Freeze/Crash/Reboot

Actually, I'm not convinced the actual problem it's specific to the card.

Only the results may be. As in, the results of the problem and how we see it is specific to our card.

I've been reading alot on the boards continuously like I did before responding to this post. There is a conflict somewhere and I haven't been able to root it out myself.

I've tried a number of things including:

Shut off AA and AF completely.
Revert to an older set of drivers (77.72).
Changing the AGP aperature

Everything I have tried has resulted in the same ending.

I did try to update my bios, but was unsuccessful. I'm not sure it's of much concern considering my board has been dropped by Intel for continuing support and the "update" is still over 2 and a half years old (about 12 months newer than my current).

Nothing is overheating, I have a Hardcano installed and none of my monitored hardware reaches temperatures above 34C. The GPU core temperature has never gone above 70C (according to the nVidia software monitoring).

Looking through my system event logs I can see the attempts to play the game today (and last night) with all of the services starting and about 12 minutes later I see a stop control being sent to the NVIDIA Display Driver Service. The service enters the stop state and then the event log is stopped. Then about 1 minute later everything starts up again. (reboot)


I'm running on a fresh reformat/reinstall of XP Pro with SP2. I did this last Saturday. I installed BF2 and BF2:SF xpac and have had no difficulties with this game whatsoever. The only other program I installed was McAfee. I've switched to that from Symantec products (those products had a large hand in what caused my issues resulting in the reformat/reinstall). I purchased Civ4 yesterday and installed last night and began this process then.

Hi chaps. If it is any consolation, I am having the same problem, with a high end spec computer:

3Ghz pentium IV
1GB RAM
BFG GeForce 6800GT OC (256 MB RAM)
Gigabyte GA8KNXP (Rev2) Mboard

Game (1.09 patch) runs for a few minutes then (seemingly randomly) the graphics corrupt to wavy lines of pixels, with the cursor a one inch square of pixels. This is followed in short order by the computer locking up. I have to hard reset the computer to re-start.

Tried all sorts of solutions - re-installed game; updated all drivers; re-installed old Nvidia drivers (2 different versions); set various graphics options on/off. Same result.

I must say that, having read through the numerous posts on this forum (and others), the only logical objective conclusion is that one of two alternatives exists:
(A) Firaxis did not beta test this game to any real extent; or
(B) Firaxis was well aware of many, if not all, of these problems and chose to release the game to target Xmas sales.

(My personal suspicion is that they coded/tested the game under an earlier version of DirectX and then hastily ported it to 9.0c to rush it out for Xmas)

Not sure what we, the consumer, can do about it; but I - for one - am pretty ticked off. In an act of desperation, I am corresponding - politely - to the take2 support desk. No real solution yet.

Regards, Colin.

I have a X800Xl.
I used the Pak-unpak fix to get the game to work with the older patch. The game worked pretty well for me (no more hanging!)

With the new patch, I get hangups, sometimes my small global map (bottom right corner) is all messed up, I get a blue screen sometimes when I talk to civ leaders, and I occasionaly get a glitch in graphics where a piece of terrain extends a black line across my land that moves when I move the view.
I have done a complete uninstall, deleting old folders, did a clean install without the pak/unpak and patched directly to 1.52 from downloaded patch from Firaxis.
Weird. I like the new patch, but it also has brought back (for me) a lot of the old problems. I downloaded the new (december) 9.0c directx, and never had a hangup since, but not sure if that is luck, or was a fix for me.

I haven't yet installed the brand new ATI drivers, but there is no Civ4 fix in the notes anyway. I also replaced my old headset with a new headset, so I'm not sure if that could be a cause for problems. (I prefer USB connected headsets).

I hope there is a new patch, to fix the latest patch, but man I love this game!
(New patch missing some things definately, a map at least on one of the scenarios).

I hope you all get your game sorted out, I will continue to keep an eye on this thread and look for a fix for my problems.
(Dxdiag, just in case I am made a stupid error and can easily get myself corrected)

The fact they were all getting the same error and have BFG 6800 GT OC cant be a coinincidence. I took my 6800 out last night and cleaned it really really good. Didnt help a bit. Still got crazy screen and the square mouse cursor.

Luv Muffin, what December directx? The last update to directx on their website was 08/2004... Are you using something other than the regular Directx 9.0c enduser runtime?

I sent an email to BFG tech support pointing them to this thread and explaining what is happening. Hopefully we can get some help.

Raider62 said:

Luv Muffin, what December directx? The last update to directx on their website was 08/2004... Are you using something other than the regular Directx 9.0c enduser runtime?

Click to expand...

Oh, I am so sorry. I assumed everyone knew this. Just because I found this somewhere hidden on some forum doesn't mean it's common knowledge after all! lol. I am so sorry everyone.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...FA-0E3C-4837-AFC0-6C67DCAA54BF&displaylang=en
It was mentioned elsewhere, and is on the "other people downloaded this..." on the directx 9.0c download page.
Maybe it helps? I don't know.

Hey thanks hadnt seen that. I will give it a try...

I am having the same problems (corrupted graphics, square cursor, and lock-ups) using the same video card (BFG 6800GT OC). It makes me feel a little better knowing I'm not the only one experiencing this problem but not a whole lot. I really just want to play the game and right now, I can't. It's bumming me out.

Well I think its official. Whatever is causing our particular problem is BFG 6800GT OC related. Now if we can just find out how to fix it.

Raider62 said:

Well I think its official. Whatever is causing our particular problem is BFG 6800GT OC related. Now if we can just find out how to fix it.

Click to expand...

I didn't know about problems with this particular card. Those kind of hard crashes and reboots sound like some sort of driver or hardware level problem that's happening when Civ runs. I'll try to get this card in house and test with it.

Have you tried the Civ IV demo? Does the same thing happen there? It's basically a smaller version of Civ IV. Does the problem seem better with tiny and duel maps? Maybe there's a correlation to the amount of video memory or AGP usage?

Turn off fastwrites, vsync, and write combining. set appeture size to 128 and underclock the agp to 4x

If you cant from nvidia driver, than download rivatuner.

http://www.guru3d.com/rivatuner/

With that ute, you should be able to turn them off without going to bios to do it.

Underclock the card too.

Its the heat on the card that is cuasing that. even tho it may not appear too hot it could crush the voltage on the card enough to make it lock up.

And ther are no updated bios for these cards on the bfg website?

Anyways if you do all that and it stops crashing you have a card that does not do what it claims it can do.

Hey thanks for coming Thamer. We appreciate the help. I will download the demo and try it. Not sure about tiny maps I play hotseat for the most part and it happens anywhere from 5 minutes into the game to an hour. It also happens during the few multiplayer online games I have tried. I have the graphics settings to low and low resolution textures and it still happens.

I will post back about the demo


Thanks again, It's nice to see you willing to help us like this. Restores my faith in CIV.

Thanks Thamer for replying. I too have the exact same card and the exact same problem. I have also seen it occur while playing Farcry, and Star Wars Battlefront II. I called BFG support center and the guy told me it was (probably) my power supply. I upgraded my power supply from a 420 watt to a 520 watt and it still crashes. I am at my wits end. I really want to play Civ 4, let alone Farcry and Battlefront II. I hope we can find out whats causeing this really annoying problem, or have BFG replace our cards with ones that work the way they should.

Thanks for starting and continuing this thread folks, heres hoping that Firaxis being a game company has better luck with BFG tech support than us little folks who just payed for a high priced paper weight

Uninstalled Civ4
Installed the Demo

Played the demo twice all the way with graphics on full. No problems.

I will try the riva tuner and see what happens Neon.

For what it's worth, here's another data point:
I'm getting random crashes to blank black screen, no video signal, hard manual reboot necessary.
I've only just gotten the game but I've been playing it for many hours already. The crashes were tolerably infrequent at first, but have gotten more and more numerous (as the game has progressed?). The Diplomacy screen seems especially unstable. The crashes occur without any particular provocation (key presses, mouse clicks); they happen even while passively waiting.
I updated to 1.52 before playing, so I can't compare the versions.

Have tried the following without results:
* Turning off all sound
* Turning off AA
* Running in windowed mode
* Updating to latest ATI Catalyst driver set
* Disabling drive emulation
* Disabling anti-virus software
* Installing Dec 05 DirectX 9 release
* Running with memsaver=1
* Switching off Fastwrite
Here's my system in brief:
Athlon XP 2200+
512 MB RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro
Windows XP, SP2

Any hints at all?

Oh, and here's a diag:

keoires said:

As everyone else has stated in this thread (seemingly) I'm using a 6800 GT OC card. Mine is by BFG Tech. I'm using the lastest nVidia Forceware drivers. (81.98)

Everything runs fine for about 20-30 turns. There is no deterioration of playability. Suddenly, the video crashes. Everything looks like "white noise" on a TV, with some color still... and my mouse cursor is "visible", but it's a square about 1"x1".

Attached dxdiag.txt

Click to expand...

That's exactly the problem I have. The card is an Inno3D 6800 GT, and my drivers are 82.12.

rgds/EoE

Neon, I turned off all those things you suggested using rivatuner and coolbits, played for 2 hours then it crashed as usual. At least it lasted for a long time this time. I also updated directx using the link provided by Luv Muffin. Not sure if they helped or just got lucky but it felt more stable.

Raider62 said:

Neon, I turned off all those things you suggested using rivatuner and coolbits, played for 2 hours then it crashed as usual. At least it lasted for a long time this time. I also updated directx using the link provided by Luv Muffin. Not sure if they helped or just got lucky but it felt more stable.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with that. I was freezing all the time (very frustrating when trying to do a turn-log for a SG). Since then, not a single problem. I am NOT saying this fixes anything, not even sure what it does, but it did seem to work for me (so far). I'm still keeping my fingers crossed every time I play the game, but so far so good.

Glad it helped you a bit, Raider62. I hope your problems get sorted out.