nVidia GeForce 8800 GT

Crashng problems anyone?

from Elemental Forums

Having read a lot of Elemental news, it seems crashing is a way of life until the game is patched into usability.

I tried updating my game, played about 200 turns, then I had constant crashes.  I was able to avoid the crash, slightly, by not moving my mouse around too much, especially during the wait between turns.  When it crashed, initially, I was sometimes getting the "DX Call" error.  Most times, however, it just crashed, and I'd get a system tray balloon which told me that my graphics drivers had stopped working, but had now recovered.  The crashes now happen no matter if I play a pre-existing game, a new game, or a different save.  Once the crashes started, they somehow became chronic.  I've never quite seen anything like it.  I reinstalled my drivers, of course.  Not willing to do a full OS reinstall at this time, considering how many people are reporting crashing problems.  I can handle crashes, but this much crashing makes it unplayable.

I tried uninstalling the game and reinstalling ver 1.00, but all the same problems were there.  I'm not getting crashes in other games.  The odd part, is that i played through the campaign, and a simple level or two, and everything was fine.  The crashes just started happening out of no where, and once they started, they never went away.

Man, I'm confused.  Is this game not truly out of beta?

I'm using Win 7 32-bit, by the way. nVidia 8800 GT, 2 gigs of RAM, 2.4ghz quad core, 1 mouse (black, smooth, sexy, named "The Crashenator" -- I hope its not the problem).

 

2,339 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Please open your debug.err file in notepad, and link the contents into a post here via pastebin. This will give us some technical information that can help troubleshoot your problem.

The file can be found in My Documents\My Games\Elemental

Be sure to copy the debug immediately after the error occurs; if you start the game again, the debug log will be erased and recreated for the new session.

If there was a dump zip created in C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic on Windows XP), please post it via drop.io.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I've had crashes where no debug.err was produced at all.  When I get an actual DX error, it seems to give me one, but not when I get general black screens and then a Windows crash error.  My actual video driver is still reporting to crash as well.  When this happens, Elemental goes black but sometimes comes back.  I've been trying this with a fresh install (v 1.00) and an updated game, and there is no difference.

Here's my debug.err:

http://pastebin.ca/1949411

Star Control: Origins
Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

have you tried updating your video driver?

I have been using an amd system with a geforce 8800gt  with the 197 (latest drivers from the nvidia website),  integrated sound winxp and getting about 300-400 turns before OOM.

harpo

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

The game writes the debug.err file continuously starting from each time you run the game, so there will always be one.

As harpo pointed out though, please update your video drivers--your current ones are more than a year old. Especially if you're getting driver reset notices, as that indicates a failure in the driver itself.

I'd also strongly advise sticking with the current version of the game (even if it appears to behave the same) just so we can eliminate that as a potential issue. There are lots of other things fixed anyway.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

With updated drivers and an updated game, the problems are still persisting, and in the same way.  I will have to see if there's a deeper problem, but I was having no issues with the games I was playing before Elemental (Starcraft 2, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age -- all higher demand than Elemental... I hope).

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I'd say - check if the card isn't overheating.

I use nvidia for years and don't recall 'driver stopped working' error. Well, maybe it's Win7 specific.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

I use nvidia for years and don't recall 'driver stopped working' error. Well, maybe it's Win7 specific.
End of quote

It was a major issue for the first three to five months of Vista. So it's not unlikely something of that sort can happen again.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

it could be that the videocard is getting a temperature SPIKE that is causing the driver to crash.

I did have a similar issue to this with an ati videocard where the copper billet in the heatsink had moved away from the GPU and the card would crash when any significant graphics work would happen, I fixed the issue by dismantling the heatsink & puting some materials to force the billet into contact with the GPU. since the fixing of the card I have not had any problems in the particular computer, but am continuing to keep an eye on it.

harpo