[Rainbow Man]

Supreme Commander rolls over and dies seemingly randomly during skirmish games (haven't tried campaign yet because that was so boring last time heh), though not until the action has gotten a bit thick and I've got a good base going. Then *pop* I'm booted back to the desktop with no explanation.

Typical isn't it?!


In Far Cry the video driver dies as soon as I try to start a new game. The hero appears on-screen in his red hawaii shirt, and then it's hasta la vista baby and the game kills the driver. After a lengthy period of nothing happening from any input I'm back on the desktop again and the driver reports it has successfully recovered.

Never says from WHAT though.

Half-Life Episode 1 crashes as soon as Dog lifts up the wreckage of the crashed helicopter thingy right at the start of the game. Happens like clockwork every time I try. Can't see why it would happen. Original HL2 seems to work just fine and I've played through Lost Coast multiple times wiht no issues.

Anyone seen anything similar happen on their systems with vista? I run 8800s and Core2 duos CPU with nforce 680sli chipset underneath by the way. And I have the latest video and mobo driver installed by the way. *Edit: I've tried a bunch of other games too and no problems with them. And 3dmark 06 runs flawlessly. 7Zip benchmark reports around 5500kb compression/110,000kb decompression speed with no CRC errors or anything.

Input greatly appreciated. Thanslk in advance!

Peace.

[Kyyla]

I've had no problems with Supreme Commander or Ep1. 8800Gts + 965p C2D.

Peace.

[Malo]

Are you running latest patches on those titles?

[Albuquerque]

Only think I can think to try is this:

Start a command prompt with administrative credentials.
Type the following:

bcdedit /set increaseuserva 3072

You should get a "The operation completed successfully" result, then you can exit the command window. This is the same as the /3GB switch in XP; it provides another gig of ram (vs 2GB) to applications that are coded for it. It fixes crash-to-desktop issues in Stalker and another game I can't think of right now, and solves some hiccups in certain other games.

[Rainbow Man]

Originally Posted by Malo

Are you running latest patches on those titles?

Yeah. Patched 'em first thing I did after install..

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

This is the same as the /3GB switch in XP; it provides another gig of ram (vs 2GB) to applications that are coded for it.

What difference does this do if you only have 2GB RAM installed?

Thanks.
Peace.

[Albuquerque]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Man

What difference does this do if you only have 2GB RAM installed?

Thanks.
Peace.

Still helps; give it a shot. The worst thing it could do is not help your crash to desktop, at which point you can do this command to revert back:

bcdedit /set increaseuserva 2048

[Malo]

Running administrator? Tried compatibility modes?

[Rodéric]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Man

What difference does this do if you only have 2GB RAM installed?

Instead of the 2GB for the kernel/OS, 2GB for the app you get 3GB for the app and 1GB for the kernel/OS, it's known to break some things (read an article about that not long ago).
Even if you only have 2GB RAM, don't forget your swap file, which may also be used, so even then it helps.

I have a problem with HL2 & HL2:Ep1 (crash while loading) on my C2D E6600, 2GB, ASUS P5B-E Plus (P965) and GF8800GTS. (Vista x64 Ultimate)

I'm tempted to believe that I get somewhat out of RAM, and that's because of Vista taking too much resources...
(But I have no proof, disabling services and Aero didn't solve it)

[Albuquerque]

Vista only takes more resources when nothing else is going on. If you boot your computer and let it idle at the desktop, Vista will start "fidgeting" like indexing your drive, precaching apps, other stuff.

But if you open up a big resource hog (game, photoshop, etc) it will dump all of it's nonsense out of memory and let your app have it. Under the most extreme application resource load, the Vista OS will only take up ~50mb more than XP.

I know that some very modern games have memory leaks under Vista though (Stalker is one of them,when using either of the Dynamic lighting modes) so opening up the 3GB memory switch can help get around it or at least keep the issue from cropping up nearly so fast.

I just reloaded FarCry on my Vista machine last night, but didn't have a chance to start it up. I'll give it a try later today and post back with my results...

[Rainbow Man]

Thanks Albu.

My gut reaction is this is a video driver issue fundamentally. Since Far Cry doesn't crash until it actually draws some 3D (the hero) and both it and GHalf Life2 EP1 crashes so predictably every time that's what my instincts tell me.

Maybe I'll try those new beta drivers I heard had been released on Nvidia's site.

Or maybe I'll reinstall this machine from the ground up anyway. In 64-bit mode this time (plan on getting 4+ gigs for it). I just have to get a home network working so that I can back up some stuff to my old PC.

Got any good advice on how the hell to get it working? I've put 'em both in the same workgroup but I can't "see" the other PC from either one of 'em.
Peace.

[Kyyla]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Man

Got any good advice on how the hell to get it working? I've put 'em both in the same workgroup but I can't "see" the other PC from either one of 'em.
Peace.

Set up the Vista machine as being in a private network and turn on sharing and discovery from the Network and sharing center.

[Albuquerque]

Originally Posted by Kyyla

Set up the Vista machine as being in a private network and turn on sharing and discovery from the Network and sharing center.

Yup, that would be it. And if for some reason that doesn't work, go into the Firewall and temporarily disable it. I've had some problems with unmanaged workstations that somehow can't see other machines unless the firewall is disabled.

I know there's a better / more proper / more supportable way to fix it, but I haven't spent enough time to investigate why it happens.

[Chalnoth]

Well, I haven't tried those games yet, but most of my game problems in Vista have been fixed by editing the permissions. Basically, it seems like a lot of Windows XP games like to write to files in the game folders, but by default those game folders are set as read-only by default in Vista. So the game, not knowing how to handle it, just crashes out. This may or may not be your issue.

To see if it's the issue, run the game in administrator mode. If that fixes the problem, then simply edit the permissions on the game folder to allow authenticated users full control.

[Davros]

i dont know if this is tue:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=226278

[Albuquerque]

Played FarCry for about an hour last night. Cliff notes: Works fine in Vista. Well, one exception: enabling HDR turned the sky completely black. I have to assume this is a driver issue rather than a Vista issue though. I'm on an NVIDIA 7900GT video card with the 158.xx Vista32 drivers.

Originally Posted by Davros

i dont know if this is tue:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=226278

Likely a driver issue; an app isn't going to toss AA samples because it has more memory to address...

[pjbliverpool]

Hehe, I have an almost identical system to Roderic:

C2D E6600, 2GB, ASUS P5B-E Plus (P965) and GF8800GTS 640MB

But im running Vista 32bit (Home Premium).

I've had no problems with Farcry or HL2:E1.

Supreme Commander worked the one time I tried the demo but I couldn't get in to it so only played for about 5 mins.

[Rodéric]

Found back the article I was refering to, and here's a follow up :
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3044
(the first article is linked at the beginning)

[Rainbow Man]

Originally Posted by Kyyla

Set up the Vista machine as being in a private network and turn on sharing and discovery from the Network and sharing center.

No go. Other machine (XP Pro) just doesn't show up. And no, the firewalls are disabled on both of them.

If I look for network PCs on one of them I only see THAT particular PC and not the other.

Weird. Windows seems to permanently hate me. I've never really managed to sort networking out on any of my PCs running many different Win OSes. I don't understand why it can't be more like plug and play without all the black magic and shit.

Anyone got a link to some kind of step by step guide to get Vista to happily network up with some XP boxes?

Peace.

[Albuquerque]

Do you know the IP address of the machines?

If so, do this from the Run command box:

\\ip.address.of.box\c$

So, like Start -> run -> \\192.168.1.201\C$ -> enter

Give that a shot

[Rainbow Man]

What's it supposed to do? :P

I ran it and it just said "The network path was not found."
Peace.

[Chalnoth]

I think it'll do that if you got the IP address wrong. But I thought that the administrator shares were now disabled by default in Vista regardless.

[Rainbow Man]

No, I definitely did get the IP right; the OS seems a bit funny in the head TBH.

The box I'm trying to reach doesn't actually run Vista; THIS one runs XP pro.

Anyway, maybe I should make a new thread about this in a better forum since it's no longer about games. :P

Thanks for all your help so far!

Peace.

[Albuquerque]

Thought I'd reply to this thread again, just to keep Vista troubleshooting in the same vein.

If you have any problems with "hiccups" in your game -- you're driving around in FarCry and notice it pauses for about 1 second once every 10-15 minutes -- try setting your page file to the same static sizes. I had really hoped this wouldn't be necessary, but setitng my page file to 2048/2048 cured some little hiccups that I noticed in several of my games.

Even UT99 suffered from this hiccup, and it needs like what -- 300mb of ram at absolute most? Bah. Turning the page file completely off made games unable to load on my rig, so I don't suggest doing that unless you've got a minimum of 4Gb of system ram.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

Thought I'd reply to this thread again, just to keep Vista troubleshooting in the same vein.

If you have any problems with "hiccups" in your game -- you're driving around in FarCry and notice it pauses for about 1 second once every 10-15 minutes -- try setting your page file to the same static sizes. I had really hoped this wouldn't be necessary, but setitng my page file to 2048/2048 cured some little hiccups that I noticed in several of my games.

Even UT99 suffered from this hiccup, and it needs like what -- 300mb of ram at absolute most? Bah. Turning the page file completely off made games unable to load on my rig, so I don't suggest doing that unless you've got a minimum of 4Gb of system ram.

From what was previously said in this thread, this makes a lot of sense: perhaps Vista intentionally pages out processes that normally run in the background when a demanding piece of software like a game is run. That seems quite silly to me, as I don't see any reason to do anything but simply pause the processes, as they'll get paged out automatically if the program needs the memory.

[Fox5]

If you're running sli 8800's, maybe you're running up against Vista's 2GB barrier. Under vista, graphics memory and system memory are pooled into one addressable space, and 1GB of vram would only leave 1GB of sys ram to work with.