Random rebooting

[hong]

Hi there,

I'm having lots of trouble with Civ 4 locking up and rebooting my system, sometimes several times a day. The game will be playing fine, with no hint of problems at all, and then bang, it dies.

I've tried fiddling with the video options and downloading the latest drivers from the NVidia website, to no avail. The PC itself is fairly new, so there shouldn't be any cruft or malware screwing things up.

Attached is my dxdiag file. Quick skim of the specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13 GHz)
1 GB RAM
NVidia 7600GT, 256MB
HDA X-Mystique soundcard
160 GB hard disk
Win XP Pro, with all updates

Currently my video setup in Civ 4 is:

1680x1050 (widescreen, v.nice)
Medium graphics level
Medium render quality
Medium globe quality
2x Antialiasing
No high-detail terrain

Can anyone help me out here?

[EDIT: Civ 4 version is 1.61, the latest AFAIK.]

 

[crunch]

Well... your sound drivers are ancient (9/24/2004) but I don't think they cause trouble. More likely reasons are:
- GPU overheating
- not enough power
- something else

Are the crashes more frequent on larger maps / later eras? Are the crashes more common the longer you play the game? Can you crash e.g. immediately after loading a save?

Magic ini file option that might help: SetMaxFrameRate=40 (or 30 or so).

 

[hong]

The crashes seemed to be most common late in the huge map I was playing last (ie, lots of units, lots of squares, most terrain uncovered). It was pretty stable with the standard map I was playing before that. But then I've only been playing for a few days so there's not much data to go on.

Loading and saving seem to work fine. I also set the max frame rate to 30 as my most recent tweak but that didn't seem to help.

As for overheating, I've checked the GPU temp after a crash and it doesn't seem out of spec. Granted that's maybe 1/2 to 1 minute later, but the temp is only about 50C and the it's supposed to function up to 100C. I'll turn on temp notification in the NVidia control panel and see if I get anything.

 

[hong]

Also, is a 430W PSU enough?

 

[Madbull]

I had a similar problem .

I bought both the game and my PC last November and until last week i had never managed to finish a game because my PC always crashed playing civ4. Sometimes i could play for an hour or two without a hitch and then it would start crashing every other turn, other times it would crash as soon as i loaded a game. Drove me mad as apart from civ4 my PC ran perfectly.

Every time it crashed i would get a BSOD along the lines of "nv4_disp.dll stuck in an infinite loop"


Last week I changed the graphics card on my PC from a Nvidea 6500GT to an ATI X1900GT, i also changed the PSU from a 380W model to a 580W model.

So far the game has worked perfectly since i upgraded, not a single crash or stutter in game play.

I'm not sure if it was switching from Nvidea to ATI drivers that did the trick or the PSU change.

Going to experiment over the next day or two to see if i can work out which one it was.

 

[hong]

Interesting that changing from Nvidia to ATI seemed to help you. From what I gather, ATI cards seem to be causing a lot of grief. It would be ironic if switching video cards solved the problem for me, since I got Civ bundled with the card....

 

[civ_god06]

Also, is a 430W PSU enough?

It should be but it also depends on the quality of the psu. What Make/model is it?

 

[hong]

Coolermaster. It came with the case.

Also, I played again last night on a large map, with the Nvidia control panel running in the background. The temperature monitor never went above 55C, so overheating doesn't look like a problem.

 

[hong]

Update: the game I was playing just crashed, at about ~1700 AD with most of the map and all the AI's revealed. There was no sign of trouble beforehand. I surmise that it has to do with the complexity of the in-game situation -- if the code has to juggle too many things at once, it becomes fragile and/or makes too many demands of the hardware.

 

[crunch]

If this is the case, try to reduce the load on the computer. Disable movies, sound (EnableAudio=0), close all background apps before launching civ, etc. Or play smaller maps.

 

[hong]

I'm already running Civ as the only foreground app. I also have a bare minimum of background stuff, ie no Torrent client, no messaging, Winamp agent, etc, etc.

One thing I've now noticed is that the movies I get when I finish a wonder cut out halfway through. The music keeps playing but the movie just freezes in the middle. I can still continue playing, though. So disabling movies may be worth trying.

Oh well, maybe I'll just get another 2G of RAM. I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade anyway.