Graphical Glitches/Computer Lockup

[Grunthex]

Alright, I've tried everything I know, so it's time to find you folks who know more.

Whenever I play Civ these days, at some point, 5-45 minutes in, I'll get graphical glitching and computer lockups. About 2/3 of them require me to reboot the computer, the other 1/3 of the time I can exit out of Civ4 and everything goes back to normal. This never happens between turns, it's always in mid-turn, and usually when nothing seriously significant is happening (not combat usually, often not even moving a unit, just mousing around, even if I'm not scrolling the map).

My first assumption was the graphics card was having some kind of issue - so I upgraded to the newest drivers (181.22 for my Geforce 8600 GTS), and ran a number of stress/temperature tests (3dmark06 among others). The card never heats above 65c, which is basically nothing. I don't get the freezes during 3dmarks most intensive tests.

I've also run tests on my RAM (fine), and my cpu for overheating (just by logging temps while I play Civ4 - that also never gets above 60C).

Attached is my dxdiag.txt - if anyone has any ideas what might be the issue, I'm going crazy. It's not unplayable, but a reboot every 20-30 minutes makes a slow game.

 

[ori]

does the windows event manager show any errors for the lockups?

 

[Grunthex]

Nothing in Event Viewer I can see. Looking in both the Application and System subsections of the viewer, lots of services starting and stopping, but nothing that seems to timestamp with my crashes, or refers in any way to Civ4, or anything graphical.

I have since my first post turned my Civ4 graphics settings down to medium (sigh), and I get less lockups, though it still glitches out just as often - many of them look like it's taking some random texture from the game and throwing it in random places on the screen (or over the whole thing). I tried a Video RAM testing program, but it didn't give me any leads.

I just wish I knew why it only happened in Civ4, and not any other application.

 

[ori]

civ4 is surprisingly demanding on the graphics card and driver for what it actually does - it uses much more resources than quite a few modern 3D games, I guess they were still learning how to do things when they made this engine
Anyways: the civilizationIV.ini includes quite a few settings to reduce usage of graphics memory - its all those that have bik or bink in their name and guimanagedtextures try playing around with those

 

[Grunthex]

Those options helped, but finding and disabling the full-screen option right next to it helped more. Disappointing, and I can't scroll the map, but at least it's stable again. Thanks for the assist.

 

[Goweigus]

I think I am having the same problem with unpatched BTS, except its in less than 16 minutes each time- heres a cut from a different thread

Well I tried a BTS game without any mods or patches and everything went perfectly fine the first 10 minutes, then starting in the 10th minute it started wigging out like all the other times. I thought it froze when my oracle video started but it came back after a few seconds, then over the next few minutes another symptom returned which i forgot to mention-and that is some on screen crazy. Its not that bad but say like a barely visible white square would flash on some improvements and a green line would cut across the upper right quadrant of my monitor once every 10 seconds or so, and then finally in the 16th minute of the game it froze up started playing this noise repatedly duhduhduhduhduhduh very quickly and so i had to reboot

I have no idea what this could be except somehow an issue with the files, I really don't want to have to wipe the harddrive and start over but i guess i might have to

 

[ori]

try patching the game (if you did not already do so) presumably they solved some graphics problems in the patches, also update this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&DisplayLang=en

 

[Goweigus]

Turns out the fan on my GPU died, I assume thats the issue