nVidia - Fix for Crash to Desktop possibly found

WarX

Chieftain
Joined
Nov 4, 2005
Messages
52
*My Specs:

P4 3.2 Ghz - 1GB DDR RAM - nVidia gForce 6600 256MB - WinXP Pro SP2

*My Original nVidia driver version:

81.85 October 20, 2005

* Quick Summary of Fix:

Use the 71.89 April 14, 2005 driver verison found here http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_71.89.html

MORE DETAILS BELOW->

*My Problem:

Game would crash to desktop after a few minutes of playing on a large map, rendering the game unplayable (had to rerun the game 50 times a day until i got sick of it)

*Things I have done prior to finding the solution that are still being used:

1) Turned all game settings to medium (still crashed)

2) Changed to a fixed swap file of 3GB min and 3GB Max (still crashed)

3) Turned on Link Retrain from BIOS settings (still crashed)

4) Turned off Hyperthreading support from BIOS (was desperate, still crashed)

5) Turned movies off in Civ INI (reduced hangs, but still crashed game)

6) Turned on Windows Mode and played using that (reduced crashes, but still crashed alot)

Please note that im mentioning the above only because i did not roll those changes back when i stumbled on the solution that fixed the crashes for me. Therefore they might be totally unrelated, infact I think they are unrelated. So if you try this fix, then you do not need to do the above.

*The Solution -> What fixed it for me:

I was reading the -Take Two- press release regarding the ATI card fix for this game, and noticed they kept on mentioning "and other nVidia driver problems", that and the fact that coding and testing of the game must have been done with old drivers, since obviously the new drivers were not released yet...I decided to rollback my nVidia drivers to something the coders and testers might have used.

Headed over to www.nvidia.com and downloaded the latest driver (from the OLD drivers) that specifically supports my gforce 6x series, that was the 71.89 April 14, 2005 driver verison found here http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_71.89.html

I completely removed my previous driver first, and then installed the one above. I have been playing for 2 and a half days now, for a total of about 13 hours without a single crash. Previously I used to crash every 10 or 5 minutes.

I also play Age of Empires 3, and the driver downgrade did not mess that game up.

Hope that helps some of you out there. Trick is to downgrade your driver until you reach a stable one, or just use the 71.89 driver.
 
i dont mind the use of the older driver just so i can have some sanity .. i was almost gonna stop playing till the 1st patch got released :D

thank you for that post :)

**MY SPECS**
Geforce 4 TI (128) on a 3500 AMD 64 with 1 GB DDR4200 Ram (XP Pro with sp2)
 
Thanks... yesterday i stop playing this game becouse of CTD's.... i will try with other drivers...
Thanks again !
 
Does this also work with a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420?
 
THANKS!!! you made my day, just bought it today here in Denmark and when I had installed the game and loaded it up it just showed a blue screen and later the picture of the earth but with nothing to click at. So when I saw that we had the excact same computer specifics I gave it a try and it worked :D
 
Glad it worked for you! As a side note, I have now turned hyperthreading back on, turned movies on, and playing in fullscreen mode (along with reversing the other changes) and I still do not get the CTD problem. Im finally able to enjoy the game.

The driver will work on a MX 420, but i do not know if it will solve the problem. Although I think it should, since those drivers are an abstraction layer to access the hardware. It seems that nVidia has done some changes to the new drivers that changed the way the abstraction layers work, thus causing these problems.
 
Hmmm... some of my games need newest driver... so I do not want to install the old driver. :( I want an official solution, or at least a statement from the developers!
 
I've also found that just clearing the cache can help here as well (find and remove the crc.dat file).
 
Just to mention it to all of you: My previous statement does not mean that I'm not thankful for your research for bugfix-solutions. But I am kinda angry that there is no word from the developers.
 
GertFroebe said:
Hmmm... some of my games need newest driver... so I do not want to install the old driver. :( I want an official solution, or at least a statement from the developers!

Are you sure they need the newest drivers, or does everyone just reflexively say "UPDATE GRAPHICS DRIVERS NOW!" in their installation instructions?

I've been using 61.77 for a long time now. Two or three times I tried updating the NVidia drivers, but the new drivers caused glitches in old games, so I reverted. For example: z-buffer stuff was apparently broken in System Shock 2; Items that were behind a wall were appearing and disappearing, all the stuff was flickering like it couldn't tell what should be drawn and what shouldn't. And in some other games, including Deus Ex, framerate when the display was 32 bpp was terrible, whereas 16 bpp still worked properly. So each time I tried newer drivers and encountered these bugs (which was 2 or 3 times), I reverted back to 61.77. I don't remember which drivers I tried, but I think the first one I tried was the version that came right after 61.77 (That's 66.93), and the others were all 7*.* (yes, that's a lot of possible versions, but I don't remember which ones I tried).

Recently, I tried 81.85 (the newest version) and those issues were gone, but antialiasing didn't work anymore (I got weird 'static' in some pixels), and I didn't get any perforamnce benefits in FEAR or NOLF2 (although NOLF2 was already on maximum settings and ran excellently, compared to FEAR running terribly on minimum settings), so once again I reverted. Again, note that the issues I mentioned 81.85 fixing were issues which didn't exist in 61.77, but existed in some drivers after 61.77 and before 81.85.

Anyways, I have not had any problems with 61.77 except for one tiny unimportant one: a color glitch which only happens if I try to adjust the brightness and/or contrast a specific way in the NVidia control panel IF the gamma ramp is ****ed up from a program which auto-configures it. If the gamma ramp is normal, this bug doesn't occur. P.S. I am unable to duplicate the problem by fiddling with the gamma/contrast/brightness controls in the NVidia display control panel thing. I think I would have to use an external program which ends up setting the gamma below 0.5, since that was the case when I encountered the problem. Of course, gamma that low is nigh-unbearable anyhow (which was why I was fiddling with those controls - to try to make it bearable - until I realized the gamma ramp wasn't supposed to look like it did, and changed it to the normal setting). :p
 
Driver 81.87 (Beta) still has the desktop crash but it's down from several times a day into just once.

Athlon64 X2 3800+
DFI LanParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
1GB Geil Value PC3200 Dual Channel Kit (2x512MB)
SLI PNY 7800GT 256MB

Settings:

1600x1200
4x AA
All on High Quality


Crash also appeared on my brothers Radeon X1800XL (5.10a Beta Drivers) which annoyed him for a few seconds (he's an addict now).
 
I had the 78.01 driver... going back to your version seems to have fixed the memory leak that makes it go slower and slower and then die.

Thank you for figuring this out for us - Take2 should pay you for your technical support!


Edit: nope, just crashed last night. It's better now, but it still crashes after 4 hours. And that is with graphics set to "Low."

Grr.
 
Its posts like this you want to read when you are crying in agony since Civ4 won't run properly. With a 2 month old P4 3.6 Ghz - 1GB DDR RAM - nVidia gForce 6800 256MB - WinXP Pro SP2 PC, I thought I would have no issues...I did. On larger maps game got slower and slower and then died, no matter what settings I used.

I've just tried uninstalling the lastest NVIDIA drivers and installed 71.89. Sadly I still have the same issue. Any ideas guys?
 
Chiefwiggum said:
Its posts like this you want to read when you are crying in agony since Civ4 won't run properly. With a 2 month old P4 3.6 Ghz - 1GB DDR RAM - nVidia gForce 6800 256MB - WinXP Pro SP2 PC, I thought I would have no issues...I did. On larger maps game got slower and slower and then died, no matter what settings I used.

I've just tried uninstalling the lastest NVIDIA drivers and installed 71.89. Sadly I still have the same issue. Any ideas guys?

Large maps with lot's of AI's are going to get slow, really slow pretty much no matter what. The computer has to figure out actions for every unit in each of those civs, so yeah, it's gonna get really slow later on the game with a lot of units in play. Now compound this with some of the game's technical problems, and well, it isn't pretty.

Only advice I can offer is to play on smaller maps.
 
StormyNight said:
Thanks, and if you'd excuse my ignorance, how do you run Civ IV in windowed mode.

Open Civ4.ini and look for "Fullscreen" (or "Windowed"? err... one of them :D )
and change the value following instructions.

You can have automatic windowed mode or set it so that system asks you if you want to run fullscreen or not.
 
I've greatly stabilized my system by using the nVidia utility to set image quality to "performance" as opposed to "quality." I also ratcheted down the AA to 0 and set the game preferences for renderer and shading to low and the graphics to medium. Now I can see the wonder movies without stuttering and with full sound score.
I'm using the latest drivers, BTW.
nVidia 5700/256
P4/2.53mhz/1GB RAM
Win XP Pro SP2
SB Audigy 2
Frankly, even with the ramped down settings, the game looks and plays great.
 
Shadowlord said:
Are you sure they need the newest drivers, or does everyone just reflexively say "UPDATE GRAPHICS DRIVERS NOW!" in their installation instructions?

Yes, they do, because my other games had also some bugs that have been solved with the newest driver. So I can't step back to an older one, just for Civ4. But lets wait for the Patch next week. I hope they fix the major problems with that.
 
Yoshua said:
Large maps with lot's of AI's are going to get slow, really slow pretty much no matter what. The computer has to figure out actions for every unit in each of those civs, so yeah, it's gonna get really slow later on the game with a lot of units in play. Now compound this with some of the game's technical problems, and well, it isn't pretty.

While this may be true, its no excuse. The number of units and the number of tiles on a large map (perhaps a few 1000 at most) are paltry compared to the speed of moden CPUs - which can do billions of operations per second.

Sure the graphics are fancy now, so that eats some CPU and a lot of GPU, but the general slugishness of Civ4 is inexcusable.

Oh well, as I'm sure they said, its fast enough - and a great game, but as a developer, I have to shake my head. (I'm running an AMD 64x2 3800+.)

-KL
 
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