Crash to a 800x600 4bit desktop

This exact thing happened to me for a long time with Guild Wars, until one day I dropped back to an older driver version and it stopped. So, in this case, it isn't the game giving you problems, it is the driver. So find a different version of the drivers and give that a go.
 
Earlier, I posted that when I rolled back my nVidea drivers to 81.85 from 81.95, this problem went away. Well, it did go away, but it decided to resurface last night. Since I didn't have this problem pre-patch, I'm wondering if the cause might be there. I will try reinstalling Civ 4 version 1.00 and see if the problem surfaces again.

BobTheRabbit
 
same thing again. was about to logg off the PC and try to forget Civ for a few months til its finished, but someone's posted an edited congif file to try out. sure why the hell not, might aswell try, could end up NOT being a waste of money.
 
BobTheRabbit said:
Earlier, I posted that when I rolled back my nVidea drivers to 81.85 from 81.95, this problem went away. Well, it did go away, but it decided to resurface last night. Since I didn't have this problem pre-patch, I'm wondering if the cause might be there. I will try reinstalling Civ 4 version 1.00 and see if the problem surfaces again.

BobTheRabbit
Click to expand...

I dropped way back, to the 60 or 70 series.

This is a DRIVER problem.
 
71.89 drivers have a problem with badly corrupted promotion icons, I haven't even bothered seeing if the CTD issue still happens with them because the corrupted icons in itself is enough to put me off. There is no way I'm going any earlier than 71.89, the only way is up from there because I spent a long time finding the right drivers that worked well enough for Sim City 4, without causing graphical problems in The Sims 2 + expansions.

If this is a driver issue then they'd better patch it up because I *need* good drivers for my other games. Besides, these 71.89 drivers aren't looking to good on the LCD monitor which is why I updated them in the first place.

Exactly which driver version are you using Nightfang?

This is a summary of the 81.95 driver V patch issue.

Civ 4 unpatched with 81.95 driver causes a 'sudden death' CTD, no errors & no slowdown or any other symptoms before CTD which was in the resolution it should be (1024x768).

Civ 4 patched with 81.95 driver causes a messy CTD. The game appears to Switch resolutions, I noticed this because the screen goes black in this new type of CTD with only the cursor which is huge. It takes around a minute for a windows error message to appear with the send to microsoft option, this appears to already be in 800x600 and this error message is over the black Civ background. It takes a further minute & half for the game to disappear offscreen leaving the 800x600 (4bit colour) desktop.

My Civ resolution is set up to match desktop resolution of 1024x768 btw.
 
miramis said:
71.89 drivers have a problem with badly corrupted promotion icons, I haven't even bothered seeing if the CTD issue still happens with them because the corrupted icons in itself is enough to put me off. There is no way I'm going any earlier than 71.89, the only way is up from there because I spent a long time finding the right drivers that worked well enough for Sim City 4, without causing graphical problems in The Sims 2 + expansions.

If this is a driver issue then they'd better patch it up because I *need* good drivers for my other games. Besides, these 71.89 drivers aren't looking to good on the LCD monitor which is why I updated them in the first place.

Exactly which driver version are you using Nightfang?

This is a summary of the 81.95 driver V patch issue.

Civ 4 unpatched with 81.95 driver causes a 'sudden death' CTD, no errors & no slowdown or any other symptoms before CTD which was in the resolution it should be (1024x768).

Civ 4 patched with 81.95 driver causes a messy CTD. The game appears to Switch resolutions, I noticed this because the screen goes black in this new type of CTD with only the cursor which is huge. It takes around a minute for a windows error message to appear with the send to microsoft option, this appears to already be in 800x600 and this error message is over the black Civ background. It takes a further minute & half for the game to disappear offscreen leaving the 800x600 (4bit colour) desktop.

My Civ resolution is set up to match desktop resolution of 1024x768 btw.
Click to expand...


Currently, I am using 81.95. I cannot remember what driver I was using when I got the CTD with Guild Wars problem.

Mine is set to match as well - 1280x960
 
Nightfang: I'm confused, are you having the CTD to an 800x600 desktop with Civ and those drivers or not? I took your other post to mean that you had tried reverting to older drivers to address this issue but it now looks like you were referring to another game??
 
miramis said:
Nightfang: I'm confused, are you having the CTD to an 800x600 desktop with Civ and those drivers or not? I took your other post to mean that you had tried reverting to older drivers to address this issue but it now looks like you were referring to another game??
Click to expand...

*sigh*

RE-Read post #22.
 
Nightfang said:
*sigh*

RE-Read post #22.
Click to expand...


Nightfang, please remain civil. The *sigh* was completely uncalled for and provided no useful input to this thread. Please pump up your ego somewhere else. :rolleyes:



I've reverted to 71.89 (had read in another post that this version worked for someone else). Good news and bad news. I no longer have the crash we're discussing, but the game slows down to the point that it refreshes the screen about once every 30-45 secs...completely unplayable. :cry:

I would greatly appreciate some input from someone that understand the interactions between the Drivers and the Game and is willing to provide some insight to the rest of us.
 
Just an update. I have the exact same problem of crashes to desktop every two or three turns that readjusts the desktop resolution and colour. I found out what drivers I have and I'm using 61.76. So this problem isn't just with newer drivers. It seems to also be with the older ones. Now I know 61.76 is getting fairly old (I never updated as I never had any problems before and my philosophy is don't tamper with what's working fine) so I'm considering updating to the 7s. If I do I'll let you know the results but after reading this thread it doesn't fill me with hope that changing drivers will do anything as this problem seems to be widespread and not confined to just one or two drivers.
 
i finally got my game to work right.i have a nvidia 5700.i went into bios and
changed the agp aperture.it was set to 64mb.i changed it to 256mb and voila
problem solved after 5 hair pulling days.:)
 
Same problem. I think the 81.9x drivers have the peculiar problem of crashing to the desktop in a low resolution mode. I have tried older drivers and I still have CTD problems. I have tried a lot of tweaks, too like changing AGP aperture, pixel/vertex shader version, turning on/off fastwrites, fooling with the .ini file, low detail, no effects, etc etc etc.

The only thing that seems to happen with the tweaks is that I can play the game longer on big maps. But, there is some critical mass of units/cities/civilizations that it hits where even just scrolling the map using the mouse causes a crash.

I really don't attribute this to the driver. Although different things happen with different drivers, it always crashes after a certain point is reached in the game for me. I haven't had any problems playing other 3D games with this driver, and this is a turn based strategy for crying out loud. I think all the included the bells and whistles are misplaced in this game.

I think I've had it guys, I just can't get this thing to run.
 
CarbonToast said:
I haven't had any problems playing other 3D games with this driver, and this is a turn based strategy for crying out loud. I think all the included the bells and whistles are misplaced in this game.
Click to expand...

I strongly agree. My system runs RTS and FPS games without a hitch, besides the fact that is well above specs. And flashy graphics aren't what made the series great. This is what you call selling out to the mainstream crowd. Leave it to corporate America to mess up a good thing in the name of the all mighty dollar.

For some reason I'm not quite ready to give the game up, though.

Well, I was hoping that rolling the drivers back would fix this problem, now I'm not so sure. Still haven't had a chance to try it. Looks like (with just one exception I've seen) this IS overwhelmingly a problem with nVidia cards.
 
HounddogLGS said:
For some reason I'm not quite ready to give the game up, though.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Argh. Every time I see a post where someone got it working I rush out and try the suggestion, only to be disappointed at it crashing after 20 minutes or so.

I shot down my latest hypotheses, I really have nothing left:

I noticed that the lion share of CTD problems are happening with the Intel/NVidia combo AND with the last generation 845/865/875 MCH chipset. So, I thought perhaps some of the more 'advanced' features of the chipsets were fouling things up. But no dice, I disabled Hyperthreading and moved my memory around so it wasn't running in dual channel mode, but it still crashes.

I am a software developer, and crash dump output usually makes sense to me so I had a look at the civ4-generated mdmp files with the windows debugger. In every single one the game crashed in the initCvPythonExtensions function. Perhaps the coupling between python and the main game is not so good, so I updated the python24.dll to 2.4.2 (game ships with 2.4.1), but still crashes. I don't know if python is used for most aspects of game behavior but I suspect that it is. Perhaps what I need to try is a map with zero scripted events, I've only been trying the 'Ice Age' and 'Earth' single player maps.

If Firaxis gave me the code I'd debug it for free. I just want to play!
 
Which fix?

EDIT:

Gav is talking about the fix in this thread. I tried making the changes described in the .ini file, but I still get CTD when the world starts getting too busy.
 
I have the same problem on an 1.333GHz thunderbird, 1GB RAM and an Leadtek fx5200 (20% overcloacked) with 81.85 driver. I really hope they will come up with a second patch for this problem soon!!!!!! :ar15: [civ4]
 
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