137 réponses à ce sujet

[DeIssan]

Since when will underclocking burn ram?

[greyhavens24]

Zethell wrote...

A little warning to all of you.
If you force the game to run at lower performance, or through usermade fixes, there is a risk of the memory burning on your graphics card.

What you basicly have to do, is find a clock setting, or graphics setting, that just barely is enough to not get an overheat and crash, but obviously, that would be too hot, and eventually burn.

Edit:
And with all the fixes in the world, some areas of the game will still be unplayable and crash.
(like the stone prisoner DLC)

How on earth do you come to this conclusion. When my HD4870 is in non 3D mode i.e. no load, it automatically underclocks itself!!

I spotted you post to a separate thread and from what you describe I suspect your problems were possibly because of an insufficient ampage on the 12V rail of your powersupply as the HD3870 has a larger die size than the HD4000 or HD5000's which requires sustained higher ampages. It clearly says on the side of my old HD3870 box "450 watt power supply with 30amps on the 12V rail recommended" and when I upgraded to this card from my old X1950 I bought a quality power supply because of this requirement.

If you experience a voltage drop (vdroop) this will cause the graphics card to draw more current (amps) which causes excess heat and then the card will have to work harder and thus become unstable or overheat. If it happens over a protracted period you would probably experience a failure as you describe. Also insufficient cooling within your case could cause hot spots which could also increase heat which the graphics card alone cannot effectively dissipate which results in a higher temperature delta which again would induce failure. The reason your HD5770 isn't experiencing these problems is because

a) it's a 40nm die and requires less watts/amps to run
and
because it's 40nm it runs cooler

A gaming PC is the sum of it's parts and is only as good as it's weakest component. You'll be surprised at how much difference a case like an Antec P182 (as I have) or Antec 900, 1200, or any other high end case from Antec, Silverstone or Lian Li will make to cooling! Also never underestimate the importance of a power supply. Just because a power supply says it's 600W doesn't always follow it's a good one. Take a look for Power supplies from Dark Power, Tagan or Antec as good examples. If you paid less than £70.00 for your PSU that was probably what ultimately killed your HD 3870.

Dragon Age may have it's issues, but I think you need to look at your hardware rather than blaming software.

If you don't want to get flamed, you need to back your comments up with hard facts, not conjectures. Underclocking is damaging, I ask you! AMD processors and graphics cards have been doing this for years - Haven't you heard of AMD Cool 'n' Quiet for example?

Also what do you think an HD 3850 is? It's the same GPU as the 3870 at a LOWER clock speed and slower ram (aside from the drop in stream processors and ROPS before some smart alec corrects me LOL!).

Anyway, what's this got to do with my original post about fixing problems in Windows 7? Please try and stay on topic we're all trying to help each other not bemoan our personal misfortunes!

Modifié par greyhavens24, 19 février 2010 - 09:36 .

[greyhavens24]

Hi Guys,

Ongoing report time:

Forcing DX9 mode (via my tip of adding the -dx9 switch to your shortcut), installing Catalyst 10.2 drivers, ATi 790FX southbridge drivers and installing the Realtek drivers have worked a treat the game has been 100% rock solid since doing this. No problems, no crashes and no slowdowns - absolutely perfect, mind you I will add the caveat - SO FAR!!

I'll keep you posted. When I get a bit of time, I am going to try removing some of these and try to find what actually caused the problem.

Once I get to the bottom of it, I'll post to this thread.

Happy times!

[DeIssan]

Update on my situation. Turns out for me the helmet hide mod was causing crashes, disabling it have ceased my CTDs. So if you have the same mysterious crashes and use this mod, try turning it off (and force load save after that).

[Girl on a Rock]

Hi everyone,



I'm sorry to be a bother, but I'm a huge tech dummy - I'm having a hard time figuring out some of the instructions past making the game run on DirectX 9 (which I was able to make it do, but the game is still crashing).



As far as the drivers and whatnot - I really don't know what to update, or what my system needs, or anything like that!



Any help would be super, super appreciated.



My system info:



OS: Win7 Home Premium (I think it's 64 bit, because my system info says my PC is x64 based)

Processor: AMD Turion™ II Dual-Core Mobile M500, 2200 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

RAM: 6GB

Video: AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200, 336 MB (I know, weaksauce, but it surpasses the minimum requirements), Driver Version 8.635.0.0



I don't know what other information might be needed to help me out, but I'll be happy to provide it - again, thank you - I will be so grateful for any and all help!

[greyhavens24]

Hi Girl on a Rock,

No Probs, here goes!

First thing is you will need to find out exactly which version of Windows 7 you have (32 bit or 64 bit). The easiest way to do this is to press the windows key + pause|break key or by clicking with your right mouse button on the computer icon in the start menu and selecting properties. The system panel should come up and halfway down the page under the heading System, you should see a category that says system type - under this entry it will either say 32 bit or 64 bit. The x64 you mentioned could mean 64bit or simply it's an x64 processor i.e. an Intel or AMD Chip, but I understand why it would mislead. Follow the above instructions and all will be revealed!

Once you have established which Windows 7 variant you have you can download the drivers from the following links:

For 32 bit Windows 7, Catalyst 10.2 for graphics and integrated chipsets are available here

For 64 bit Windows 7, Catalyst 10.2 for graphics and integrated chipsets are available here

Click on the appropriate link  for your windows version and you should go directly to the required download page for that version. Click on the download, and Internet explorer will bring up a dialogue saying File Download - Security Risk (Don't worry it's not a risk just windows being a bit of nanny!) - click the save button the first dialogue will disappear and you will be left with a Save as dialogue. Just hit the save button and the download will start. Once it has downloaded click on your name on the top right of the start menu (above documents) when this dialogue opens, look for the folder named "Downloads" and open it in there you will see a big red ATi icon double click on it to run and it will automatically start the driver installer, from there just follow the onscreen prompts. Voila drivers installed. The computer screen will go blank for a short period (this is when it uninstalls your existing driver it may make the sound similar to USB being unplugged and then plugged in all perfectly normal. You may be asked to reboot at the end of the installation, if it does need to do this it will prompt you to do so.

And that's it

Can you let me know what sound chip your machine is using and I'll point you in the direction of the best driver for your sound chip.

Modifié par greyhavens24, 19 février 2010 - 09:33 .

[greyhavens24]

Now that I've got Dragon Age stable, I'm going to start reverting things back to there previous states until I can get it to consistently crash, at this point, I should be able to pinpoint the actual culprit. Once I find this out I'll let everyone know.

I have now reverted from the onboard sound with Realtek OEM drivers back to my Creative X-Fi EXtreme Audio running 64 bit drivers for Windows 7 version 1.4.90. This has not affected Dragon Age at all. This effectively rules out the Creative X-Fi as the source of the problems. I have also renabled the ATi High Defintion Audio device in device manager, again with no ill effects - so obviously it's not a conflict between audio processors.

I have also maxed out my HD4870 to see if it was overheating it's now running with 8x AA (with edge detect (24x samples), Smoothvision HD Anisotropic Filtering set to 16x, Adaptive AA on, Catalyst AI to advanced but wait for vertical refresh disabled (I only put this on if there is excessive artefacts or tearing anyway). Again hasn't missed a beat, so therefore it's not the hardware overheating that was causing the problems.

I'm going to try a few more reversions today and I'll keep you posted on any results.

UPDATE: I was wrong about the Creative drivers, see my later posts for more details.

Modifié par greyhavens24, 23 février 2010 - 12:53 .

[greyhavens24]

OK Guys,

Had my first crash today, not like I was experiencing before but a crash nonetheless. I had removed the -dx9 switch as detailed at the beginning of the post so that I wasn't forcing DX9 mode anymore and as mentioned in my earlier post I had renabled my Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio.

This time it resulted in a BSOD which actually was pretty telling and yielded a result!

The crash was in a a file called P17.sys which is part of the Creative drivers!

Maybe, these problems are being caused by certain audio chipsets and DX10/11.

I'm going to try a couple of things and get back to you with the results.

BTW the -dx9 switch is working as graphically the game is different. Mainly in the textures having more "depth" i.e. bricks on the corner of houses not appearing flat but looking like er...bricks should do ahem. Also the HDR frame buffer effects i.e. light sources etc are less garish in dx10 mode leading to a more convicing look and and bit less garish and "cartoony".

Modifié par greyhavens24, 21 février 2010 - 04:44 .

[roughcoat]

Hey thanks greyhaven24 .... gotta say that its truly amazing to me that this game has such godawful tech support. Hey Bioware.... if you even offered some tiny fraction of the support that Blizzard offers... you're game might actually give them a run for their money. But as it stands now, I don't know how you face your customers.

[greyhavens24]

Hi Guys,

Just for your information I put ina technical support question with EA. Take a look at this response, it's shocking!

"Thank you again for contacting EA customer support.

Unfortunately the game is not tested on Windows 7 or 64 bit environment. Therefore there may be situations where you may face some problem in running the game. You can try to run the game as administrator, to run the game as administrator:

1. Right-click on the shortcut icon of the game
on your desktop.
2. Choose the option "Run as Administrator".
3. Choose to allow the game.

If the game still not runs properly,
Please try to play it in Compatibility mode. Please visit the following
link for the steps to play the game in compatibility mode"

So essentially what they are telling me is that either they haven't got a clue or just simply can't be bothered to try and solve the problem. Good job I'm having a go then! This is diabolical considering that I'm using mainstream hardware that would be easy to test as they are all available worldwide.

I thought I'd log the report not neccessarilly expecting an answer but more to log the issue but I suspect from the response it will have very little effect and basically will fall on deaf ears.

To actually state that the game wasn't tested on Windows 7 is absolutely disgusting. The game was released after Windows 7 was by a good 4-5 months, and the release condidate was available to the GENERAL PUBLIC for a good 6-9 months prior to that...and...what about all the Vista users having the same problems, has it not been tested on that environment - whatever happened to Beta testing EA/Bioware?

Modifié par greyhavens24, 21 février 2010 - 04:38 .

[Tyrax Lightning]

roughcoat wrote...

Hey thanks greyhaven24 .... gotta say that its truly amazing to me that this game has such godawful tech support. Hey Bioware.... if you even offered some tiny fraction of the support that Blizzard offers... you're game might actually give them a run for their money. But as it stands now, I don't know how you face your customers.

My apologies for going a little off-topic, but it's kinda funny ya mentioned Blizzard. EA better shape up in Tech Support, for Blizzard's Starcraft 2 is incoming... It dares to challenge Mass Effect 2 for Space Game Supremacy!

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm

Many thanks for the aid with Windows 7 aid. I'll be getting W7 on my next puder build i'm in middle of. (Might as well, what better time to switch OS then between builds? I hope it doesn't reek like Darkspawn.)

[JWT2k6]

Do you have to add this to the DAOriginsLauncher shortcut, or can you do it to daorigins.exe as well? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't make a difference but I just want to make sure



"C:\\Program Files\\Dragon Age\\bin_ship\\daorigins.exe" -enabledeveloperconsole -dx9

[DeIssan]

greyhavens24 wrote...
I'm going to try a few more reversions today and I'll keep you posted on any results.

Did you see my earlier post? For me it was a 3rd party mod (helmet removal) that caused the CTDs, you might want to try removing 3rd party mods one at the time to check.

[greyhavens24]

DeIssan wrote...

greyhavens24 wrote...
I'm going to try a few more reversions today and I'll keep you posted on any results.

Did you see my earlier post? For me it was a 3rd party mod (helmet removal) that caused the CTDs, you might want to try removing 3rd party mods one at the time to check.

Thanks for the input.

However I'm not running any mods as I'm trying to get to the bottom of what was causing the problems. Comments always appreciated, keep 'em coming guys.

[greyhavens24]

JWT2k6 wrote...

Do you have to add this to the DAOriginsLauncher shortcut, or can you do it to daorigins.exe as well? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't make a difference but I just want to make sure

"C:\\\\Program Files\\\\Dragon Age\\\\bin_ship\\\\daorigins.exe" -enabledeveloperconsole -dx9

Hi there,

Yes, you can do it with  the daorigins.exe, I'm using that now. All it does is bypasses the initial splash screen the Launcher is just the usual autorun thing most games have and is largely unnecessary. The -enabledeveloperconsole switch just enables "cheat mode" used by the games developers so that they can jump to specific areas, and get items etc. It's there for the developers to test things.

LOL perhaps they didn't know about this switch when they were testing the game.

[greyhavens24]

OK Guys,

All my drivers and hardware is now back to what I had when it was
crashing at the start of this post and I discovered the -dx9 switch and
yet, no crashing.

I have had another BSOD in P17.sys yet again. Looks like there is something untoward in DX10 and Creative drivers as I can say that this is the ONLY THE 2ND time I have had a BSOD in Windows 7 and both have been with P17.sys as the root cause.

I have reverted back to Catalyst 9.11 with no repeats of the crashes before. One key thing I did when I installed 10.2 and this latest reversion back to 9.11 is that I actually uninstalled the previous driver (using the Catalyst installer - NOT Uninstall Programs in Control Panel. Normally I would just update the driver when a new one comes out. As this hasn't caused any problems to date, I've done this since I owned a Radeon 7200 (long term ATi Fan!!!).

However maybe this is what has cured the actual instability and crashing I first experienced. Any ATi owners having problems out there may well benefit from downloading the latest 10.2 drivers, once downloaded double click on the ATi packaged file to run and at the option of install and uninstall choose the UNINSTALL option. The machine will require a reboot then run the ATi package again and choose install and install all the options available (if using custom) or choose the express option.

The game was initially crashing all over the place under 9.11 before yet now - absolutely rock solid. Clearly the problem doesn't lie with the Catalyst drivers themselves, maybe there are some legacy driver  files lurking about that need uninstalling for best results. As a matter of course I will pop 10.2 back on.

So far I think I can rule out Catalyst Drivers being the issue and Realtek Sound Drivers. I do however think that it is very advantageous to UNINSTALL the catalyst drivers before putting new ones on, but make sure you use the ATi uninstaller NOT control panel's.

Creative Drivers obviously are an issue, but do remember that X-Fi's aren't fully supported under both Vista and Windows 7 and that the Creative drivers do have a work around for Direct3D Sound in the form of OpenAL (ALchemy). Whilst alchemy also enables EAX in Vista/Win7, the driver also interprets D3D Sound and converts it into Creatives OpenAL for the X-Fi. Essentially the driver is emulating D3D (or at least that's my understanding of how the X-Fi works under DX10/11) as the card doesn't directly support WDM (windows driver model - introduced with Vista) and maybe this is what is causing some peoples problems. I remember there being a big outcry about this when Vista first launched. Just a thought, if we use the -dx9 switch, maybe we are perhaps forcing a "compatability" mode that is more widely tolerant of hardware, especially those components that don't fully support WDM (I know the catalyst drivers are WDM)?

I hope my investigating is yielding results for people and you're finding my post's informative.

[JWT2k6]

I thought it was common knowledge to completely uninstall your previous drivers before installing new drivers >_>;

[LedGabriel]

I'm on more having this problem, tried disabling the Windows Error Report as I saw on other forums, also run as administrator and compatibility mode; all to no avail.



I just remembered Assassin's Creed had a similar problem, the issue was with it constantly pinging the Ubisoft server, the easy fix was to unplug the internet cable from the pc, no even disabling the connection would work.



So I think, could DA:O have a similar problem? I cannot play right now, but I think it's worth a try. Unplug the cable before playing, see if it helps. I'll try it tomorrow.

[Tyrax Lightning]

JWT2k6 wrote...

I thought it was common knowledge to completely uninstall your previous drivers before installing new drivers >_>;

I didn't know that. I've updated Drivers plenty of times before without uninstalling old ones 1st. I thought new Drivers were supposed to delete old Drivers 1st for you before installing themselves. Is this wrong?

[Gurnz]

Hi peeps. I have a suggestion, for anyone who hasn't done so already I recommend you update your DirectX runtime files, it can be downloaded here  I've not actually started playing the game yet so I can't comment on whether it will help or not but it's fixed problems with other games in the past.  If you have Vista or 7 you will find it will download a ton of updates for DX9 and will also upgrade Vista users to DX11.  Well worth a try for anyone having problems. Good luck.

[JWT2k6]

Tyrax Lightning wrote...

JWT2k6 wrote...

I thought it was common knowledge to completely uninstall your previous drivers before installing new drivers >_>;

I didn't know that. I've updated Drivers plenty of times before without uninstalling old ones 1st. I thought new Drivers were supposed to delete old Drivers 1st for you before installing themselves. Is this wrong?

Yes, it is. New driver installations do not overwrite files from previous installations. After uninstalling current drivers for a new installation, I recommend using Driver Sweeper from www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ . This will ensure that any driver residue will be erased before you install new drivers.

[Tyrax Lightning]

JWT2k6 wrote...

Tyrax Lightning wrote...

JWT2k6 wrote...

I thought it was common knowledge to completely uninstall your previous drivers before installing new drivers >_>;

I didn't know that. I've updated Drivers plenty of times before without uninstalling old ones 1st. I thought new Drivers were supposed to delete old Drivers 1st for you before installing themselves. Is this wrong?

Yes, it is. New driver installations do not overwrite files from previous installations. After uninstalling current drivers for a new installation, I recommend using Driver Sweeper from www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ . This will ensure that any driver residue will be erased before you install new drivers.

Many thanks for this info! Does this Driver Sweeper Program cost anything, either up front, or subscription-wise? It doesn't say.

[CrustyCat]

Tyrax Lightning wrote...

JWT2k6 wrote...

Tyrax Lightning wrote...

JWT2k6 wrote...

I thought it was common knowledge to completely uninstall your previous drivers before installing new drivers >_>;

I didn't know that. I've updated Drivers plenty of times before without uninstalling old ones 1st. I thought new Drivers were supposed to delete old Drivers 1st for you before installing themselves. Is this wrong?

Yes, it is. New driver installations do not overwrite files from previous installations. After uninstalling current drivers for a new installation, I recommend using Driver Sweeper from www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ . This will ensure that any driver residue will be erased before you install new drivers.

Many thanks for this info! Does this Driver Sweeper Program cost anything, either up front, or subscription-wise? It doesn't say.

No, it's free.

[greyhavens24]

Hi Guys,

I'm not a noob at this and part of the reason for not uninstalling is probably shear laziness, and as I mentioned, in over 10 years I've never had any problems from doing this. I wasn't saying it was a good practice, I was just saying this is what I have done in the past.

The reason I mentioned it is purely because I'm trying to find out what I have actually done differently to make the game suddenly stable!

And as for the comment on Driversweeper, I never trust any software that purports to do a better job than existing uninstallers. After all the best people to know about what does and doesn't install with ATi drivers are ATi. Please don't be offended it's a personal opinion not a dig at the poster.

I would like also like to point out that even with my experience and knowledge, and really I should know better, I got into bad habits and I am sure that I am not the only one that has done or will do this with ATi drivers. After all we don't uninstall and reinstall a game to "patch" it do we!

My comments were to assist in getting to the bottom of stability problems, which I hope everybody is finding useful.

Modifié par greyhavens24, 23 février 2010 - 10:02 .

[LedGabriel]

Found this: http://www.gamingnew...install-errors/



Try starting the game in windowed mode and going full screen after start playing. Tried once, played for 40 minutes without crash. It's worth a try.



Also tried the DX9 thing. Is it my impression or the game looks better?