That's funny! I spent a day testing options on and off until I narrowed it down to the "Enable Bloom Effects" option (under the EFFECTS tab in option), turning off this option completely gor rid of the blue screens for my Windows XP Pro + Nvidia 7800 GTX System.

So go turn off "Enable Bloom Effects" guys, it may fix your problem like it did for us.

Trust me, it isn't just SOASE, I'm having the exact same issue with other games such as CoD4.

I'm running on an 8800GTX and Q6600 @ 2.4GHz. Seems like the more text there is on screen, the lower my performance goes.

Here at the main menu, there's not much text.
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/5d9c739482414a27e102a0f6c192e54fffeee492.png

Single Player menu on the Tutorial tab. Again, little text.
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/8a31a67127dc3beca43833c5a9e3178615afd039.png

Now I click New Game and get a nice performance drop.
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/e15c8f1889fb3cb614f9ed6aa8efbf92eb1f51d8.png

Move to Custom Maps and the FPS goes back up.
http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/176fe7a71e450aa38e4ec3fa139fc35fd72107df.png

I can have hundreds of ships and strike craft duking it out with everything on high at 1680x1050 with 4 multi-sample. When font pops up, to the depths my frame rate goes!

I've just had 2 mini dumps on a game I have been playing for 7 hours. Thank god for autosave! Do they want or need the mini dumps?

These two crashes happened almost the exact same time as the novalith gun fired. Both times I was watching it fire when it went to black. Didn't start this until I set the novalith to autocast firing.

It was similar to the freeze in that it would well ya know, freeze then go black, switch back to the game but still frozen, music is playing, back to black, then to desktop.

well in the short time that I have disabled bloom effects, I have had far more trouble. way more freezing including 2 mini dumps. feels like every other minute I am cussing my monitor.

Asus M2N32-SLI 590 AM2
64-bit Vista
4600+ AMD X2
4 GB RAM
7600 GT x 2 (Issues in single and SLI)

I've been searching around for a fix to this for a while and thought I'd check to see if anyone has seen this from Microsoft?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194/en-us

This was an update back in August '07 that installed 3 patches which was suppose to vastly improve the performance for Vista, sort of a pre-emptive SP1. The problem I'm having is 2 updates install, but I can't get 938194 to install. Can anyone that is also having the screen freeze, flicker and video driver has stopped responding error, check to see if this patch has been installed on theirs --> Windows Update/View Installed Updates. Install history might show if it failed if you haven't wiped out the history. I tried for a few hours yesterday to get this patch to install and will try again tonight, but it'd be good to know if others checked into this and are or are not missing this patch as well. Ridiculous to me that Microsoft pushes out patches for their O/S that their O/S can't even install... This is about the 3rd patch with issues.

Here's a good article on Vista's performance, case anyone cares:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=243EIONI4TZOSQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=204701251&pgno=9&queryText=

I'm also going to try the ole Right-Click and Run as Administrator, next. That worked for some other games and probably would have helped circumvent the previous patch posted for the virtual address issue. I've also gotten the 2-3 FPS stuttering issue. I'm down to Medium on everything, with most things turned off and still running into issues.

Great graphics though. Liking the 360 degree camera, zooming in on a huge fleet.

I'm getting this BSOD now as well.


Completely out of the blue. I could play the game fine until today, now it BSOD's after about 5 minutes, every single time. I'll try to narrow down whether it happens when a specific in-game event happens. One thing worth noting is that I get some graphics corruption justbefore it happens. That's nothing new though, I used to get that graphics corruption before as well, it would just go away after about 5 seconds or when I alt+tabout and in again. Now it BSOD's straight after the corruption.

I think it might have something to do with when I send in Advent Disciples into the first new planet/rock I discover. Will post back.

Specs: XP SP2; 6800GT (Dec. drivers)

Okay, for me it's definitely got something to do with the Research tree. When I play for about 5 minutes, get a capital ship and some frigates, have a fight and then go in the Research tree, the screen goes black/distorted. It doesn't BSOD though, I can get the game running normal again while alt+tabbing out and in again.

If I however go in the Research tree early on in the game (before I've built my CS or discovered a planet yet), the game seems to BSOD pretty much at random after a short while (haven't figured out when exactly yet). I'm not sure if this is the same issue everyone else is having, but I've tried this a number of times now and the result has always been the same.

Mailed my dxdiag dump as well. Hopefully it helps.

There are no details on reproducing it... It's SIMPLY PLAY THE GAME!

I've included my DXDIAG twice, and MSINFO once. Each time I submit a ticket I get the same response that they are not aware of any problems with the game.

Should be Incident: 080212-000155

New reply from them...


"Your case is being escalated to our Level 2 Tech Support group. The Level 2 agents will have to review the case notes. As this process may take some time we ask that you be patient and a Level 2 tech will contact you as soon as they can, to help resolve your issue"

Last night I noticed the majority of my crashes involved 3 things.
1: going into the research menu
2: zooming out from planet view
3: being at a wormhole

The wormhole area was the worse cause it froze and blacked out on me 14 times. It took me 11 minutes of waiting to get to a point where I could save my game and then end it through Task Manager.

New update from Level 2 techs... looks like a sign of progress


Our research indicates that this issue in on our engineer's "to be fix" list. They are in process of investigating this. Hopefully a fix will be available soon. Once a fix is available, it'll be integrated into future driver updates. Please check back with us periodically for driver updates. We'll probably have new drivers coming out soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Best regards,
David

Thank god right?
Sorry I have been such a sarcastic twit over this... For those of us who have this problem, it's very major and extremely frustrating. You can be right in the middle of something and then comes the freeze, 10 seconds later, black screen and if you are lucky it will switch back to game like nothing happened. Last night was the worst one yet for me when it sort of got in this crash loop at the wormhole and took around 10 minutes of trying to save the game in between the crashes. Afraid to load it back up cause I might be in the same situation.