30 réponses à ce sujet

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Whenever I start up ME1 I get a slideshow, and it's very, very unresponsive. Basically, I will see the Bioware logo slideshow animate, sound is choppy and it continues that way all the way up to the main menu. Once at the main menu trying to click on anything or navigate it is really hard to do, almost impossible. If I minimize the game it seems to run fine...but well, I can't play it minimized 

My system:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66 ghz
ATI HD 6750
3 gigs of ram
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
Windows XP SP3

DirectX is all up to date as well. I had this problem with an ATI HD 2600 XT  card and figured I'd just wait to play ME1 until I got a new video card, but still getting the same problem. I tried to lower all the settings using the config utility but it had no effect. I purchased this game through Steam by the way.

I can play ME2 with no problems though, runs great with all the settings maxed so I'm a wee bit confused why I can't get ME1 to run at all. 

[Gorath Alpha]

I don't see any obvious hardware tipoff there. What happens when you run the game from a clean boot, disconnected from the 'net, without any background programs? You shouldn't have had any difficulty with the game using an HD 2600 XT; what troubleshooting have you done so far?

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

I haven't tried running it with a "clean boot" I do have a profile setup specifically pared down for playing Black Ops when I had lots of trouble getting it to run well. I'll try that later.

Unfortunately it is not possible to run games purchased through Steam without an internet connection I believe, Steam verifies your ownership of everything that was purchased through them upon launch over the internet. I'll try it, but I have a feeling it won't work.

As for troubleshooting, I haven't really tried anything but the config tool. Not really sure what else I could possibly mess with.

I have tried setting the priority of the process both to "above normal" and "below normal" and had no effect on it either.

[Gorath Alpha]

Actually, there is supposed to be a standard opt-out to play a Steam game after logging out of the site, you'll have to wait for someone who is willing to put up with Steam's assorted shortcomings to confirm that. I refused to buy Fallout-New Vegas when playing through Steam was added as a requirement.

And I will turn down ME-3 if EA requires Origin for it.

[Moondoggie]

Out of curiosity what exactly do you have running in the background during play? I'm curious to see if any of it rings alarm bells as things known to cause issues with games. Do you have any sort of mods or trainers for ME1 that you are using?

And for my wild stab at a quick solution i'd say try downloading and installing the 1.02 patch manually steam has been known to not apply the patch properly sometimes and it causes haywire with the game

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Well after disabling all hardware acceleration for my sound card through dxdiag, I can get to the options menu but it's still a slideshow. The initial bioware logo animation and everything played fine though which is an improvement. Going to update the drivers for my sound card and see what happens. The last set of drivers for my sound card are from April 2010, and will cause all my control panel apps for the card to stop functioning, but going to give it a try to see if it works.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Moondoggie wrote...

Out of curiosity what exactly do you have running in the background during play? I'm curious to see if any of it rings alarm bells as things known to cause issues with games. Do you have any sort of mods or trainers for ME1 that you are using?

And for my wild stab at a quick solution i'd say try downloading and installing the 1.02 patch manually steam has been known to not apply the patch properly sometimes and it causes haywire with the game

I actually bought it from Direct2Drive a couple years ago and it didn't work then either. I dug around and found some obscure article on EA's knowledge base that said the ATI 2600 XT wouldn't work for ME1 either even though it only listed the 2400 as not compatible, the guys at Direct2Drive were nice enough to refund my purchase when I contacted them about it.

I tried the clean boot and that didn't do anything for it either. So it's not background processes. I do think it's sound card related. About to give it another try with new drivers, so we'll see.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Yeah, updating audio drivers didn't work either.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Gorath Alpha wrote...
And I will turn down ME-3 if EA requires Origin for it.

I'm pretty sure it will require Origin, Battlefield 3 is going to require it, and pretty much anything EA publishes from this point forward.

Honestly, Origin doesn't do anything terrible, but it's a bad prescident, and I am already mad at EA for requiring an internet connection just to play the single player version of the original Crysis. I pretty much swore off anything coming out of EA, but I couldn't pass up the deal they had on Steam for ME1/ME2, so I bought it lol.

I'm seriously loving ME2, I haven't seen a game as well done (aside from the getting stuck on object bugs and having to quit the game to get unstuck) in a looooooooooooong time. ME2 is what games should be like, but the industry has moved in the Call of Duty direction which is very disapointing. 5 hours to beat a game is pretty disapointing, and I have yet to find any newwer titles that don't follow that same design. I've been playing ME2 for about 3 weeks now and still haven't finished it...getting close to the end I think, but I figure I still have another week before I'll get to that point.

I will purchase ME3 regardless of Origin just because it's such a great series. Kind of disapointed that I can't run ME1, but well, one of these days when I can manage to drop $$ on a new computer, I'll be able to play it. As it's looking right now, it's just not going to run. I don't think I have any PCIE slots available for a new sound card in my current machine, and I'm not going to go out and get a PCI card because it will be a waste of money in a couple years as PCI is getting phased out for PCIE.

[Bogsnot1]

A couple of things to try
- Once the game is running, alt-tab out to windows, bring up the task manager, right click on masseffect.exe, select "set affinity", and disable all but Core 0.
- Check the "Tweak Mass Effect" thread stickied at the top of this forum, as it will give you some ideas on how to properly get your SB Audigy running properly under ME
- Try it in windowed mode. Some peolpe report this sort of problem doesnt occur in windowed mode, only in full screen. Cant recall the exact fix at the moment, but I'll go digging for it.

[mcsupersport]

You may want to try disabling your sound card just to see if it fixes the issue. The other thing to try is set core affinity to a single core, and see if it makes a difference.

What brand of Video card are you running?? And are you using the house drivers and any added programs or are you using stock AMD drivers??

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Bogsnot1 wrote...

A couple of things to try
- Once the game is running, alt-tab out to windows, bring up the task manager, right click on masseffect.exe, select "set affinity", and disable all but Core 0.
- Check the "Tweak Mass Effect" thread stickied at the top of this forum, as it will give you some ideas on how to properly get your SB Audigy running properly under ME
- Try it in windowed mode. Some peolpe report this sort of problem doesnt occur in windowed mode, only in full screen. Cant recall the exact fix at the moment, but I'll go digging for it.

I tried switching which cores it would run on, didn't make any difference. The cores are actually running about 50-60% utilization when both are enabled, 100% if I force it to only 1 core.

I'll try the windowed mode, and I'll look at the audio stuff too and report back later.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

mcsupersport wrote...

You may want to try disabling your sound card just to see if it fixes the issue. The other thing to try is set core affinity to a single core, and see if it makes a difference.

What brand of Video card are you running?? And are you using the house drivers and any added programs or are you using stock AMD drivers??

XFX for my 6750, the 2600 I tried it on long ago was an actual AMD card.

I'm using the AMD drivers for the card I believe, but I don't think it's the video card really at this point, I'm pretty sure it's sound related.

I can give the sound card disabling a go too, but I think ME requires some form of sound period to run. 

On a side note, I do have a USB headset deal plugged in that I'll unplug as well, but I don't think it's causing any issues since I was getting the same thing before it was even installed when I originally purchased ME1 in like 2008 or something like that.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Ok, sound stuff no difference, running windowed works great if the game doesn't actually have focus, so, making progress, but not sure what to do about it since the game window needs focus to actually play it (unless I just want to watch the animation on the title screen and pretend I'm playing lol)

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

It seems running windowed causes a massive memory leak as well, pretty much all my system ram was consumed and forced me to reboot to correct it.

[mcsupersport]

Something to look at is dl MSI afterburner, and run it to see what it lists as your gpu core clock, memory clock and temps as you are trying to run the game. The question I have, is while it was an nvidea card, I had a similar issue with my last card in XP, before upgrading to win7 and amdHD6950. But anyway, what would happen is the card wouldn't boost up in performance, instead it wold stay at about 1/4 max clock speed. I had to play with the drivers to get it to stop this, and I wonder if for some reason you are having a similar issue, since if the card is going max out, it should run the game flawlessly.

Also, what other programs are you running in the background, since they may be interfering. Things such as antivirus, internet protection programs, key loggers, and it may be worth your time to do a basic boot, that only loads the op system, drivers and NOTHING else and then run ME to see if it does ok.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

mcsupersport wrote...

Something to look at is dl MSI afterburner, and run it to see what it lists as your gpu core clock, memory clock and temps as you are trying to run the game. The question I have, is while it was an nvidea card, I had a similar issue with my last card in XP, before upgrading to win7 and amdHD6950. But anyway, what would happen is the card wouldn't boost up in performance, instead it wold stay at about 1/4 max clock speed. I had to play with the drivers to get it to stop this, and I wonder if for some reason you are having a similar issue, since if the card is going max out, it should run the game flawlessly.

Also, what other programs are you running in the background, since they may be interfering. Things such as antivirus, internet protection programs, key loggers, and it may be worth your time to do a basic boot, that only loads the op system, drivers and NOTHING else and then run ME to see if it does ok.

I actually use AIDA64 for monitoring my hardware, great program, it's what Everest became. Core 1 on the CPUsits at about 99%, core 2 sits at about 5% the GPU sits at 0-3% utilization. All temps are normal and my GPU is clocking itself up to 700mhz (stock speed) when starting it. Ram usage is well under max, so I know I'm not paging while trying to play too. I tried manually overclocking my card to try and force the GPU up to 875mhz, and didn't make any difference. Temp on the GPU is 58c, core 1 is showing 50c, core 2 is showing 58c. 

The funny thing about it though is it runs perfectly as long as the window does not have focus. When the window doesn't have focus, the GPU shows 30% utilization, core 1 80% and core 2 30%. For some reason when the window has focus the game engine is forcing everything down core 1, including everything that should be sitting on the GPU, which is REALLY odd. Something in the config I think is messing this whole thing up, but I have no idea where to look or what to change.

I've done the clean boot, closed anything and everything, gone into the task manager and killed all the processes that aren't required for windows to run properly and still no change.

I got on the phone with a guy from EA tonight, he tried his best to help me, but couldn't figure it out, he escalated it for me though, so we'll see what the next EA guy comes up with.

[mcsupersport]

What drivers have you tried?? And have you tried any older ones??

[Bogsnot1]

Just done some digging through the archives here, and found some fixes that worked for others who had similar problems.
1) Motherboard BIOS was an older revision, update it.
2) Nero SmartStart/Media Home was conflicting with the sound. PowerDVD and AdAware are also known culprits that cause stuttering. Kapersky AntiVirus also causes problems with games running on the Unreal3 engine.

Theres another option I'm trying damned hard to remember, as I had to fix a similar problem on a mates computer earlier this yer when I gave him my copy of ME to try, but for the life of me I can't recall it. One of these days I'll start writing stuff down.

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Drivers, bios everything is up to date. I actually just flashed my bios like 2 weeks ago, which the only thing that changed from the revision I had was the startup logo lol. (see above)

I purchased ME1 back in 2009, I tried running it then, same issue, so older drivers aren't going to do anything for it.

I've tried running with absolutely nothing else running.(see above)

Something is misconfigured in the plethora of configuration files involved in this game, it's causing it to ignore the GPU and the second core on my processor when the window is active, so it's basically a matter of figuring out what is wrong with the Unreal engine causing it to behave this way.

Wish I could get someone from Bioware to look into it

Modifié par g0thiC_iCe_cReaM, 08 octobre 2011 - 01:58 .

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

 Found a log:

[0.005] Log: Log file open, 10/08/11 09:16:14[0.005] Init: BioWare Final Build Version: 1.2.20608.0
[0.005] Init: Command line: [0.005] Init: Base directory: e:\\games\\steam\\steamapps\\common\\mass effect\\Binaries\\
[0.057] Init: CPU Page size=4096, Processors=2
[0.057] Init: High frequency timer resolution =3.579545 MHz
[0.057] Init: Memory total: Phys=2097151K Pagef=4194303K Virt=2097024K
[4.575] Log: Failed to load 'Material None.': Failed to find object 'Material None.'
[4.575] Log: Failed to load 'Material None.': Failed to find object 'Material None.'
[4.575] Log: Failed to load 'Material None.': Failed to find object 'Material None.'
[4.575] Log: Failed to load 'Material None.': Failed to find object 'Material None.'
[4.575] Log: Failed to load 'Material None.': Failed to find object 'Material None.'
[4.578] Log: Failed to load 'Material None.': Failed to find object 'Material None.'
[6.784] Init: Audio Driver: SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio [DF00] (emulated) (WaveOut 0)
[6.911] Init: Audio Device: Generic Software Compatibility Mode
[7.064] Init: 64 Free Sources, 2 Reserved
[9.385] Log: >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Initial startup: 9.39s <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
[12.919] Log: Bio2DA.cpp::CheckedGetIntEntry(): Failed to read row(1902, isNum=0), column(4) in Bio2DA(Talent_TalentEffectLevels)
[12.919] Log: Bio2DA.cpp::CheckedGetFloatEntry(): Failed to read row(1918, isNum=0), column(4) in Bio2DA(Talent_TalentEffectLevels)
[13.277] Warning: Warning, Failed to load all forced mips - increasing fudge factor to 3.0 and trying again.  Available memory = -1

Modifié par g0thiC_iCe_cReaM, 08 octobre 2011 - 02:19 .

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

The EA guy was confused at what I was telling him was happening, so here's a video of what happens when I try to run ME1:

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

(double post fail)

Modifié par g0thiC_iCe_cReaM, 08 octobre 2011 - 02:42 .

[Bogsnot1]

Dont worry too much about it not utilising more than one core on your CPU, as not many of us actully get it using more than 3-5% of the secondary or tertiary cores.

Just out of curiousity, was it the same rig you were running it on back in '09 (with teh exception of the 2600xt GPU), or was it a completely different rig?

[g0thiC_iCe_cReaM]

Bogsnot1 wrote...

Dont worry too much about it not utilising more than one core on your CPU, as not many of us actully get it using more than 3-5% of the secondary or tertiary cores.

Just out of curiousity, was it the same rig you were running it on back in '09 (with teh exception of the 2600xt GPU), or was it a completely different rig?

Same machine, different video card, more ram.
I did see it was picking up the wrong audio device at one point (usb audio) in the logs I found, I also tried disabling all audio devices and same thing.

Another thing to note is the mipmap error at the end of that log that I posted, I looked for any "fudge factor" settings in the config files and couldn't find anything. I tried different texture filtering options and none of them made any difference either.