Beyond3D Forum

Goragoth · 07-Aug-2008, 01:25

Ok, first up my relevant system specs:
Athlon X2 6400+
Sapphire Radeon HD3870
Gigabyte nForce 560 mobo
Enermax 525W power supply
8 gigs Corsair DDR2 RAM
Vista x64 SP1 (up to date)
Catalyst 8.7

No overclocks or other performance tweaks - stability is more important to me than a few FPS. Also I have the latest DX redist installed.

Now to my problem: I've put this system together only a few months ago after my old one died and a little while ago I started to notice some issues. The first thing was Devil May Cry 4. It crashed 2 or 3 times when I got up to the big frog boss guy with glowy fairy anntenae. I haven't got past that point yet. The crash was the result of the drivers crashing and Vista resurrecting them. Now a little while later I installed Titan Quest + Immortal Throne expansion and tried to play that. After about 10-20 minutes of play I also get a short freeze followed by the drivers dying. At first I didn't even realize it since TQ actually handles the error most of the time and recovers without crashing. Then, yesterday I was playing a bit of GRID and again the display drivers crashed, bringing down the game.

Naturally was getting a bit frustrated at this point and worst of all, after some of the crashes (the TQ ones in particular) I would get horrible display corruption in Aero (hard to explain but it was like some of the colours were messed up, almost like in an overcompressed picture) and it seemed to only be fixable by rebooting (and I hate to reboot my PC). Now I've been playing a lot of Diablo2 and Total Annihilation lately where I have no issues so that's one major reason that I didn't notice anything earlier. Interestingly enough Assassins Creed also worked without a hitch and I played that for several consecutive hours. Supreme Commander also appears unaffected.

Now to get to the bottom of the problem I tried a bit of a stress test by running 3DMark 05 and 06 with each test repeating 5 times at 1600x1200. No problems. Then I was thinking to myself, what did the problem games have in common? I had AA enabled in game (Assassins Creed has the AA box grayed out so no AA there). And what do you know? As soon as I had AA enabled in 3DM06 it crashed on the third run through the first test, same display driver dying thing. Leaving the CCC open and checking the temps right after the tests completed (without AA) it would get to the high 80's (I think I saw 89C for a split second). Oh and I did run the tests without AA again just to be sure that it wasn't a cumulative effect of running the other tests first.

Right now my conclusion is that it is some combination of a heat problem the anti aliasing (although whether the AA simply pushes the temps to an unstable point or it is a problem in the AA logic triggered by the heat I don't know). Although I would think that these chips should be stable at ~90C? Any other suggestions on what could be the problem, let me know.

Goragoth · 11-Aug-2008, 11:06

Ok, in case anybody cares I have tried turning off AA in Titan Quest and indeed I have not had any more crashes in several hours of play. That's good news I guess. It means I can't use AA in games anymore but at least no constant crashes (and now I'm really hooked on Titan Quest again).

Seemingly unrelated to this problem I do get a ton of "CPLIB :: General - Invalid Parameter" (source atikmdag) errors logged in the Windows Event Log. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems (other than clogging up my event log) but it can't be healthy. A quick google of the error doesn't seem to turn up anything useful, so if anybody here knows what that might be about, please let me know.

Florin · 11-Aug-2008, 11:51

Try the furmark stability test, that should pinpoint any heat issues.

Davros · 11-Aug-2008, 14:49

have you tired other games ?
according to your post you havnt it may just be titan quest
ps: isnt cplib related to avivio ?

Goragoth · 12-Aug-2008, 08:09

Ok I think I may have made a mistake actually. Looking at the logs and their times again it turns out that the error wasn't occuring during TQ at all. It was happening while streaming video from the Internet in WMP. When I googled the error I got lots of hits from someone who was getting this exact error while WMP was running as well. It would also make sense if CPLIB was AVIVO related then obviously. Still a bit of a worry. I tried disabling hardware acceleration now but I don't think it has made difference.

07-Aug-2008, 01:25	#1
Goragoth Member Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: NZ Posts: 363	HD3870 driver crash problem Ok, first up my relevant system specs: Athlon X2 6400+ Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Gigabyte nForce 560 mobo Enermax 525W power supply 8 gigs Corsair DDR2 RAM Vista x64 SP1 (up to date) Catalyst 8.7 No overclocks or other performance tweaks - stability is more important to me than a few FPS. Also I have the latest DX redist installed. Now to my problem: I've put this system together only a few months ago after my old one died and a little while ago I started to notice some issues. The first thing was Devil May Cry 4. It crashed 2 or 3 times when I got up to the big frog boss guy with glowy fairy anntenae. I haven't got past that point yet. The crash was the result of the drivers crashing and Vista resurrecting them. Now a little while later I installed Titan Quest + Immortal Throne expansion and tried to play that. After about 10-20 minutes of play I also get a short freeze followed by the drivers dying. At first I didn't even realize it since TQ actually handles the error most of the time and recovers without crashing. Then, yesterday I was playing a bit of GRID and again the display drivers crashed, bringing down the game. Naturally was getting a bit frustrated at this point and worst of all, after some of the crashes (the TQ ones in particular) I would get horrible display corruption in Aero (hard to explain but it was like some of the colours were messed up, almost like in an overcompressed picture) and it seemed to only be fixable by rebooting (and I hate to reboot my PC). Now I've been playing a lot of Diablo2 and Total Annihilation lately where I have no issues so that's one major reason that I didn't notice anything earlier. Interestingly enough Assassins Creed also worked without a hitch and I played that for several consecutive hours. Supreme Commander also appears unaffected. Now to get to the bottom of the problem I tried a bit of a stress test by running 3DMark 05 and 06 with each test repeating 5 times at 1600x1200. No problems. Then I was thinking to myself, what did the problem games have in common? I had AA enabled in game (Assassins Creed has the AA box grayed out so no AA there). And what do you know? As soon as I had AA enabled in 3DM06 it crashed on the third run through the first test, same display driver dying thing. Leaving the CCC open and checking the temps right after the tests completed (without AA) it would get to the high 80's (I think I saw 89C for a split second). Oh and I did run the tests without AA again just to be sure that it wasn't a cumulative effect of running the other tests first. Right now my conclusion is that it is some combination of a heat problem the anti aliasing (although whether the AA simply pushes the temps to an unstable point or it is a problem in the AA logic triggered by the heat I don't know). Although I would think that these chips should be stable at ~90C? Any other suggestions on what could be the problem, let me know.

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11-Aug-2008, 11:06	#2
Goragoth Member Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: NZ Posts: 363	Ok, in case anybody cares I have tried turning off AA in Titan Quest and indeed I have not had any more crashes in several hours of play. That's good news I guess. It means I can't use AA in games anymore but at least no constant crashes (and now I'm really hooked on Titan Quest again). Seemingly unrelated to this problem I do get a ton of "CPLIB :: General - Invalid Parameter" (source atikmdag) errors logged in the Windows Event Log. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems (other than clogging up my event log) but it can't be healthy. A quick google of the error doesn't seem to turn up anything useful, so if anybody here knows what that might be about, please let me know.

11-Aug-2008, 11:51	#3
Florin Merrily dodgy Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: The colonies Posts: 1,398	Try the furmark stability test, that should pinpoint any heat issues.

11-Aug-2008, 14:49	#4
Davros Darlek ****** Join Date: Jun 2004 Posts: 9,486	have you tired other games ? according to your post you havnt it may just be titan quest ps: isnt cplib related to avivio ?

12-Aug-2008, 08:09	#5
Goragoth Member Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: NZ Posts: 363	Ok I think I may have made a mistake actually. Looking at the logs and their times again it turns out that the error wasn't occuring during TQ at all. It was happening while streaming video from the Internet in WMP. When I googled the error I got lots of hits from someone who was getting this exact error while WMP was running as well. It would also make sense if CPLIB was AVIVO related then obviously. Still a bit of a worry. I tried disabling hardware acceleration now but I don't think it has made difference.

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