Constantly crashes

[Mr Beer]

I have recently bought a new PC and Civ4 at the same time. The PC is well able to handle Civ4 (see attached).

Problem is, the game crashes a lot, seemingly at random. It seems to happen anywhere between 30 seconds and half an hour of game time. No particular action sets it off.

There are no error messages at all, my screen just shuts down and the PC drops into a state which I don't know exactly how to describe - it looks like it's on, but it won't do anything. I end up having to switch it off manually and back on.

I have tried upgrading to the latest patch, but no success.

I do not think it's a memory issue, as I have 2GB ram and also, it doesn't matter whether I load up a very small map or a big one.

Any suggestions or ideas?

 

[Mr Beer]

file attached

Also, version info:
Civ version 174
Save version 103
Build version 1.7.4.0
No mod

 

[trythis]

Mr Beer,

I had the same issue you have with a Gefore 6800XT card. I have not had a crash in the past week and here is what I have done. Note that I have windows xp.

1. Start, run, type dxdiag, click on the more help tab, click over ride and set over ride to 60hz.

2. Right click on desktop, select properties, click settings tab, advanced, monitor, set dektop resolution to 60HZ.

3. I believe this is what actually did the trick though is to ensure you have no screesavers set or in the powers options you have the monitor power to never turn off. I would also ensure hard drive and standby were also set to never.

4. Start, run, type msconfig, click on startup tab and disable all. Reboot pc.

5. Also in the options in the game set your graphics settings to meduim.

One other thing I noticed was that once I did all of this I also ensured I did a complete shutdown and then rebooted my computer before playing it makes the game much more stable.

 

[Mr Beer]

OK, thanks for the reply, but still no luck. I tried all of the above steps, the only thing I couldn't change was the screen's refresh rate, as it's already at the minimum of 60Hz.

I also downloaded all the latest nVidia drivers, but it's still crashing.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

 

[auldian]

Install Microsofts DirectX from August (full redistributable) HERE.
There are much newer drivers now at nvidia.com HERE for your card. It's quite a new piece of hardware, so it's likely many bugs will be addressed in these 1st few months.
Disable audio in the game's options temporarily, as a troubleshooting measure.
Let us know how it goes.