Game freeze. What is the cause here?

Help?

from Sins Forums
Hello, thanks for looking at this.

I recently bought a new gaming rig (for obvious reasons) and went out today to pick up a copy of this game. I was so thrilled to play it on my brand-spanking-new beast. I pop the CD in, install it, everything's great. So I run the game, looks fantastic, and I begin the basic tutorial. I noticed that my picture is a little off, so I go to options and select a slightly higher resolution, but noticed I could still do better, so I select the 1600 by 1000 resolution and then... green pixels appear all over my screen like the black-and-white static you see on a T.V... and then, blackness. My monitor quits on me but the game is still running. In desperation I try Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but this does nothing. I can still hear the nice score of music from the game while my monitor fails to register a computer is attached to it. After a minute of this the music turns into a series of beeps...and then, you guessed it, blue screen of death.

EDIT: I no longer need help with the install  ;) But read on to see more information about the crash and what I have tried doing.
technical
12,656 views 26 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
If it helps, here are my system layout:

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6850 (4MB L2 Cache,3.0GHz,1333 FSB)
4 GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz OC'd to 1066MHz (4 DIMMs)
512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
BTX Motherboard
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Ah, nothing like a healthy reboot for your system

Problem fixed. :CONGRAT:
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Ah the help really worked wonders, huh?
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Actually. Problem wasn't fixed. Those green flashes I mentioned earlier happen everytime I run the game for around 10-30 seconds. Something to do with my graphics card, judging on the administrative log event viewer. Any help?
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Actually. Problem wasn't fixed.
End of quote

:(

Make sure drivers are up to date from the manufacturers website. You should be able to change the settings manually in the user.settings file located in:

Vista:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting

XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting

Please note that some of these directories are hidden by default. To unhide them, go to Control Panel -> Folder Options -> View and set yourself to view hidden files and folders.
End of quote


If you have trouble still, you may want to try uninstalling, downloading Impulse from impulsedriven.com, registering and installing through there.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Did all that, the game still crashes...I suspect my video card with a memory conflict?
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Whats the temperature of your components when this occurs?

My brother had an similar issue with another program and it turned out his computer was overheating.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
I don't have a sensor, so no idea.

But, that would be a strange reason as that would mean my GPU skyrockets in temperature in the space of 10-20 seconds.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
But, that would be a strange reason as that would mean my GPU skyrockets in temperature in the space of 10-20 seconds.
End of quote


Not strange at all.....

CPU's and/or GPU's routinely undergo drastic temperature changes in a matter of seconds when placed under load, nevermind 10-20 seconds.  ;) 
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
The thing is, they Shouldn't. My system specs are in most cases double or triple the performance required.

I have installed new drivers for my monitor, graphics card, and updated to the lastest patch. I have also installed this game on another computer, and no defects of the game were detected by me on there, so the disc is not corrupted.

So I feel like i'm walking into the dark on this one. No clue what to do.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
Artifacting like that does indeed generally indicate overheating (blown the dust out of the computer lately?) or a severe driver issue. I'd definitely check on the temperature thing first.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
The system is a week old, so dust shouldn't be an issue. If it were a driver issue, would Vista not work properly then, because its seemingly at 100% for me right now.

As far as the temperature is concerned, I downloaded a program from Nvidia's site that lets you tweak the fan on the GPU. I cranked it up from 3o% (default) to 70% and even removed the side panel of my tower. This brought my idling GPU from 58 degrees C to 48 degrees. The game still did the same thing however. Still, some people have told me it only needs to reach 70 before it starts to overheat. So should I invest in an aftermarket heatsink--WWW Link, or should I keep checking around?

Oh, here are some new things I found out:
Benchmark:
Memory read = 7788 MB/s
Memory write = 2061 MB/s
Memory latency = 60.7 ns
3068 MB of RAM free
Directx 10
750w PSU

Also, please note that I have a VGA output Monitor but a DVI-I output GPU, with an adapter to solve this. Although its trivial, I thought I might add it anyways.

Checking my event viewer reveals that "BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot --" it repeats that message several times, with the -- being replaced with 22. 19, 23, 24, and 3, all in different messages all delivered at precisely the same time. These come along anytime my computer freezes due to the game.

EDIT: Thanks to kryo, I finally have a term to describe my crash. Yes, my computer is artifacting. For an example of this, here an image I found WWW Link. This depicts what my freeze and crash looks like almost exactly, except the white pixels are replaced white bright green ones for me. So...how do I solve artifacting :NOTSURE:
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
If it were a driver issue, would Vista not work properly then, because its seemingly at 100% for me right now.
End of quote

May or may not. Go to the nvidia website and a menu near the top should be to update drivers.

The only time I've encountered something like that was when my video card defaulted to dual monitor output when I had only a single monitor...
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
Mr.Domino,

The "default" display drivers are usually good enough to run one's OS, but when it comes to gaming......there are sometimes VAST differences betweeen driver revisions (in fact....sometimes you'll find older drivers giving you better performance). Of course, the first step should be making sure you've got the latest driver revision. :)
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
Okay, I did that.

Actually, I saw an improvement! This time when I froze, It took it 5 minutes, and I did not encounter the artifacting that has been happening. It just simply froze.

The reason I thought I had the latest drivers was because I let a tech support guy from my PC's manufacturer (Dell) remotely do some things. I did not stick around while he was doing this, so I'm at fault for this. Whatever.

Still, I'm going to have to resolve this freezing if it kills me (I hope not). I'm running Memtest later on and checking windows updater every now and then.

Also, I downloaded Impulse (props to Stardock, its amazing) earlier and tried just downloading the game, but the same result occurred.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
Hey.
Just ran Nvidia's nTune system stability test. Here are the results. Note: I used current settings for 10 minutes, nothing over the top.

All 5 systems at once: FAIL (this looking exactly like whats happening in Sins, with the green wave of artifacts covering my screen, but this time it happened in less than 2 seconds.
Processor: Pass
RAM: Pass
PCI-E Bus: Fail (system just froze)
Disk: Pass
GPU: FAIL (Same result for when I did the whole system)

I have not yet tried testing things such as the processor and RAM at the same time, but these results should give you a general idea.

Also, here is when my system is idling according to Nvidia Monitor.


Hope that helped!

EDIT: Here's the event veiwer right after the fatal crash.
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
Well that doesn't sound good.

You only overclocked your RAM, right?
Can you see the temperatures your system is operating at when under a load?
I'm wondering if you might have a bad piece of hardware.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Correct. Only my RAM is OC'd.
My GPU has the only temperature sensor I know of. After 20 minutes of playing Battlefield 2 (which works like a charm?) My GPU had only gone up 2 degrees C.

I'm going to download 3D Mark 06 just to see what the results are...if any :NOTSURE:
Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
Well, I just manually moved my 8800GT to the other PCI x16 slot. No difference. Do you guys (and girl :D) think I should keep trying or is card only good for RMA now?
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top

8800GT's were known for having their trash factory gpu-fan set to run really slow (due to the noise-level at higher speeds). Because it's such a trashy fan on the 8800GT's you could manually set the fan on your video card to run at 100% all the time (I think you can use RivaTuner to do that....I haven't had RivaTuner installed in a while so I can't remember).

Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top
As far as the temperature is concerned, I downloaded a program from Nvidia's site that lets you tweak the fan on the GPU. I cranked it up from 3o% (default) to 70% and even removed the side panel of my tower. This brought my idling GPU from 58 degrees C to 48 degrees. The game still did the same thing however. Still, some people have told me it only needs to reach 70 before it starts to overheat. So should I invest in an aftermarket heatsink--WWW Link, or should I keep checking around?
End of quote


Yup, It is noisy at 60%+, but my GPU isn't really heating up too much due to gaming. In the 5 minutes I have played Sins (my record :NOTSURE: ) I checked my GPU's temp and It hit around 5 degrees hotter before leveling off. Yes, I used Rivatuner at first, but I like Nvidia's nTune software to do the tweaking. I have even removed my side panel and put a fan right next to my system just for kicks, and the result was the same.
Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
I think there might be something you could do with your BIOS, but I have no idea what exactly would need to be done.

I'd ask for a replacement at this point.
Reply #23 from Sins Forums Top
Well, the only thing I did in the BIOS was run a system check. It even failed that o.O

I just did the last thing I could think of which was to go into the 3D settings in the Nvidia control panel and manually turn off functions of my graphics card, particularly the "conformant texture clamp", which should be turned off should artifacting occur. Didn't help at all.
Reply #24 from Sins Forums Top
Well, the only thing I did in the BIOS was run a system check. It even failed that o.O
End of quote


Update your BIOS then.
Reply #25 from Sins Forums Top
Well, I swept the drivers clean and installed the newest one.

Same result X-(