[Nvidia Forceware Drivers] Probably THIS is the real fix..

[neo27]

Yeah, sorry for the paucity of detail, I'm used to a place called "the internets" where no one helps anyone... so thanks for even making a reply post

In addition to the locks, I also have wonder movie sound stuttering, but that's the lesser of the two problems.

As for drivers, I've tried the 7189s, as well as the 8185s (which I'm on now).

No overclocking done, I have the side of the case off, and while I can't see the temp on the graphics card, for what it's worth, the cpu temp is pretty low (118ish)... and I played doom3 with the case on, so, well, take that for what it is; anecdotal.

The complete specs:

Asus A7V333
Athlon 1.8 GHz
1GB RAM
XFX 6600 GT
SB Audigy

I think that's about all that's relevant, bug me if I forgot something important.

I do have 2 monitors set up, I thought it might be related to that, but I disabled one, still hangs... I've tried all the obvious stuff, I think

, I'm just trying to return, however little it may be, the help/tips I've received from the community here. I do understand how you feel.

How about the game settings?
During the hard lock, is there any hdd activity? Prior to the hard lock, were there extraordinary symptoms exhibited?
In fact, your case of 'hard lock' is the first I've read so far..

 

[rpriha]

I'm getting hard lockups also, at first only one in an hour or so, but now I can play only about 3-5 minutes before a total lockup happens.

The problem is always the same: Everything works normally, then without warning the screen gets corrupted. First you see very briefly (half a second) some random polygons being drawn all over, then the screen changes to have colourful, garbled pixels all over. Cursor may still move but is displayed as a square corrupted block. Alt-tab or anything else doesn't work, only thing you can do is to perform a hard reboot.

Athlon 64 / 3500+, Abit AV8-3rdEye motherboard
Gainward Geforce 6800GT, AGP
1GB of DDR400 memory
No overclocking of any kind

Software:
Windows XP with service pack 2, freshly installed last weekend
NVidia drivers 71.89, 81.87 and 81.94 tested, lockups with at least
the 71.89 and 81.94

The same computer can run Doom 3 or Far Cry without problems the whole day, so I guess the hardware should be ok.

See the attached file "civ4lockup.jpg" for a screenshot of what the crash looks like -- has anyone encountered similar crash?

 

[Pyrion]

What graphic card and drivers are you using? As I've mentioned, my 6600gt is directx9c compliant and I'm also using updated, albeit beta, drivers. Also, you can set it to 0, and I think that probably will cause to game to rely on d8 api instead.

GeForce 6600GT, 71.89 drivers (at the time of the bsod). 81.85 drivers now.

 

[Naginata]

Hmm... I don't have any graphical corruption at first. Sound gets stuck in a repeating loop, no or very little HDD activity... if you were walking past my computer and glanced at it, you'd think everything was fine during the lock.

If I leave it sit on the lock, many times (not every time, but most times) it will eventually go black, then come back up with graphical corruption sort of similar to that picture on my CRT (which didn't have the game on it to begin with) and my LCD saying "Video Mode not supported".

Game settings... I think I had pretty much everything on. 1280x1024 res and most of the graphics options on high or maybe medium. I'll look and see exactly what everything is when I get home from work if need be.

 

[yo-yo~delta]

Could you try the latest 81.xx drivers? 71.89 is pretty outdated as far as directx9c compatibility updates is concerned. And I wouldn't be surprised if you still have slow framerates or lagginess since this game is pretty intensive at large res on huge maps. After updating to 81.xx, try again with settings i'd described earlier, and if necessary, try running at low res with low gfx settings to test if its really the gfx card that's the bottleneck.
Also, you should not downgrade your directx, that's the last thing you would do simply because the game was designed on directx9c. Downgrading might bring about more complications.

I tried the latest 81.xx drivers. They kill my computer, force me onto 640x480 low colors. My comp does not like them at all. I already have it running on lowest setting, except in driver settings I have it set to Performance and not High Performance, because I see no speed increase, and I also then see some artifacts (forests turn strange colors after zooming). Also, the framerate and speed is almost the same for duel map size 2 civs and huge map size, 9 civs, even when I played about 5 hours strait on the huge map (now at 1907, most of map revealed). SO does this indicate RAM or gfx card? Thanks for all the help.

 

[gunnergoz]

P4 2.5Ghz, 1 Gig RAM; nV 5700/256 MB; 81.xx drivers; Win XP pro SP2; SB Audigy 2 (latest drivers)

Neo-
I've tried your suggestions and my PC now works in at least Large worlds with no movie/audio stuttering or crashes. Slightly downgraded video effects but very playable and still quite appealing visually. Thanks.

 

[neo27]

I'm getting hard lockups also, at first only one in an hour or so, but now I can play only about 3-5 minutes before a total lockup happens.

The problem is always the same: Everything works normally, then without warning the screen gets corrupted. First you see very briefly (half a second) some random polygons being drawn all over, then the screen changes to have colourful, garbled pixels all over. Cursor may still move but is displayed as a square corrupted block. Alt-tab or anything else doesn't work, only thing you can do is to perform a hard reboot.

Athlon 64 / 3500+, Abit AV8-3rdEye motherboard
Gainward Geforce 6800GT, AGP
1GB of DDR400 memory
No overclocking of any kind

Software:
Windows XP with service pack 2, freshly installed last weekend
NVidia drivers 71.89, 81.87 and 81.94 tested, lockups with at least
the 71.89 and 81.94

The same computer can run Doom 3 or Far Cry without problems the whole day, so I guess the hardware should be ok.

See the attached file "civ4lockup.jpg" for a screenshot of what the crash looks like -- has anyone encountered similar crash?

I'm taking a long shot here. Is it possible that you check the temps for the cpu as well as the gfx card? AFAIK 6800gt is one hot card. Artifacts usually appear when the gpu or gfx ram gets unstable, and the system will practically hang the instant signals to video card becomes corrupted.

GeForce 6600GT, 71.89 drivers (at the time of the bsod). 81.85 drivers now.

With 81.85b, and with my settings, do you still get bsod? If yes, a little strange since I've yet encountered a bsod after trying 4 different versions from 78.xx and up with a 6600gt as well.

Hmm... I don't have any graphical corruption at first. Sound gets stuck in a repeating loop, no or very little HDD activity... if you were walking past my computer and glanced at it, you'd think everything was fine during the lock.

If I leave it sit on the lock, many times (not every time, but most times) it will eventually go black, then come back up with graphical corruption sort of similar to that picture on my CRT (which didn't have the game on it to begin with) and my LCD saying "Video Mode not supported".

Game settings... I think I had pretty much everything on. 1280x1024 res and most of the graphics options on high or maybe medium. I'll look and see exactly what everything is when I get home from work if need be.

Sorry if I'd missed it, have you applied the settings I've suggested?
But your symptoms sounds more like the system locking loop in infinite loops. Could be sound/audio driver problem. The audio subsystem is pretty flaky for this game too.

I tried the latest 81.xx drivers. They kill my computer, force me onto 640x480 low colors. My comp does not like them at all. I already have it running on lowest setting, except in driver settings I have it set to Performance and not High Performance, because I see no speed increase, and I also then see some artifacts (forests turn strange colors after zooming). Also, the framerate and speed is almost the same for duel map size 2 civs and huge map size, 9 civs, even when I played about 5 hours strait on the huge map (now at 1907, most of map revealed). SO does this indicate RAM or gfx card? Thanks for all the help.

In that case, you might want to drop back to the most recent 7x.xx drivers. From the looks of it, your ram and most likely cpu are the bottlenecks here, other than the harddisk, which you can't do much about.

P4 2.5Ghz, 1 Gig RAM; nV 5700/256 MB; 81.xx drivers; Win XP pro SP2; SB Audigy 2 (latest drivers)

Neo-
I've tried your suggestions and my PC now works in at least Large worlds with no movie/audio stuttering or crashes. Slightly downgraded video effects but very playable and still quite appealing visually. Thanks.

Great to hear that, have fun!

 

[KingJim]

I agree with Neo, rpriha. This kind of problem that I had in another game (world of warcraft) was a result of temprature problem in my case. I could have sworn that it was the game because everything else ran just fine. Turns out that WoW was really pressing my hardware to the limit and caused it to run much hotter than it does any other time and thus would get these kinds of graphics and hard lock-ups that you get. I put a new fan/heatsink on my northbridge chip, added an intake fan to the front of the case and also re-arranged the cables to get better airflow. After that all of my problems with WoW went away! If your motherboard allows it, try to underclock your cpu and turn down the graphics as much as possible. If things run more-smooth for you under those conditions then its probably a hardware heating issue.

 

[quandtum]

...I've observed that prior to the CTDs that happened ever so often on the 80 series drivers, my hdd started thrashing real badly, and screen updates become sporadic, pointing to the fact that the graphics end was doing badly. So I looked at the civ4 ini file and saw this:

; Sync input to smooth interface (may run slower)
SyncInput = 1

What I think this is for is probably vsync. Original setting was 0, I set it to 1 so that the graphics card wouldn't process frames in advance. This is normally enabled in games to avoid tearing, but I guess in civ4 it helps in stability.

; Enable Trilinear Filtering for the Minimap
MinimapTrilinearFilter = 0

This is basically what it says it is. Trilinear filtering for minimap. No big deal over this, you can set it to 1 if you like. For me, bilinear or trilinear makes no difference.

; Set max frame rate clamp (0 means none)
SetMaxFrameRate = 40

This setting, together with the vsync setting, is probably where the problem lies. Limiting the fps to 40 does not in anyway impair gameplay, this is not a First Player Shooter. For comparison, normal movies have 28fps thereabouts. Human eyes cannot discern significant difference from 30fps and above. So there is absolutely no reason to allow civ4 to attempt to process extraordinarily high framerates, which might be the reason why it breaks, probably due to problems with buffer or memory overwriting.

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 1

This is (very likely) not related to the graphics problems. But many people are using this for convenience. Basically the game autosaves every x turns you specified.

; Enable D3D9 Queries
D3D9Query = 1

This is another area which might have caused stability issues. Original setting was 0. I set it to 1 since my card is Direct9 compliant. Another note for gen6 and gen7 nvidia card users, rolling back drivers is a bad idea because directx9c was constantly updated for its runtime components even up till today. You really ought to be using the latest drivers for better directx9c support.....

I made these changes to my system (Athlon 1800, 750MB ram, Nvidia Ti 300 (64MB), Win XP all updates, Nforce 81.85) and for the first time in ~2 weeks was able to play for more than 10 minutes without a CTD or reboot. I have since taken off the framerate clamp with no problems. What I found interesting was that with SyncInput=0 the movies worked fine but the game crashed. After the change the game works but now I have the movie stuttering problem . One thing that Neo didn't mention that did help my system somewhat was turning off the screen capture option in the ini file.
Thanks again Neo.
P.S. Figures that I would get the game working a couple of days before the patch comes out

 

[Naginata]

Sorry if I'd missed it, have you applied the settings I've suggested?
But your symptoms sounds more like the system locking loop in infinite loops. Could be sound/audio driver problem. The audio subsystem is pretty flaky for this game too.

Yeah, as far as dropping to lower gfx settings, unfortunately I have almost zero time to play during the week, especially THIS week, so I might play for 45 minutes and not crash... but there's a chance that I'd be able to do that now anyway.

I'll give it a good run this weekend and see, I appreciate the tips, I'll let you know how it goes

 

[willgamer]

SyncInput=1
SetMaxFrameRate=40
D3D9Query=1

This does it for me so far! Great work guys!

My system is 6800GT, 2.4Gz Intel, 1G mem, 81.85 Nv drivers, no oc.

I was experiencing the zoom out corruption and multi color freeze up.

So far no re-occurance (though I now have the movie stuttering). I'll play with the settings to see if that can also be fixed.

 

[Commander0Zero]

Thanks man the settings worked great!! Still some video studdering but hopefully a patch will be on the way soon.Played for 4 hours no crashes after applying your settings.

AMD Athlon 64 3400
Nividia 6800GT
2 gigs of memory
Nvidia 81.94 forceware drivers

 

[NARC]

I'm getting hard lockups also, at first only one in an hour or so, but now I can play only about 3-5 minutes before a total lockup happens.

The problem is always the same: Everything works normally, then without warning the screen gets corrupted. First you see very briefly (half a second) some random polygons being drawn all over, then the screen changes to have colourful, garbled pixels all over. Cursor may still move but is displayed as a square corrupted block. Alt-tab or anything else doesn't work, only thing you can do is to perform a hard reboot.

Athlon 64 / 3500+, Abit AV8-3rdEye motherboard
Gainward Geforce 6800GT, AGP
1GB of DDR400 memory
No overclocking of any kind

Software:
Windows XP with service pack 2, freshly installed last weekend
NVidia drivers 71.89, 81.87 and 81.94 tested, lockups with at least
the 71.89 and 81.94

The same computer can run Doom 3 or Far Cry without problems the whole day, so I guess the hardware should be ok.

See the attached file "civ4lockup.jpg" for a screenshot of what the crash looks like -- has anyone encountered similar crash?

That is exactly what I get also.

I have VERY similar specs as you also:

3500+ A64
Asus A8V Deluxe
BFG 6800GT OC (AGP)
1Gb PC3200 RAM
Audigy2

 

[Bast]

Guys I have the same specs except my CPU is A64 3200+. And I can run everything. A minor lag on 18 Civ/huge maps though.

Is this what you guys are playing?

Also, I'm using forceware 77.50. So you might want to check this out.

 

[NARC]

Yeah, I can run it fine - except for the crash like rpriha. No lag, no slowdown. Soemtimes I get the corrupted graphics when I zoom out real far.

 

[lord_graywolfe]

ok neo i tried your changes. the game starts out fine and seems to be working great untill i open a advisor screen then when i come back the map is black again. that is the only problem i seem be having, well the opening movie dose stutter still but i can live with that. i will see how long i can play and keep it working right if i dont open a subscreen. thanks for the advice though. oh my system is

anthlon (64) 3200+ 1.8GHz
GF FX5200 128mb
512 ram

 

[rpriha]

NARC: I think I have solved the "colourful pixels" -crash. I noticed that I wasn't using the absolutely newest motherboard chipset drivers. If your motherboard also uses the VIA 4-in-1 drivers, go ahead and try version "4.56v" or newer. I haven't encountered any lockup since installing them, and I've been playing total of over 10+ hours after the installation.

Now I'm near the endgame (researching fission et al) and got my first crash to desktop & cannot initialize renderer, blahhhh Time to read a couple more of threads ...

 

[rpriha]

NARC: ... and the NVidia 81.94 drivers have been confirmed to fix the zoom out graphics corruption.

 

[NARC]

It does use the 4-in-1 drivers, but I could have sworn that I had updated them. I have a copy of the ones I installed, so I'll check to make sure that they were that version.
And I'm pretty sure I am using the latest nVidia drivers, but I'll check to see if they've released more in the last 2 weeks. If they are the latest, then they have not fixed the zoom out corruption.

Hopefully the forthcoming patch will clear a lot of this up....

 

[lord_graywolfe]

ok i dont get this at all. when im playing on the lakes world the game runs great i havent hit a problem yet, well the starting movie still stuters. if i play any other one i get the black map. why would it do that. the only thing ive changed lately was to switch to trilinear which makes my minimap better. and i installed the blue marble.