.

The more of you that is submitting tickets, the more they will know this is a problem they need to solve asap

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Getting blue screens randomly only with SINS (I play many other games daily, my system is very stable). The blue screens points to NV4_Disp.dll as the cause. I am using the latest official non-beta driver release from December '07 (169.21), again no problems with any other of the many games I play.

OS: Windows XP Professional
CPU: Athlon X2 4400+ (dual core cpu)
RAM: 2 GB
Video: Nvida 7800 GTX x 2 (SLI mode)
Motherboard: Asus A8N SLI Deluxe

P.S. Multianna, your link to the Nvidia ticket submission has a typo in it

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Arghh! Nvidia doesn't have a bug submission page for Windows XP?!?

All I can find is for Vista (ugh!)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html

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I am running a Dell XPS 720 with dual nvidia 8600 GTS in SLI mode with Vista 32 bit. I also have been dealing with this problem. It is not an issue with Sins alone as this happens with many different applications. A possible fix for this can be found here:
WWW Link
Havent had a chance to try it yet but will in a couple days when I have time.

From everything I have read on this, it appears to be am nvidia driver conflict with Vista. No official solution is out there yet and applying Windows updates and hotfixes does not fix the problem.

If anyone else trys the fix listed here please post your results.

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(My post from another topic).

7-8 series cards will have trouble on vista with games that a graphics intensive .Sins may not be that intensive but im sure if you scrolled in on a huge battle .You may have to download some of these hotfixs to fix it.Be aware that if you dont your comp will after a while BSOD and not start up for 20 minutes (i know i had this problem)

http://www.nvidia.com/object/windows_vista_hotfixes.html

A suggest would be to download any that apply to you and if that doesnt fix it report your problem on the Nvidia boards.

Note: I see ppl with the same problem in XP in this thread.Your best bet would be go to the nvidia forums and post it.Or search there forums for other threads that have been answered

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I had the same problems. I turned off bloom effects in graphics options, problem solved for me!Try it.

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