Random crashing of many types
By
Blackleviathan,
Posted on: 2012-07-30 01:39 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Up until a month or two ago? When did you install that new video driver? Did the crashes happen before you updated it? Might try an older video driver. Newer drivers aren't always better, and some have bug causing crashes.
Also check your temp on the video card as your playing. You can use HWMonitor http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html for that to see if it's getting hot. Dust might have built up on the hardware as well, reducing its cooling ability on some components in the computer case.
The driver updates? I don't remember. It might have been around the same time... also, I didn't even THINK about dust. I'll have to check that out, too.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
Hi there,
I just spoke with one of our programmers about your issue. He has a few questions/suggestions:
1. Do you play other games for extended periods of time?
2. Do you have a CPU/GPU temperature monitor? If so, can you check the temperatures while you're doing various tasks? (Maybe different games, or while CoH is open vs not open, etc). If not, he recommends http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
Thanks!
~Freitag
Kevin Callanan
Community Specialist
Paragon Studios
I find using geometry buffers a huge laggy and crash prone problem and usually end up telling people that crash or lag a lot to turn them off.. And kinda skimming the info that you have them on. Just a suggestion though
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I'll try that temp gauge idea- but here's a question: if having the most updated drivers isn't always the best idea, what NVIDIA drivers WOULD you guys suggest, and how do I even download an older driver?
...Did I mention that I'm bad at this? LOL
I'll try shutting of my geometry buffers, too.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
CoH helper reveals quite a bit.
However, based on your symptoms it looks like a video card failure. It could possibly be other things, motherboard failure or PSU going bad. Every tiny bit of info could sway what I would test for first.
The impression I get is that you just turn your PC on and just play games right? Maybe some web surf etc.
I would say the first step is to try and borrow a spare video card from a friend and see if that is your problem. The old trade suspect part for working part.
9500 GTs are in the budget segment of the market and have to be profitable for their lowly price tag. Most of these things don't have long lives, just long enough to cover warranty.
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
Well, I'm certainly hoping it's NOT my video card dying... I don't get why it would only effect CoH though.
One symptom I apparently forgot to mention is a little newer- choppy animation. Almost like it's skipping frames or something.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
What I usually is disable advanced graphics set it to like minimum settings then re enable the advanced graphics settings and slowly tweak settings to get a happy medium. Maybe your graphics can't handle the super high quality but have it set so its a medium in between.
Other than geometry buffers
The next thing that causes lag is like the shader quality and shadow quality
They look good but aren't nessisary for game play. I mostly play with world and character quality and detail
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Quote:
One driver may work well for my system, that doesn't work as well for yours. Systems are all different, with different components, software, programs, etc. The 275.33 drivers were pretty good, and after those nvidia started changing the way the drivers were written, that caused some problems. It seems that for the most part their improving now. |
Originally Posted by Captain_Titan
but here's a question: if having the most updated drivers isn't always the best idea, what NVIDIA drivers WOULD you guys suggest, and how do I even download an older driver?
|
If the 275.33 drivers are available, those are a good place to start for an older driver. However, if you weren't having an issue prior to the new drivers your running, then just rolling back to the previous driver may be a good idea for starters.
If your new to downloading/installing drivers do a little research on how to do a "clean install" using a driver cleaner program. If I'm looking into driver issues, I start looking at, http://forums.guru3d.com/index.php and at nvidia's forum.
To find an older driver, go to the driver download page at nvidia, http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us and there is a link on that page, to search for older drivers.
Starting with minimum graphics setting and by turning them on, one by one, upping the details little by little, can help you isolate a specific graphic feature that may be causing an issue.
Quote:
One think that works well for me when "tweaking up" the GFX options is to use the in-game command "/showfps 1" (without quotes). It shows you the frames per second you get in the game in the top right part of the screen. You can disable it with "/showfps 0".|
Originally Posted by TerraShock
Starting with minimum graphics setting and by turning them on, one by one, upping the details little by little, can help you isolate a specific graphic feature that may be causing an issue.
|
In game, to do the tweaking you can "go" with a character either to somewhere graphically intensive (if you aim for "best quality graphics/perfomance", i.e. Praetoria) or to a place easy for the GPU (for "I just want performance to be able to play", most indoors mission are good). I change some GFX setting, and then move around abit looking at the FPS.
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Someone suggested to me that I disable PowerMizer from my NVIDIA drivers. I'm not using a laptop, so I'm not sure if that would make any difference. I've tried every other solution that people have suggested, and a lot of my more common symptoms match complaints I've been seeing with PowerMizer.
I might have a primary suspect in this case, now. Does anyone have any experience with Powermizer on PC, or is it just a myth, like Bigfoot, Elves, and Eskimos?
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
So what happened on your video card swap then?
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
In nvidia control panel, goto, manage 3D settings, then select global settings. Select prefer "maximum performance". That change is about as close to "powermizer" that I know of. Basically causing your card to not raise/lower power when it cycle's between 2d/3d mode.
Terra, I really thought your idea was my fix, but alas- the crashing continues. I've seriously tried every idea people have thrown at me. I even had a friend of mine who fixes computers professionally come in and check it out. Still no cause found for the problem. 
Your suggestion did fix my choppy animation problem, though. So that's sort of a plus...
I'm really hoping that I don't end up having to re-install windows or something.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
If you do a windows re-install. use a different drive. If it still has the same issue you will have resolved that its not the OS. you can then put your old drive back in since its not an OS problem.
Edit: Did the "pro" yank it apart and check for bad caps?
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
Yeah, it's been checked. The hardware has been given a clean bill of health, and none of my other systems, programs, or what have you are being affected. It's only City of Heroes that crashes on me.
I'm just getting super frustrated. This double XP weekend has been a complete waste for me. Had the whole weekend off, and I've been crashing every ten minutes. Makes keeping a team around almost impossible. I can't even stay on long enough to run a single DFB half the time.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
I see a couple things not really answered in here. First, while it may have been infered I don't see where the video card has been listed as being swapped for a known working one to test if that was the problem. You can 'verify' that the card's not the problem all you want, but if you don't swap it out, then you can't 'certify' that it wasn't.
You asked why City of Heroes and nothing else? It goes back to the video card, sorta. Unlike most modern games and just about anything else, City of Heroes was designed to use the raw power of the video card in the way of Open GL (as opposed to software based processing in the form of DirectX). Because the game is trying to access the card directly, basically it results in a hotter card because it's maxing out the capabilities of it. I nearly litterally fried three laptop video cards with this game! Some of the details might be a little off, but that's the gist of it.
Now I really don't think this'll help the issue, but it wouldn't hurt. You say that you've 'reinstalled', does that mean that you've completely wiped the game from the drive after using the uninstall utility (and therefore redownloaded the game) or are you just refering to say the drivers? Follow this link on installing City to a completely different location and see if that doesn't help atleast a little as for some reason Vista and Win7 run into problems for some rare few with the default installation.
A couple important things before you reinstall. Do a full uninstall and then delete the City of Heroes, NCSoft, and Launcher folders if they still exist. You should also delete the registry keys for Cryptic and NCSoft just in case.
Also, track down speedfan to take a look at your various temperatures as it's entirely possible that your video card fan could be failing which WILL kill the card.
Did you try rolling back to an older driver? I didn't see it mentioned as something you had tried?
Sorry for not being more clear. But to answer your questions, WanderingAries and TerraShock, yes. Unfortunately, I've had to do all of those things. I even re-installed Windows. But, I may have found one of my issues- when I updated my DirectX, my performance seems to have worsened. Not sure if that's one of the symptoms, or just a coincidence.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.
Definitely weird considering the game has Nothing to do with DirectX. It uses OpenGL for graphics rendering.
If you did the OS "nuke" and still have issues, then were looking at a hardware issue.
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
Quote:
Agreed, if you haven't already, then trackdown speedfan and see if you can't post some screen shots of it.
|
Originally Posted by newchemicals
If you did the OS "nuke" and still have issues, then were looking at a hardware issue.
|
So, I'm not a techie- I couldn't tell you what's what inside my tower, and I need some help.
Up until the past month or so, I've been playing the game just fine. Ran like a dream. Then, all of a sudden, I start getting random crashes. Most of my instances are where the game will freeze and I'll have to go into the program manager to shut down. Sometimes I'll get a black screen that tells me it's crashed with a pop-up box. (Sometimes I'll get that screen after going into the program manager, too.) Other, rarer times, the screen will scramble completely. Sometimes, the whole computer locks up and I have to do a hard reset. Or, I'll get blue screens of death telling me that the graphics driver has timed out, or something to that effect. Nobody knows what's wrong. It's ONLY when I play City of Heroes. Every other app and thing I do on the computer runs just fine. I was told to run CoH helper, so here's what that tells me:
---System information gathered by CoH Helper version 0.2.0.2---
DxDiag gathered at July 30, 2012 01:19 (-07:00)
Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.120503-2030)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
System Model: System Product Name
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Central Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ (2 CPUs), ~2.8GHz
Memory: 4096MB
.Net Memory Report: 3093MB out of 4094MB available
Page File: 6721MB (1465MB currently in use)
C Drive: (Maxtor 7 H500F0 SCSI Disk Device) 390326MB out of 476929MB (81%) free
D Drive: (SONY DVD RW AW-G170A ATA Device) zero-size drive
Windows directory location: C:\Windows
DirectX: DirectX 11
DirectX Diag version: 6.01.7601.17514 (64-bit version)
Display Notes: No problems found.
Sound Notes: 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 9500 GT
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce 9500 GT
Video Memory: 2796 MB
Driver Version: 8.17.13.142
Driver Date: 5/15/2012 3:48:00 AM
Driver Language: English
Sound Device Description: Speakers (High Definition Audio Device)
Driver File: HdAudio.sys
Driver Version: 6.01.7601.17514
Driver Date: 11/20/2010 3:44:23 AM
Sound Device Description: Headphones (High Definition Audio Device)
Driver File: HdAudio.sys
Driver Version: 6.01.7601.17514
Driver Date: 11/20/2010 3:44:23 AM
Sound Device Description: Digital Audio (S/PDIF) (High Definition Audio Device)
Driver File: HdAudio.sys
Driver Version: 6.01.7601.17514
Driver Date: 11/20/2010 3:44:23 AM
WMI Information
Motherboard Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Motherboard Model: (empty)
Motherboard Product: M2N-E
Motherboard Version: 1.XX
BIOS Manufacturer: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS Name: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
BIOS Version: Nvidia - 42302e31
BIOS Release: 20070214000000.000000+000
Registry Information for Current User
Resolution: 1280x1024
3D Resolution: 1280x1024 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: Yes
Maximized: No
Screen Position: 0, 0
Refresh Rate: 75Hz
Vertical Sync Enabled: Yes
Physics Quality: Medium
Maximum Particles: 50000
Max Particle Fill? 10.000
Physics Card Enabled: No
Anti-aliasing: 4x
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: Medium?
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: Compatiblity
3D Audio: No
FX Sound Volume: 0.600
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: ?
Installation Directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\NCsoft\City of Heroes
Mod files in the Data directory
No modifications found
...Does this tell ANYONE what might be causing my problem? I've run virus scans, malware sweeps, de-fragged, uninstall/re-installs, graphics driver updates, sound driver updates, I've done compatability tests- everything tells me that it's fine. The game just doesn't like to play without crashing lately, and it's getting increasingly more frustrating since I don't know enough to fix what the actual problem might be.
Please play and rate my AE arcs! Just look for @Captain Titan, and you'll find them! Also, whoever made the Penelope Yin splash page needs to be told that spines don't work that way.