Voodoo 5=OK; GeForce 3=Crashes!

[Ewann]

I had been playing Civ 3 for 20-30 hours without a single crash or problem of any sort with my Voodoo 5 5500 graphics card on my Athlon 900/WinME/Asus A7V/SB Live! system.

Last weekend I picked up a GeForce 3 Ti 200 card and replaced the Voodoo card with it. With the GF3 in my system, Civ 3 crashes every 5-15 minutes! I have tried 4 different driver revs (XP, rev 6.x, rev 12.x, etc) and none of them even touched the crashing problem. I upgraded from DX 8.0a to DX 8.1, and then found that Civ 3 actually *rebooted my PC* instead of crashing!

So, I popped the Voodoo 5 back in my system and voila... all of the problems are gone and my system is as stable as a rock after another 10-15 hours of Civ 3 play without any crashes!

I'm really bummed that this shiny new GF3 card is useless with Civ 3. I'm not sure which to return- the game or the card! I'll hold onto the card for a couple of weeks in hopes that either Firaxis or nVidia releases a patch/driver rev to make this work!

Any success stories from anyone in solving frequent crash problems?

--Ewann

 

[Ewann]

The game actually freezes up my PC (alt-tab, C-A-D don't work, etc) rather than crashing me back to the desktop. If a troop movement sound is happening at the time, it will get stuck in a sound loop, but that's not all that often.

--Ewann

 

[Wolfshanze]

I have a GeForce 3 and Civ3 runs just fine and dandy.

The Problem is that you have not cleaned out the Voodoo drivers properly from your system... you can't just add-in GeForce drivers and assume everything is hunky-dory... you have to COMPLETELY REMOVE any and all Voodoo drivers from your system BEFORE putting in the GeForce drivers to get the GeForce to work properly with all games.

This includes removing 3DFX referances from the registry!

When you do that, it will work fine.

Stop blaming the GeForce3, and start cleaning up your hard-drive!

 

[Ewann]

Heh. I should probably blame the 3dfx uninstaller instead. I used the normal 3dfx-supplied "uninstall" routines when removing the Voodoo5... one shouldn't really be required to poke around in the registry to remove hardware, but I do recall that 3dfx did some weird stuff to the system. Thanks for the tip (even if you're a bit antagonistic about it ... I'll try installing the GF3 again and see if there are residual 3dfx entries in the registry that I need to remove. I'll post here if that fixes things (crossing fingers!)

Ewann

 

[Ewann]

Well, I wiped out every "voodoo" and "3dfx" reference in the registry, installed the new nVidia drivers that came out yesterday, and after about 40 minutes of play the game seems stable. It was crashing every 10-20 minutes before, so this is promising. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Ewann