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So, after crashing twice the other night I went looking around. According to their FAQ most crashes are due to running out of texture memory, and so they suggest turning down your graphics settings, so I did that. They also have an address you can send the dump files it generates along with your dxdiag output so they can try to determine why the game crashed; I'm looking forward to hearing back to them; really stupid that the game acted up the other night after having 0 issues the only other two nights I've ever played...

Hudson wrote:most crashes are due to running out of texture memory, and so they suggest turning down your graphics settings, so I did that.

I dont think this was your case because I only have a 512mb video card and I had all settings on "highest" and I never crashed.

Could be sound? I find a lot of games crash due to my outdated, crappy soundcard. But then again, I have a crappy, outdated soundcard, and you probably, well, don't.

sound is a possiblity; i get nabbed by stuttering sound problem in l4d sometimes too, although it's a little less obnoxious to recover from in that game. If I remember, I'm just using the default windows sound driver for my (onboard) card... it may be necessary to use the vendor driver... who the hell knows... I updated my graphics driver and reduced the video settings for the game a bit... waiting anxiously for their support to tell me something besides 'you suck and need to die'

Hudson wrote:sound is a possiblity; i get nabbed by stuttering sound problem in l4d sometimes too, although it's a little less obnoxious to recover from in that game. If I remember, I'm just using the default windows sound driver for my (onboard) card... it may be necessary to use the vendor driver... who the hell knows... I updated my graphics driver and reduced the video settings for the game a bit... waiting anxiously for their support to tell me something besides 'you suck and need to die'

Make sure you have that option for Dual core rendering/maximization turned off in the advanced graphics options for L4D. There is a known issue where Nvidia card users get stuttering and pauses if that option is on.

I did not know that; I will have to look

And there you have it.... maybe the bloom effect or some of the other settings related to multisampling antialiasing etc etc. I had them all turned on and up just because 11 *IS* louder than 10.... oh well, I'll turn some shit down and see if next time we have 7 players it doesn't explode in my lap. it's probably the bloom effect; I already turned that shit off...

Hi Jason,

It's difficult to tell as the minidumps are somewhat corrupted due to
*something* running of memory. It could be the game but it's equally likely
that it was the video driver(s). I can see that the crashes are definitely
crashing in something rendering related. If updating your video drivers
doesn't fix it, try reducing your graphical settings incrementally to see if
the problem goes away (texture detail, bloom, multisampling etc). Also, it
would be great if you had a way to make this problem happen consistently
from a save game or replay. If you do, please send it to us along with
instructions on how to make it happen.

Sincerely,

Josie
Technical Support
Ironclad Games

Also make sure Hudson that for Sins, you use the in-game anti-aliasing setting and not the anti-aliasing in the drivers. As a general rule, if a game supports FSAA internally, you want to use that instead of forcing it in the drivers.

I run my game at 1920x1200 and do not use AA or FSAA. At that resolution, I don't think it needs it.

I wonder if Hudson's situation has to do with his Quad Core processor? I remember having issues with Madden 07 when using both CPU cores. I had to disable one core and it worked perfectly.

My LCD only goes to 1440x900 so I set everything to High, disabled the bloom and changed the FSAA to 2x instead of 4x... I still can't believe I was 'running out of memory' anywhere with 1GB and 8GB of RAM, but I also updated my vid drivers, so maybe the combination of it all will solve the problem...

I also disabled the multicore rendering in L4D so we'll see if I crash in that anymore either.... good stuff...

Are you running Entrenchment or regular SINS? I am set to 1680x1050, geforce 960GSO 768MB with all settings on highest with all the extra's checked off and she purrs like a dream in regular SINS but Entrenchment gives me some lag time when loading new stuff like asteroids and planets you know all the good stuff.

DA