Consistent black screen crashes, need assistance please
By
Anaharra,
Posted on: 2010-09-12 14:51 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Try turning off Vsync. I bet it will help.
It will remove the limit on your fps though so use the command /maxfps to set your frame rate tot he max value you want it to reach.
I use /maxfps 60.
You will have to do that every time you load up CoH though as it doesn't stick.
I think this will work because I was seeing black frames in Praetoria when my video card is definitely powerful enough and changing that setting completely fixed my issue while even increasing the fps I get there.
I've turned off Vsync and capped the fps at 60, but unfortunately, it did not alleviate the problem. Same black screen crashes occur.
Hmmm
Just a hunch, but try updating your sound drivers or disabling sound in the game for a while.
I'm out of ideas if that doesn't work.
Did you properly deinstall the old drivers everytime you installed new ones?
If not then doing that, maybe even running a driver cleaner, and then installing the latest version could help.
If you already did all that, it might be an overheating problem. Open your case and remove the dust from heatsinks and fans (canned air, don't let the fans spin!! ) and try again.
@True Metal
Co-leader of Callous Crew SG. Based on Union server.
I have been having a very similar problem...it's very frustrating. I've done the same kind of steps as you...and the problem persists.
I did allievate some of the crashing by turning off ambient occlusion because apparently there's a problem with it working with fsaa (so i've been told...i'm no expert).
Although i'm getting much longer play sessions (on the whole), I'm still plagued by these crashes.
Frankly, I'm about ready to throw in the towel.
Trying the ambient occlusion thing and see if that helps some.
best of luck,
E
______________________
I hate to say it, but it could very well be your vidcard.
I don't know enough about the dual-GPU GTX 295 to say for sure, but I have a 2GB GTX 285 and they are unfortunately notorious for black screen crashes. I get this problem fairly frequently, alas. From my poking around on the web in various vidcard and vidgame forums, it seems that the current thinking is the on-card voltage regulation is kinda wonky and occasionally undervolts the card, causing a crash. I do not know enough about computers to comment on the plausibility of this theory, I'm only relating what my research has turned up.
If you can't alleviate the problem via game settings, drivers, improving airflow, or by slightly underclocking the card (my current workaround, though not foolproof) then you might want to consider RMA'ing the card if it is still under warranty. Mine isn't. Boo.
I use EVGA's Precision overclocking tool to slightly underclock my card and bump up the fan settings. It doesn't solve the problem entirely, but it seems to lessen the frequency of crashes.
Of course, your card may not be to blame at all. But keep it in mind if less-drastic solutions than RMA'ing the card aren't working.
Good luck! 
...in CoH racing to 50 is like trying to race to the end of your vacation. -Arcanaville
Debt barely slows down levelling these days. It's just a little bar that measures how much Awesome you've generated recently. (If you're not getting debt, you're just not trying to generate Awesome hard enough.) -Kelenar
I'll suggest redoing your drivers to latest but make sure after uninstalling them you use a driver cleaning program to get rid of all the leftover bits before installing the most recent ones. That should assure that you have a clean set of up-to-date drivers. You might also consider running the game in it's 'safe mode'. This sets it to minimum graphics. It'll look ugly but if that crashes you, something is almost definitely up with your card I'd think. Other ideas would be to try a complete clean install of the game just in case a bad .pigg file is to blame. You could also try monitoring the card with a program like GPU-Z to watch temps and voltages for anomolies. And a program called Furmark is a good OGL (which CoH uses) stress-tester. It will stress your card out and possibly give another point of reference for your crashes if it crashes you too.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Thanks all for the feedback, tried the various methods: sprayed off the CPU and card, cleaned drivers, re-installed, etc. etc.
Sadly, nothing has worked. I did manage to squeeze in an extra few minutes via lowered settings, but the crash was still inevitable. I am left to believe either something is definitively wrong with either the game (doubtful) or the card (likely). Unfortunately for the RMA situation, the card is from BFG Tech, and they went into bankruptcy so I'm very much out of luck. Best thing I can do is see if my laptop will work with CoH until I buy a new card (thinking ATI, sick of Nvidia).
If people still feel like pitching ideas, I'd appreciate it. Another note I should leave: the game does seem to crash not only during play but during login screen too, which seems to fortify the previous theory of a faulty card.
Again, thanks all for your support.
You can try turning shadows completely off. I had similar problems and that fixed it.
I've had this exact problem - my {accidental} workaround was to run it through the Steam overlay.
Hell if I know why it works, though.
Just a tought but... whats the voltage of your power supply?
Some cards need more power, and maybe your power supply can't manage the requeriments of a stressed Video Card.
That was my problem, the Acer guys build a 250 W power supply and when I installed a new card... crashed every 5 to 10 minutes while in a mish. All the drivers were up to date, the temp was correct, etc... just was a power supply problem. Installing a 600W unit solved my problem.
Hope that helps.
I loaded my computer with a Antec 850W Signature Edition, so I don't think power is the main cause of concern. As for other methods applied, I did manage to squeeze in additional time through Steam, enough to lower the settings and get more time in for a leveling session. I downloaded GPU-Z and had it running while playing, and what I've noticed is the GPU load is exceedingly large for any other game, and the crashes occur once the load has been capped. Sometimes the load would leap from 30% to 50% and stabilize at 70% until it would jump again and random intervals into 100% and crash.
I believe there have been other postings about such problems, but if there are others who know how to stop this problem, I'd LOVE to hear the answer. Thanks.
I've been having exactly the same issue. I also have a BFG 295. Blackscreen lock ups where sometimes I can hear from the sound that the machine continues to run and sometimes I get weird sound distortion and in either case to get the video back I have to shut down and restart. I have tried the following without success:
1) Uninstalled all drivers, booting into safe mode and using drive cleaner from 3d guru
Installed new drivers, I tried 17X.XX, 19X.XX, and even the beta 2.60 drivers.
2) Removed the sound card and sound drivers (using a Creative Labs Fatal1ty Pro)
3) Turned off all ultra settings and shadows
4) Reinstalled the game from scratch
5) Ran through steam
6) Flattened and rebuilt the machine, started with 64bit Vista Ultimate, now on Windows 7 Professional
7) Installed EVGA precision tune and set fans to 100%
8) Added registry entries per the end of the video card trouble shootingthread
9) Added sound card registry entries recommended in another one of the troubleshooting threads.
None of the above worked, and after trying most of them barring the system rebuild, I reverted the changes, I've also tried many different settings in the Nvidia Control Panel COH profile without success.
I broke down and ordered a new EVGA Superclocked GTX 480, and it should arrive Friday but I am terrified that the problem is going to persist. I would love to see any additional experiences with a 295 GFX black screening and crashing. Every other game works like a champ on my rig. I hand built it, and I work in IT for a living. I have never had this many problems with a game. That said I have thousands of hours commited to CoH at this point and I can't just walk away.
I have been having a terrible...terrible...time with black screen crashes and lock ups...i've been following all kinds of advice on these boards...and no luck. I don't have all my system information here other than my gpu with is a nvidia 285 gtx. I've been told I have a great chipset, my ram is great and more than enough power to run what I have. The machine I have, on paper, shouldn't have any issue running the game at all. I tried drivers, cleaning, system settings, heat/cooling settings, you name it.
I painstakingly went through every single setting in the video options to find a solution...low and behold I turned of Bloom and my problems disappeard (all my other settings are maxed except for AA which is at x4) and DoF is off. I'm not technical, and I don't really know squat about how all of this works...but the crashing scenario you've described sounds identical to what I was experiencing...and that stupid setting appears to have been what was creating problems for me. If I do crash now it's occasional at best and not hard like before.
my .02...this may be completely out to lunch...but offer it anyway.
E
______________________
Ever since I signed back up to CoH for GR, I've experienced mild crashing which I casually ignored and continued to play. Up until recently, however, the crashes have become much more frequent and has risen into a grave problem for gameplay. I get at most five minutes of movement and play before the game freezes, screen blacks out, and then screens turn back on to show the game is no longer playable. A message on the taskbar would notify me as such: "Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 257.21 stopped responding and has successfully recovered." And every once in a while, another error message would appear on top of the CoH window stating that the Nvidia OpenGL driver has detected a problem with the video driver, requiring the game to shut down. I have attempted to upgrade the driver (258.xx), roll back the driver (195.xx, 197.xx), uninstall CoH, re-install CoH, turn down graphics, etc. Nothing has proven to be effective enough to solve the problem.
Below are the CoH Helper details:
---System information gathered by CoH Helper version 0.2.0.2---
DxDiag gathered at September 12, 2010 14:45 (-07:00)
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7600) (7600.win7_gdr.100618-1621)
System Manufacturer: OEM
System Model: OEM
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Central Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 12288MB
.Net Memory Report: 9605MB out of 12279MB available
Page File: 21679MB (2876MB currently in use)
C Drive: (WDC WD6400AAKS-22A7B0 ATA Device) 317028MB out of 610477MB (51%) free
D Drive: (HP DVD Writer 1270d ATA Device) zero-size drive
Windows directory location: C:\Windows
DirectX: DirectX 11
DirectX Diag version: 6.01.7600.16385 (64-bit version)
Display Notes: No problems found.
No problems found.
Sound Notes: No problems found.
No problems found.
No problems found.
No problems found.
No problems found.
Input Notes: No problems found.
Monitor:
Monitor's Max Resolution: (blank)
Video Device Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce GTX 295
Video Memory: 4077 MB
Driver Version: 8.17.12.5721
Driver Date: 6/7/2010 4:58:00 PM
Driver Language: English
Monitor:
Monitor's Max Resolution: (blank)
Video Device Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce GTX 295
Video Memory: 4077 MB
Driver Version: 8.17.12.5721
Driver Date: 6/7/2010 4:58:00 PM
Driver Language: English
Sound Device Description: Speakers (Creative SB X-Fi)
Driver File: ctaud2k.sys
Driver Version: 6.00.0001.1375
Driver Date: 5/5/2010 9:30:10 PM
Sound Device Description: Digital Audio (S/PDIF) (High Definition Audio Device)
Driver File: HdAudio.sys
Driver Version: 6.01.7600.16385
Driver Date: 7/13/2009 5:07:00 PM
Sound Device Description: Digital Audio (HDMI) (High Definition Audio Device)
Driver File: HdAudio.sys
Driver Version: 6.01.7600.16385
Driver Date: 7/13/2009 5:07:00 PM
Sound Device Description: SPDIF Out (Creative SB X-Fi)
Driver File: ctaud2k.sys
Driver Version: 6.00.0001.1375
Driver Date: 5/5/2010 9:30:10 PM
Sound Device Description: Headset Earphone (4- Logitech USB Headset)
Driver File: USBAUDIO.sys
Driver Version: 6.01.7600.16385
Driver Date: 7/13/2009 5:06:32 PM
WMI Information
Motherboard Manufacturer: EVGA
Motherboard Model: (empty)
Motherboard Product: 132-BL-E758
Motherboard Version: Tylersburg
BIOS Manufacturer: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS Name: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
BIOS Version: IntelR - 42302e31
BIOS Release: 20090922000000.000000+000
Registry Information for Current User
Resolution: 1920x1138
3D Resolution: 1920x1138 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: No
Maximized: Yes
Screen Position: 0, 0
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
Vertical Sync Enabled: Yes
Physics Quality: Medium
Maximum Particles: 50000
Max Particle Fill? 10.000
Physics Card Enabled: No
Anti-aliasing: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
Texture LOD Bias: Smooth
Water Effects: Medium quality
Bloom: 1.000 (turned on)
Depth of Field Enabled: Yes
Desaturation Effects (Sepia) Enabled: Yes
Shader Detail: High
World Texture Level: Very High
Character Texture Level: High
World Detail Level (Vis_Scale): 1.000
Entity Detail Level: 1.000
Shadows Enabled: No
Shadow Mode: Stencil shadows
Shadow Map Shader: Unknown (0)
Environmental Reflections: Disabled
Advanced Occlusion Settings: No
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Occlusion Strength: Off
Blur: Bilateral
Ambient Resolution: Performance
Gamma Correction: 1.000
Geometry Buffers (VBOs) Enabled: Yes
Suppression of FX When Camera Close Enabled: No
Close Suppression Range: 3.000
Show Advertisements: Yes
Audio Mode: Performance
3D Audio: No
FX Sound Volume: 1.000
Music Sound Volume: 0.600
Show Advanced Graphics Options: No
Overall Graphics Quality: 0.500
Reverse Mouse Buttons: No
Save Login Username: Yes
Transfer Rate: Unknown bytes/second
Current Game Version: 1850.201007290124.28T4
Installation Directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes
Mod files in the Data directory
No modifications found
If there's anyone will to assist me, I'd greatly appreciate it.