Bummer.
I had a blast with the Welcome Back Soldier program. Killed many grey things and got killed by many grey things, too. But, just as the WBS was ending, and co-incindentally just after I resubscribed, I started getting massive lag spikes, crashes to desktop, and system reboots. This made the game unplayable, and has been like this for the last 2 weeks. At first I thought it was a connection issue, but then noticed I had the same problem in both online and offline modes. If it were purely a connection issue, I would not have the problem in offline mode.
I have narrowed the problem down to some kind of timing issue with my video card and the game. What will happen is about 1 minute after I spawn into a mission my screen will freeze. Sometimes it will recover (all the trees and grass will disappear, then come back) for a few seconds before freezing again. It may do this one or two more times, but eventually it will freeze for about 2 minutes then reboot my system. I set WinXP so that it would not automatically reboot on system failure and found a BSoD saying that the video card was stuck in an infinite loop and pointing at the nv4_dsp.dll file.
I have found this to be a relatively common issue with NVidia video cards and random 3D accelerated games. According to MS (Q314215) this is an issue that requires a video driver update. I already had Nvidia’s 91.31 drivers, but I found and installed the 91.33 drivers, but had the same problem. I found another MS article (Q293078) which says essentially the same thing: update your video drivers. But, this article did suggest this could be a hardware issue.
First thing I did was uninstall the game and completely remove my video drivers (Driver Cleaner Pro), restart the system then re-install the latest NVidia drivers, the game, and DirectX 9.0c. No change.
So, I ran the Dell 32-bit diagnostics that came with my computer (4 years ago!), and it passed all tests with flying colors. Well, that’s not true. My primary HDD came up with 1 bad block. Next I ran chkdsk /r to repair the bad sectors on the hdd, that went off without a hitch. So, I defragged my HDDs and made sure I had all the most recent drivers (video: Nvidia 91.33, sound: Santa Cruz v. 4193 final, system board: Intel 82850 4.04.1007). I also updated my BIOS from version A05 to A09.
No change.
I disabled video acceleration completely, the game would not even load. I reduced the acceleration to the point where the game would still load. The mouse moved faster and my FPS seemed to improve a bit (strange, that…), but still got freezes and reboots.
Next, I downloaded and ran memtest86, it made 3 passses though all tests with no problems. I’m currently about to run Prime95′s torture test and will then download and run 3DMark’06 to put my video card through the wringer. However, I will be surprised to find an actual hardware failure on my system. I can accept it if one is found, but I feel this has to do with the way Battleground Europe 1.23.6 is programmed. Interesting, though, how the problem only started 2 weeks after the patch was released…
Either way, if I cannot find some resolution to this problem, either on my end or CRS’s, I am going to re-unsubscribe from this game. I cannot afford to pay for a game I cannot play and enjoy.
Blogger does not support catagories, so I’m going to try out something suggested on the technorati website: blog tagging.
Relevant tags for this post: Battleground Europe, Games, Nvidia, Computers
Posted in Battleground Europe, Computers, Games, Hardware | |
Battleground Europe Forums – ‘Welcome Back Soldier’ 5-Year Anniversary