BFA 6800 GT and "checkerboard" lockup after 5-10 minutes

[combathanger]

Guess Im lucky, I get 30-60 minutes, but the exact same result. I am not going to screw around with underclocking my $500 (at the time) video card to play a slow paces strategy game. This is pathetic to have such a premier title shipping in such piss poor condition. I can play any other 3d game with zero issues for hours and hours and hours.....so this is CLEARLY an issue with CIV4 code.

Too bad Fruxis has now sullied the name of Sid Meiers, truely major suckage.

 

[freezerburn26]

I also have this same exact issue at random intervals. Sometimes an hour sometimes 2 min. Evga geforce 6800gt standard clock.

 

[yadda]

I had the exact same problem. And I see that many people with the GF6800GT card are having it too. After 5-30 minutes the machine locks up. What I did was downclock the engine clock and the Memory clock on my gf6800gt. Now I played the game for two and a half hours without any problems.

Following Ludde's and Raezal's suggestion: I've downloaded coolbits.reg and have changed my card settings as follows:

Originally: Core Clock: 370 MHz, Memory Clock 1.00 GHz
Now Running at: Core Clock: 330 MHz, Memory Clock 899 MHz

Civ 4 has been stable so far (about an hour and half). I haven't tried any other settings (either faster or slower) at this point. I'm going to try to play an extended game and see if it remains stable. If it does, I'll start bumping up the speeds.

I agree with Crimson Shadow, it's be a shame if the permanent solution is to have to downclock the GPU/memory to play the game.

 

[mephistoex]

Following Ludde's and Raezal's suggestion: I've downloaded coolbits.reg and have changed my card settings as follows:

Originally: Core Clock: 370 MHz, Memory Clock 1.00 GHz
Now Running at: Core Clock: 330 MHz, Memory Clock 899 MHz

Civ 4 has been stable so far (about an hour and half). I haven't tried any other settings (either faster or slower) at this point. I'm going to try to play an extended game and see if it remains stable. If it does, I'll start bumping up the speeds.

I agree with Crimson Shadow, it's be a shame if the permanent solution is to have to downclock the GPU/memory to play the game.

I think atleast, powerstrip can make different clocking configurations for different games. So as long as powerstrip is running, when you start the .exe file of the game, it should change the clock settings. I myself used this a while a go. Though on that case I wanted to overclock the card

 

[ReconSOC]

I think atleast, powerstrip can make different clocking configurations for different games. So as long as powerstrip is running, when you start the .exe file of the game, it should change the clock settings. I myself used this a while a go. Though on that case I wanted to overclock the card

I underclocked as well and it works just fine now... They need to fix that.

 

[freezerburn26]

I underclocked to 300 and 800 and still crashed to checkerboard after 2 min!!!

 

[yadda]

I've started a new thread with the solution that was uncovered in this thread.

Lets hope it helps out more people.

lThanks for all the input!

 

[ReconSOC]

OOPS! Correction - It work for about 2 hours underclocked, however now it is back to it's old tricks. 5 minutes max before crashing... Damn.

 

[freezerburn26]

Yeah underclocked or no I get the crash. It's strange though because it's in really random intervals. Could be 2 min or 2 hours.

 

[ReconSOC]

Whats weird is it did work for a few hours, I thought it was fixed. But now I can't last more than 5 minutes. Really sucks because I had a great game going... heh

 

[Crimson Shadow]

Hmm? At first I thought that would not be important but now it seems it is.

When I ran the game for the first time it had worked for almost 3 hours straight before I got that checkboard screen. Every next consecutive run gives me an error in 5 - 10 minute.

Try to change the settings (core/mem) of your GFX or try with that HidePythonExceptions = 0

 

[Arcanus14]

I too have the lock up, the mutli-faceted nightmare usually hits within 5-10 minutes....Here are my specs...
Athlon 3400
1 gb of Ram
Nvidia 6800Gt
Audigy
Everything is upgraded....

I also disabled agp texture acceleration but that did nothing

Just finished playing HL2 Lost Coast add-on which is supposedly a super hog on your system and it ran fine for it's duration...

I'm figuring maybe it's a memory leak of some sort. I'm wondering could it be possible since this is happening to a lot of 6800 and 7800 that it has to do with the way the game uses the cards on board memory....

 

[freezerburn26]

I'm suprised there's still no ideas for a solution to this.

 

[Shadowlord]

Games that exhibit this problem:

Civ 4
FEAR

FEAR does it? In that case, maybe it's a problem with DirectX - FEAR also uses a not-yet-publicly-released version of DX 9.0c. (Civ IV uses d3dx9_26.dll, FEAR uses d3dx9_25.dll)

Edit: Pasting in something I thought of and posted in another thread about another crash/freeze problem which happened with both Civ IV and FEAR:

On the plus side, maybe Civ IV actually will work for me - I didn't have any problems running the FEAR demo, other than a mediocre framerate on minimum settings. (Which is ridiculous. NOLF2 runs as smooth as silk on maximum settings, and looks better than FEAR IMHO...)

Edit: To get the latest version of DX, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/sdk/ - Use the "DirectX 9.0c Redistributable for Software Developers" link. Maybe that's newer than the one on the Civ IV CD? Or maybe not. (I haven't gotten Civ IV yet myself)

 

[ReconSOC]

Well no mater for me anymore and I sincerely wish all of you luck. I went and bought an ATI card and all my probems disappeared. Also, BF2 looks a lot better so I am a happy camper again.

 

[Gumpy]

Downclocking my card seemed to be it. Ive been running the game all day and no more checkboard

 

[Panzer Ace]

I have the same card and when I put the game on MEDIUM settings on the options screens it stopped the 'checkerboard' problem. But now I have a 'low virtual memory' thing from Windows pop up and the game crashes. I think it's my RAM(512). I'm planning to get more anyway. So when I do, I'll see what it does.

 

[LuvMacheen]

I have been poking around trying to find solutions to this very same issue... interesting it was noticed back in october.. I sent in a question to support and haven't even gotten a confirmation email yet... 2 days ago... I too have the nvidia gforce 6800... strange checkerboard lockup... ugh... I'll try underclocking and the other suggestions... seems sort of lame to me that we have to cripple our hardware...

 

[LuvMacheen]

Tried changing graphics settings to medium... to no avail still get the checkerboard lockup....

 

[Crimson Shadow]

I didn't try Civ 4 for really long time (from October last year), but previous week I tried open beta of MMORPG Dungeons&Dragons Stormreach.

Well to make my story short my GFX (6800GT) was badly overheating while playing the D&D Stormreach, regardless of settings. In 10 minutes of playing my GFX temp went over 110C with geometry and texture artifacts. Extremely strange, because in other games I didn’t have such problems. But, even in idle 2D mode (under WinXP) temp of my GPU was over 60C. After I had cleaned the NV Silencer (was very dusty) and made an exhaust open at the back of pc case, temp dropped significantly. (In 2D mode under WinXP temp is now at around 40C.) After that I was able to play D&D Stormreach normaly without GFX overheating.

I have yet to try if Civ 4 would work now without this checkboard screen.