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Blank3k

Join Date 02/2008

Minidump & "Stopped Working" errors on multiplayer

I play sins online with my friend, we start a fresh game... works well, nps... after an hour or 2 it eventually crashes usually with a minidump error.

then i reload Sins, load game, he joins away we go... within 5minutes i get "Sins Of A Solar Empire Has Stopped Working" errors... reload & repeat until were both throughly annoyed.

im running:
Vista x64
E6600
2gb RAM
8800GTX

so more than enough to run sins, it seems to do it less when running on lowest resolution but thats just painful to look at in comparison to full resolution.

Any ideas?

technical

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Yep, should be the same issue we've been having for a long time. Check the "Video Driver Issue causing hangs and bluescreen" post and you'll see everyone has posted attempts at fixing it, including me, but it is a Vista and graphic driver issue. Has been since the get-go of Vista. Nvidia is supposedly going to have a patch coming soon. Underclocking help me with better stability, but I still got the errors, just later on. I get all 3 errors, minidump, nvlddmkm.sys "driver has stopped responding", and BSOD pointing to nvlddmkm.sys driver. SOASE must do something more intensive or different compared to other games and that is why this problem is showing up more frequently. Game devs are hoping it to be fixed by the graphic card makers. I'm not sure if the dev team is able to recreate this on any of their hardware, but Asus motherboards and the older chipsets that were said to be Vista-ready seem to be pretty commonly have this issue. Coupled with Vista of course, both 32 or 64 bit. The 700 nForce chipset may be okay, but lots of 500 and 600 series are having the same complaint. Here's a long, long post from July '07 to present on people dealing with this issue.
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=518749

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what a nightmare, nvidia do good graphics cards but its really annoying me there coming out with the "Next-Next-Gen" cards now (9 series) while the 8 series is still running on beta drivers, they should atleast get 1 series up & running properly before releasing another!

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I was whining about it to Yarlen one day, and he said Nvidia supposedly fixed it (finally) internally, so like Stitched said I'd expect it in the next driver release or something.

I'm lucky enough that it doesn't happen in Sins, but other games aren't so lucky

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You guys might want to try using the Nvidia Beta drivers to see if they have included the fix in there somewhere, personally I always use the Beta drivers, I've never had a problem personally.

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im using ForceWare 171.20 (downloaded lastnight in an attempt to fix it, no luck

its really odd cause i was playing Sins fine for awhile, odd crash every few hours but i could load game etc & play for another hour or 2 with no problems, but as soon as i decided to hike my resolution upto max settings insted of minimal its started crashing, and restoring them to minimal resolution didnt stop it.

thinking maybe i should just uninstall sins & reinstall again

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I'm using the beta 169.28 currently, but still having some issues, so not an end-all fix. I followed the instructions from the ocforum post, booted in safe mode, removed all Nvidia driver remnance, manually if needed and installed a "fresh" driver from 169.28. I had over 12 instances of nvlddmkm.sys all over my system, and now just 3. One in the driver folder, I copied that same file to the system32 folder and then one is stuck in a patch file that I didn't want to delete. Doesn't seem to have made a big difference except I'm no longer underclocking, actually overclocking, and running games for an hour or so with minimal issues. I get a lag/stutter redraw issue that goes away after a bit, but at least no BSODs so far.

From the Video Driver issue post, someone posted that the new forceware drivers from guru3d.com are working for them, 174.20 version, pretty newly added. Unfortunately I didn't see anything new for 64-bit yet, which is what I've got running, so I haven't tested anything above 169.28. Underclocking seems to help with stability for others, as well, which the game should run fine if you have room to spare, but for others, it may not be a viable option.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/ForceWare-174.20-Vista-(32-bit-)-download-1863.html

Definitely a tedious issue. Be interesting to see how much of this is related to Vista-ready hardware that may not have been really "ready". Sure you can run Vista without all the bells and whistles turned on, but Vista is really having trouble with 3D with the older motherboards, chipsets and maybe even the graphics cards, a lot of these stating they are Vista-ready. Some stuff is coming out in the news these days, but who knows what'll come from it. This had been an issue for their basic features, the Sidebar and Dreamscene. Makes sense that SOASE has drudged it up again with their 3D-ness. I wonder how Linux's 3D holds up to Vista's...

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64 bit, 'nuff said. Your driver/software support - extremely lacking. Lol.

It is actually a problem with Nvidia, not Vista stitched, as I understand its a conflict between the power saver functions in Vista and the power saver functions in Nvidia graphics cards. Nvidia was the one who from the get-go told everyone they were Vista compatible (the power saver functions of Vista have been almost the same since it was Longhorn... You think Nvidia hasn't known/had time to fix it? Lol.)

Vista is a memory hog but if you just take like, three hours to configure it upon opening its nothing (else) to complain about.

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I noticed the game will crash to desktop sometimes when you ALT+TAB.

Want to challenge the MAGOG clan? www.MagogClan.com

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The 174.20 drivers are actually just 171.20 in disguise, so they're barely any different. I've tried several of the beta drivers over at Guru3D, and all of them have crashed eventually.

However, today there is a 173.XX version up that I've yet to try that's supposed to fix a few problems, so we'll see if Sins is part of that.

It's not a memory issue (I have over 4GB's, and it barely breaks 60% usage) or CPU usage (Q6600 here, and it only uses 1 core when playing anyways)... And I haven't encountered it in any other games I play. So it's either something within Sins that's setting it all off, or nVidia's not handling it properly. Regardless, I hope it's fixed rather soon. A 5 hour game took my brother and I over a week to complete because it kept crashing.

I also hope SP1 fixes a lot of my other problems too (like how the video driver doesn't always load properly for me and I have to restart), so that may help...

But who knows. I've sent plenty of Minidumps their way.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

The drivers with the proposed fixes aren't available outside Nvidia yet.

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