3 réponses à ce sujet

[TruYuri]

A friend gifted me Mass Effect on Steam a few days ago and I've had nothing but problems since. Sound problems, bluescreens, freezes, killed drivers, the whole shabang.

Sound problems I've since fixed, I have a Realtek integrated soundcard so I used the appropriate BIOGame.ini fix for that. Sounds work like a charm.

Bluescreens I hope I've fixed. Updated every driver possible (including BIOS) and ran chkdsk earlier. No bluescreens yet, but I've yet to confirm that they are gone. Bluescreen was PAGE_FAULT_NONPAGED_AREA or something, did a few hours worth of Google on that and hopefully that is now fixed.

Sometimes Mass Effect will kill my ATI drivers, which are of course the latest (10.5). I've found that I can solve this by either playing fullscreen AT MY NATIVE RESOLUTION (1440x900), or Windowed. I'd prefer a slightly lower res to improve performance, but whatever. This issue (and how to solve it) makes absolutely no sense to me and I can only guess that it's a problem in the game engine (UE3).

I had the dreaded "General Protection Fault" crash plenty, I eventually nailed that problem down to an invalidated file that Steam was happy to automatically fix once it was detected.

But, now, the final problem. After playing for an hour or so, in sequences where I drive around in the Mako, the game loves to freeze for 10-20 seconds and then resume. I could be driving around, getting in/out of the Mako, on foot, anything. I'd say it's more likely to happen when I am on foot, but it still happens when in the Mako regardless.

I have absolutely no solution to this, and I can find none. The "short" freezes get to the point where it becomes unplayable, but again, only on ingame sequences with the Mako. If, for instance, I should enter a structure on a planet surface (Pirate compound, whatever it may be), the freezes stop until I go back outside.

Perhaps someone out there could help me solve this. My system specs (built'er myself):

Gigabyte G41M-ES2L Motherboard (Rev. 1.0) (latest BIOS)
ATi Radeon HD4550 512MB PCI-E 2.0 x16 w/ Catalyst 10.5 (latest drivers)
Realtek Onboard HD Audio (latest drivers)
2GB DDR-800 G.Skill RAM (Dual-Channel, Voltage set to 1.9V)
WD Caviar Black 500GB SATA II HDD
Intel E5200 OC'd to 3.43Ghz (quite stable and cool, aftermarket cooling)
Windows XP Home Edition SP3
DirectX 9.0c, latest available build (March)

Drivers for any other thing are absolute latest. I don't have any special settings (such as "Turbo") enabled in the BIOS for either the RAM or the PCI-E card. I am a minimalist in my computing and have very few background processes running as possible, however I certainly don't disable any important ones. I don't have any anti-virus so that rules out any sort of conflict there. I disabled the Steam Ingame Interface as I feel that was causing instability. At most, I have mIRC, Xfire, and WLM running. That's really about it.

I run Mass Effect with all settings at max at 1440x900 except "Film Grain" and "Motion Blur". I get a few performance hiccups in an occasional spot but otherwise it runs quite smoothly... when it's not doing these damned freezes.

Modifié par TruYuri, 30 mai 2010 - 01:53 .

[Gorath Alpha]

An Hd 4550 is only intended for charts, graphs, presentations, spreadsheets, and other general use business type activity, not for games.  It is only able to get to 25% of the performance of the slowest game-capable Radeon HD 4n00 card, the 4650, on the first of four performance criteria, followed by 25% again, and then 50%, with an ending 80% for only one measurement.  

The HD 4650 is for Medium resolutions, and Medium image quality.  It is a true medium video card.  For high image quality settings, the HD 4670 runs at 200%, 125%, 125%, and 125% of its slower (4650) brother's performance numbers.  For high resolution screen settings, the appropriate cards from that generation were the 4830, 4850, and 4870. 

www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php

With the screen set to something coarse, such as 800 by 600, or perhaps 1024 by 768, and the image quality set ti low to match the poor quality of the 4550, the bogging, freezing, etc. should be alleviated, but the correct way to fix things is to obtain a proper game quality video card. 

www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx

or

www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx

P.  S.  The official system requirements for the PC game version were a horrible mess of errors, lies, and pie in the sky pipe dreams.  For a far more practical lists of components, look below:

Minimum System Requirements for Mass Effect on the PC
(Corrected from dumb, Pie in the Sky lies to the real thing)

Operating System:
Windows XP or Vista

Processor:
2.4+GHZ Intel or 2.0+GHZ AMD

Memory:
1 Gigabyte Ram (XP)
2 Gigabyte Ram (Vista)

Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 6 series (6800GT or better: 7100, 7200, 7300, 7400, 7500, 7600 GS, 8300, 8400 GS, 8500, 9200,  9300, and 9400 are below minimum system requirements)
ATI Radeon X1800 GTO (X1300, X1300 Pro, X1300 XT, HD 2400, HD 3200, HD 3450, HD 3470, HD 4200, HD 4350, HD 4550, and HD 5450 are below minimum system requirements)

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 30 mai 2010 - 12:09 .

[TruYuri]

Thanks, I guess that makes sense. Unfortunately I can't afford any of those right now so I suppose I'm pretty boned. 

Modifié par TruYuri, 30 mai 2010 - 01:24 .

[Gorath Alpha]

Although I consider it a poor option from an economic point of view, you can purchase an interim solution at less cost than those examples, if you accept the fact that just a few more months down the road from now, some next games will demand more than the temporary fix can provide, so you will be back in the same spot again pretty soon. 

For whatever reason, the number of sales and rebates for video purchases are way down, so costs are effectively much higher than just a few months ago. 

www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx

The first HD 4650 on that page is $55 after rebate, which is pretty cheap, but that card is nearly two years old now (August or September).   

Gorath
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