Leaderheads crashing system

If I play the game with the leaderhead setting at anything other than minimal, Civ 5 will completely hose my system causing intermittent freezing until I reboot. I'm using an EVGA GTX 560 ti and it will run everything at max quite smoothly until I interact with AI civs. I have to guess and say it's an nvidia problem as I never had this problem on my previous machine with a HD 5850.

Is there anything that can be done or do I have to wait for another patch or new drivers? I like the leader animations and would like to keep them enabled.

We've noticed this same report with other 560 owners, especially with the latest driver updates. We're taking a look now.

On a side note, have you tried turning AA off? Some of the other threads noted this as a temporary fix.

I'll give it a try when I get home, I think I only have it set to 2x AA so it won't look that much different.

As i stated in another thread, i have the same problem. Well almost the same, my computer doesn't freeze, but the image goes black and i have to ctrl+alt+del the game out.
Same card geforce 560 ti

GlobularFoody said:

If I play the game with the leaderhead setting at anything other than minimal, Civ 5 will completely hose my system causing intermittent freezing until I reboot. I'm using an EVGA GTX 560 ti and it will run everything at max quite smoothly until I interact with AI civs. I have to guess and say it's an nvidia problem as I never had this problem on my previous machine with a HD 5850.

Is there anything that can be done or do I have to wait for another patch or new drivers? I like the leader animations and would like to keep them enabled.

Click to expand...

I have this same problem, but it doesn't show up right away, it usually happens after I've been playing for an hour or so. I made sure I 'm not having any temp problems on the GPU/CPU by using MSI Afterburner & Core Temp to monitor the temps. This crashing started with the latest patch, before that I didn't have this problem. *

Intel i7 965 Extreme OC'd to 3.85 GHz w/Liquid cooling
nVidia GTX 580 (275.33 drivers done with DriverSweeper clean install)
6GB DDR3 RAM
Win 7 x64 Ultimate

If I set the leader animations down to the lowest I don't have any problems and can play for hours.

* before the latest patch I was using older nVidia drivers, 263.09. I upgraded to 275.33 just before applying the CiV patch.

sbq said:

I have this same problem, but it doesn't show up right away, it usually happens after I've been playing for an hour or so. I made sure I 'm not having any temp problems on the GPU/CPU by using MSI Afterburner & Core Temp to monitor the temps. This crashing started with the latest patch, before that I didn't have this problem. *

Intel i7 965 Extreme OC'd to 3.85 GHz w/Liquid cooling
nVidia GTX 580 (275.33 drivers done with DriverSweeper clean install)
6GB DDR3 RAM
Win 7 x64 Ultimate

If I set the leader animations down to the lowest I don't have any problems and can play for hours.

* before the latest patch I was using older nVidia drivers, 263.09. I upgraded to 275.33 just before applying the CiV patch.

Click to expand...

Well, turning off AA didn't help for me. It seemed to crash even harder than normal...bringing down windows explorer with it this time.

It does seem to be random when it actually does crash my system. I played for a long time on my first game session with no crash, then today I played for about 20 minutes and boom down it goes. Hopefully there will be a new driver released soon and this will go away.

...and the reason I went back to nvidia cards was that I never had any problems with any games in the past with nvidia...

This has been a problem for me with a Geforce 460 since release - the game crashes my system almost every time I speak to a leader. Turning the leader detail down to "low" or "medium" fixes the crashing.

Google the problem and you'll find dozens of threads about the same problem.

I have been playing with everything on max since release. Came back from holiday 3 days ago and since the game crashes and the gpu goes 100 % when i meet a leader. 470 gtx here.

Welcome to CFC .

In the case you've set the graphical settings for leaders to "high", then please turn them down, that will hopefully fix the problem.

New nvidia drivers seem to have fixed this problem.

I have a 560GTX, but have never had this problem.
Will updating my drivers cause it to happen?

Well, I spoke too soon. I managed to play an 2 entire games with leaderheads set to medium before starting a new game and getting the black screen crash.

Maybe next time...

I have the same problem with Nvidia GF GTS 450, DX9 on Win XP, the driver version is 275.33. I don't have any trouble with cpu or graphic card temperature. The game crashes to desktop (black screen beforehand) when I meet a civ for the first time - any other conversation with leaders already encountered doesn't cause the crash. But it is completely random; I can meet several civs in one game without crash, while in another a ctd occurs with the first civ met. It isn't much of a problem, as after loading a saved game, I can still meet the civ and there's no crash.

I am going to update my drivers to 280.26 and see if there are any problems.

But, apart from that, I have another little problem. Sometimes, the game (or the graphic card) doesn't render the light effects caused by fire present in the leaderhead scenes. Namely: for Montezuma, Nebuchadnezzar and Askia. Montezuma is all black (no light at all), save for his jewellery, Neb is paler and there's no fire, Askia lacks fire, heat distortion and the glow. Caesar works fine, which is odd. Sometimes restarting the game helps, but it's not meant to be like that

I have a fairly similar problem with my 460 (have had the problem from the game's launch). I just posted my findings and a possible solution for you in a new thread.

Basically, it appears there are problems with the DX11 implementation on the Leader Screens. You can fix the problem while keeping HIGH leader screen settings, by just disabling the DX11 codepath.

Good luck!