When meeting new Civ, screen goes black.

[Yrkoslaw]

Hello guys, I want to report an unusual bug, kind of semi-crash.
I played CIV5 smoothly and without any problem until the new patch. After that, whenever I meet another CIV, screen freeze for a second, goes black and than, do not return to normal - I can see and move the cursor, bah, I can ever click and pretty much play the game... if only I could see anything, not the black screen with cursor on it.

Chances that the computer is too weak are pretty much unpossible - 8GB of RAM DDR3 2000MHz, GTX460, i7 875k... so Hardware shouldn't be the problem. I have the latest drivers for everything.

Help?

 

[kurdt]

I also had the same issue, and found by reducing the MSAA (in video options) to 2x it solved it. No idea why, or if that actually was the fix, but it's worth trying.

 

[Southman]

Same problem here, will try the antialiasing option.

 

[GCavalry]

I have the same video card GTX460 and has this problem since day one. I didn't try the AA yet but reduce Diplomacy Screen detail to Lowest (no animation).

 

[Southman]

I have the Geforce Gtx460 also.

 

[StavrosKevin]

Having the same problem, while playing a mod, I have a 560 Ti and tried the above MSAA option but did not work. Any other ideas?

 

[StavrosKevin]

Hello again, I turned down the leader scene quality to medium and this had solved the problem. Hope that helps.

 

[Misterboy]

Hi all,

I've recently been experiencing a crash with more frequency when the game enters the leader screen. It seems to happen more often with certain leaders, like Isabella for example. The screen goes black, and about half of the time, the game keeps running (I can even "ESC" out of the leader screen), but the screen is still black).

I *think* the cause of this was updating my Nvidia drivers. I have seen reports online that the latest drivers cause this. So I installed older drivers (266.58). That helped, but I still get the problem occasionally.

Setting the leader screen to "Medium" settings has helped, but it still happens from time to time.

Before updating my drivers, I had been running the drivers previous to 266.58, which was 25X.XX something. I don't recall having the issue then.

So my question is, has anyone else experienced this. Is it the Nvidia drivers, or is it Civ 5, ... maybe the latest patch?

Oh, and I run an i5 with 8gb of ram, with a Geforce 460, so I should be fine running at the highest settings. I do run with 4xMSAA too.

I'd love some help troubleshooting this problem.

Many thanks!
-------------

I should have searched more carefully... I just started a thread about this problem.
Moderator Action: ...and i merged both threads . The_J

I just opened a "ticket" at the 2K support forums. I don't expect it'll be any help, but you never know. I am frustrated because I don't know if this is an Nvidia problem or a Firaxis problem! Urg.

 

[abeztoz]

hi i got the same problem, nvidia 460 gtx latest driver no aa, crash with black screen on diplomacy animation ERROR!

 

[a5ehren]

I am having this problem as well. 560 Ti with latest beta drivers (275.xx) - in my save it only seems to happen with Isabella.

 

[abeztoz]

this game also have overheat problem, it overheat GPU, WHAT A POOR GAME!


i got 12 black screen crash, 2 overheat crash

 

[SabreNation]

I'm also having this issue.

Misterboy - It is not the new nVidia drivers. When I first started running into the problem I realized that I had not updated the drivers for my 560 Ti since I bought it back in March. The fact that, upon closing Civ, I got a little pop-up saying my nVidia drivers had recovered from a major error seemed to confirm it. So, I went right away to update my drivers assuming that had something to do with the issue. Obviously, it did not work but I can confirm it is definitely *NOT* a driver issue.

It's got to be something with the latest Civ 5 patch. I never had a problem until I installed that patch.

I tried to lower the Leaderhead settings to Medium and it seemed to help a bit but didn't solve the issue completely. I really don't want to go all the way down to the lowest setting. It's a pride thing. I just spent $1600 building a PC in March specifically so I wouldn't have to resort to minimum settings on ANYTHING for at least another year or two. I'll try turning AA off and see if that helps.

Someone mentioned using ESC to get out of the leader screen. Maybe that will work. I had not thought of that. The game is still running in the background as I can hear the music and move the mouse cursor around, if I click around in the bottom right of the screen I can even hear the buttons being clicked. I just can't see what I'm clicking. Maybe next time it happens I'll try to hotkey my way to a save. ESC, CTRL+S, Enter. I can live with the crashes as it only happens one ever hour and a half or so. It is the fact that I can't see anything to save and as a result end up losing 20+ minutes of work every time it happens that is infuriating me.

 

[Misterboy]

SabreNation, thanks for your insight. Let me address a few of your points:

1. I have my game set to autosave *every* round. That way I can recover from a crash without much loss. REALLY annoying, but it's saved my butt so many times!

2. I have tried the ESC out of the leader screen which does work. I can hear the game running with workers and sheep etc. However, I've always tried to do a quicksave and that has never worked. Though I've always tried the F11 hotkey, and not Ctrl-S. I'll try that.

I knew it would probably be useless, but I opened a "ticket" with 2K tech support regarding this issue. Despite promises I'd hear back from them in 24 hours, it took well over a week. They had me dump a dxdiag.txt for them. Then they replied back that I needed to update DirectX and to the latest Nvidia driver (despite the fact that I told them that I had more success with older drivers). I followed there advice (DirectX had a minor update in the time since I'd opened the tech support ticket... and Nvidia released new WHQL drivers as well, on the 1st of June).

Sure enough, I started a new game after updating everything and the FIRST civ I met, crashed my game. So in my experience the latest Nvidia drivers make matters worse. Maybe the fault is with the latest Civ 5 patch, but my anecdotal evidence points directly to Nvidia drivers.

Currently, Medium Leader settings are no help, I'm still constantly crashing. I'll try Low settings. If that doesn't work, I may try playing in DirectX 9. But for the record, I'm extremely frustrated by this. Civ 5 should absolutely FLY on my rig. I shouldn't be dealing with this, especially not 9 months after release!

The worst part is that there is no confirmation from this from 2K or Firaxis. Can someone PLEASE tell us they're aware of the problem and are looking for a solution?

Since we've got nothing but each other, I'd really like to encourage anyone who has experience with this problem to post here. Maybe we can elevate this issue and get it resolved.

Many thanks!

 

[Misterboy]

An update:

Setting the Leader Screen quality to "low" definitely fixes the problem.

I spent several weeks jerking around with 2K support. They were amazingly useless. They had me do "make sure the O-N / O-F-F selector is in the O-N position" type stuff In the end, we found that the problem didn't occur with High Leader Screens when my resolution was set to 1024x768. That was their recommendation... run the game at an incredibly low resolution. Sigh.

I had hoped they'd at least log the problem and report it to Firaxis or whomever so it could be investigated. I guess I hoped for too much.

In any case, I'm now in a process of manually editing the graphic INI file to see what *exactly* is causing the problem. If I discover a setting that seems to be the culprit, I'll report back.