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Video Driver Issue causing hangs and bluescreen

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.
46,193 views 114 replies
Reply #101 Top
Well, the 1.03 update didn't fix my Vista/Nvidia hang issue. When I have all the eye candy turned up to the Highest settings, my computer hard hangs in under an hour. Reset button to recover. There aren't any minidumps, nothing in the OS event logs, just annoying hang! But again on XP on same computer, on all highest settings, works like a champ. Can game for hours without issue. There is still a huge issue with Vista and Nvidia!
Stardock? Nvidia? anyone? Help!?
Thanks,
Jim
Reply #102 Top
I am using an NVIDIA GeForce 7350 LE on Vista 32bit. This whole post describes excatly the problems I have been having. Everytime it freezes, I am zooming out from a planet.
Reply #103 Top
Well, the 1.03 update didn't fix my Vista/Nvidia hang issue. When I have all the eye candy turned up to the Highest settings, my computer hard hangs in under an hour. Reset button to recover. There aren't any minidumps, nothing in the OS event logs, just annoying hang! But again on XP on same computer, on all highest settings, works like a champ. Can game for hours without issue. There is still a huge issue with Vista and Nvidia!Stardock? Nvidia? anyone? Help!?Thanks,Jim
End of quote


It hasn't fixed mine either.

Just to test it out, turned up all the graphic options to highest (I have an 8800GT and 4GB of RAM), and got about 35 minutes into the game before it crashed. Same thing it did before. It freezes, the minidump comes up, and I have to close it manually.

I'm even using Beta drivers that Nvidia has not put out to the public, 174.2 I believe...

I would love to be able to play the game, I adore it to death, but it's incredibly discouraging with these random freezes.
Reply #104 Top
Yikes, beta drivers? You know that there is no actual naming consistency from Nvidia with those and half of the 'betas' you see are internal, card-packager-specific drivers for one particular revision of one particular update for one particular card, right?

Have you been using a driver cleaner and rebooting before you go play with installing all these different versions?
Reply #105 Top
Yikes, beta drivers? You know that there is no actual naming consistency from Nvidia with those and half of the 'betas' you see are internal, card-packager-specific drivers for one particular revision of one particular update for one particular card, right?Have you been using a driver cleaner and rebooting before you go play with installing all these different versions?
End of quote


Yup, fully aware. ;) But Nvidia is also incredibly slow to release their drivers. They have 169.28 listed as their suggested "Beta" drivers, and those are 2-3 months old as-is.

And I've been manually cleaning out the drivers myself since I know what I'm looking for.

Just tried the 174.51 drivers, and still crashed... Oy vey.
Reply #106 Top
Alright, just thought I would check. FWIW I have an asus 7900GS and I have literally never once had Sins crash on me. The only weird thing I get is an occasional split-second white screen effect late in a game when things get very heavy. I'm using 169.21 on XP. I know IC mentioned that this seems to be an internal Nvidia bug and that people should wait for the next release, but, whatever is causing it is obviously not happening for my hardware/driver/os combination.

Just as a thought, have you tried

a) updating the motherboard's drivers (either from the manufacturer or using generic chipset drivers)?

b) using Rivatuner, Ntune or similar to create an 'always 100%' fan profile to eliminate the possibility that the card is overheating and crashing the game? Nvidia's stock fan profiles are biased so heavily towards 'quiet' that a sustained heavy load will often cook them even without overclocking.



Reply #107 Top
Alright, just thought I would check. FWIW I have an asus 7900GS and I have literally never once had Sins crash on me. The only weird thing I get is an occasional split-second white screen effect late in a game when things get very heavy. I'm using 169.21 on XP. I know IC mentioned that this seems to be an internal Nvidia bug and that people should wait for the next release, but, whatever is causing it is obviously not happening for my hardware/driver/os combination. Just as a thought, have you trieda) updating the motherboard's drivers (either from the manufacturer or using generic chipset drivers)?b) using Rivatuner, Ntune or similar to create an 'always 100%' fan profile to eliminate the possibility that the card is overheating and crashing the game? Nvidia's stock fan profiles are biased so heavily towards 'quiet' that a sustained heavy load will often cook them even without overclocking.
End of quote


It seems to be mostly a Vista happening, and I use Vista HP 64.

My motherboard's drivers are the latest.

And as far as RivaTuner, well, my Video Card does not have a fan. It has an Accelero S1 and is passively cooled. :)

I'm trying out the beta drivers because Nvidia appears to be rather slow moving to address the problem publicly. The latest drivers, 169.44, address a single issue in Crysis... but nothing else. Before that, 169.28, it happened, and 169.25, the crashes still happen. I've tried several others, but they all crash eventually, at random.
Reply #108 Top
Same problem here. 169.25 drivers, WinXP64-bit Edition, Nvidia Geforce 7950GX2.
Can play for a bit, then game freeze, I can still move the mouse and hear game sounds. Eventually evertyhing stops..

Reply #109 Top
I've heard one report of success with 169.21 drivers, but SoaSE states that it will not work well with outdated drivers.

Does anyone know the cut-off point to which problems start to occur?
Reply #110 Top
Any later than 2007 drivers you will start having issues. This is very true with Vista. However I should point out that isn't a precise date as my 2006 BFG dirivers at home on my old clunker run fine. Stick to 2007 and you should be ok.
Reply #111 Top
I have a 7900 GS and Vista, I was having the freeze problem as well. I updated to the most recent beta driver from nVidia, I also made sure my sound chipset's drivers were current just in case. Since then I haven't had the freeze up, but I have been having the occasional error message and one time the game just plain disappeared, I was back to my desktop instantaneously, as if the game hadn't been running at all. Could these new issues still be video card related or something else?

I also noticed this game seems to be system memory dependent. Is that a correct assumption?

-edit-
For anyone who wants to continue there game despite the freezing issue in Vista, one thing that works (this may sound stupid) is to CRTL-ALT-DEL, then immediately cancel the action. When you return to the game, it works fine. Its saves from having to lose your progress from a crash at the very least.
Reply #112 Top
I have the a very similar problem on my 7950gt. This happens every hour or so - when i zoom into a planet the game freezes and music continues playing for about five seconds. then my computer reboots itself :(. Makes MP almost impossible. I have latest drivers so I imagine this is the same problem but my comp is just reacting badly to it.

stats:
7950gt
2 gig ram ddr2
core 2 duo 2.4ghz
Reply #113 Top
Im playing the demo laptop inspiron 6400 i have gforce 7300
When i play the game crashes to black screen and restart is needed. Sometimes if im lucky the crash recovers and leaves yellow triangle saying it recovered.

Has this problem been solved? if so by the lastest nvdia drivers?

i have since found out i have a 7300 go which means its laptop only and as such never gets any updates!

is there anyway around this?
Reply #114 Top

Hi everyone :)

same problem with me

config is Win 7 RC1 64 bits

Intel core i7 920

GTS 250 (2x1GB) in SLI mode

6GB of corsair memory

1TB HDD (diamond max)

 

I hope this info will help to find a solution

 

PS : I also played on a laptop with win XP SP3 and go 7800GS and never got this problem before

 

EDIT : the BSOD full message is :

"clock interruption not received from a secondary processor within allocated time"