ATI CARDS crashing, freezing, stuttering (SOLVED?)

[TwilightOracle]

I am having same problem with an Nvidia 7950 (periodic freezing of graphics, but can hear audio and chat), so it is not just an ATI problem. Tried adjusting different graphic options, but no improvement. I had no problems until the last update so something was changed then that is causing the problems.

[MagicianBlade]

I have absolutely no problems, but I'm using an 850XL, which they dropped support for after catalyst 8.7 or something like that, whenever the big dump of older cards was. I'm going to definitely suggest that this is an ATI driver problem --which is pretty frequent, in both camps. I switched to ATI during the catastrophe with Nvidia cards that couldn't decompress texture data properly, then switched back to Nvidia during the time when ATI's drivers were so terrible you'd never know if you could even start your OS with them or not, then switched back to ATI when someone gave me this card.. and my next upgrade will likely be an ATI card, though, unless I hear horror stories about the newer cards. I've got to upgrade SOON, for sure, my card doesn't support shader 3, so I can't run squat of new games.

[rfachini]

I've had a freezing problem running an Alienware M17 with ATI MOBILITY RADEON M88 XT 512MB HD3870. I freeze the first time I enter gianthold public area on any character. Then I often freeze during large battles in gianthold outdoor. The machine is pretty good but I've turned the video settings down anyway. I'm trying the 9.9 hotfix.

[pod]

tuning the setting down fixed your problems?
mine remained the same either on very high and low.

[rfachini]

Nope. Turning down settings and applying the 9.9 hotfix did not fix the problem. I also freeze up in quests and entering instances. I also get a flickering of objects or item descriptions. Very disappointing.

[pod]

Nope. Turning down settings and applying the 9.9 hotfix did not fix the problem. I also freeze up in quests and entering instances. I also get a flickering of objects or item descriptions. Very disappointing.

same as me.
have you ever experienced client crashing while launching? (i.e. you enter you account name and password, click connect, the game autenticates, load servers but crashes as soon as it goes fullscreen)

[pod]

I am now using a 3d club HD4870 512Mb gddr5 card.
Everything seems to work perfectly.
Tormorrow I'll try my old HD4850 on a friend's PC, to check if there was some kind of incompatibility between my previous card and the rest of the system, or if it's really a game problem with that specific piece of hardware.

[rfachini]

same as me.
have you ever experienced client crashing while launching? (i.e. you enter you account name and password, click connect, the game autenticates, load servers but crashes as soon as it goes fullscreen)

Yes, exact same thing. 2nd time I launch it's fine. Happens if I use the desktop icon or the task tray download manager to launch. I wonder if it's due to Vista changing the desktop setting to Vista Basic.

[Aurelian]

I had been wondering about the shift to "Vista Basic" too, so I tried setting the standard to basic. This didn't help, though there's other ways to go about it too.
I'm fairly sure however, that the freezing is not about the switch to basic.

[pod]

I had been wondering about the shift to "Vista Basic" too, so I tried setting the standard to basic. This didn't help, though there's other ways to go about it too.
I'm fairly sure however, that the freezing is not about the switch to basic.

qute, it did not work for me too.
just out of curiosity, how much ram do you have in your computers?

also, as a test, try to raise the amount of max virtual memory available to the system and check if it makes any difference.

please report the results after the test. thanks.

[rfachini]

Yep, Turbine Support also suggested the vista basic setting but it still insta-crashes.
I agree, this is a separate issue from the freezing.

I have 4 Gigs of RAM, but only 3 are available since Alienware mistakenly installed a 32 bit OS and I don't want to reinstall.

[pod]

I noticed the client crashes on launch with almost 100% chance if the window gets "out of focus" (i.e. clicking outside of it) while it is gathering information before launching the game.
since the message "vista theme has been set to vista basic" seemed to get client window out of focus, I made the most obvious thing and tried setting the default theme to basic (as you did), but the problem kept occurring.

let's keep checking for analogies.
please list here the full specs of your computer (components models and makers).
if you don't know what your hardware is, you can use the program everest home to automatically generate a report and then post it here.


my last test has been to set a high cap on virtual memory and run the game (I had page file disabled before this) but it gave no significant result.
I've laso tried using a single "stick" of ram at time, ried both of them singularly, with no results.
I've even redownloaded and reinstalled the game.

I'm excluding a PSU problem since texture are not corruped over time and my screen never turns black (and pc never freeze totally).

to me it's a game engine problem. the only thing I still don't get it's why some people running my cards from the same family are not experiencing problems at all.
could it maybe be a problem related to graphic cards with 512mb of ram?

I'm now testing the game with my sound blaster audigy2 zs soundcard disabled (as THREAD suggests).
we'll see what happens. maybe an outdated eax support causing game freezing?

[pod]

Ok, I've found something interesting.
Disabling the audio card, somewhat got rid of stuttering.
It turns out it seems it's a problem with the "high definition audio device" integrated in the latest ATI cards (for using them as an HDMI output).
Disabling the audio device (the ATI one) got definately rid of the stuttering, still letting me using my sound card (once I've re-enabled it).

now the game is more playable, but it still keeps freezing, only difference is there is no more stuttering.

[Nimeq]

I've had complete game freeze (sounds continue) when using DX10, but looks like Catalyst 9.10RC7 fixed it for me.

You can find those at: (And they're beta drivers, they might mess your system)
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=305363

[pod]

problem fixed.
I've played for 5 hours and experienced no stuttering nor freezing.

ATI High Definition Audio Device -> DISABLED from device manager - this got rid of the stuttering -
Installed Catalyst 9.7 ATI drivers (as a turbine tech support guy suggested in another thread) - this got rid of freezing -

I hope this could be of any help for other people experiencing my same problem.

[rfachini]

tried changing virt mem from 3365 to 1000 min/4500 max. still freezing.

[rfachini]

your map is now resizable. resizing the map seems to always cause a freeze for me. sound stops when frozen too.

[rfachini]

I tried the 9.7 and 9.1 catalyst drivers. I also tried the options setting listed in this post: http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p...31&postcount=5

I'm still getting the freezes. Really, Turbine support should be trouble shooting this, not us.

[pod]

yep, that's not an ati driver problem. I think they really shoud do something about all these problems with game stability.

[thejynxed]

I was going to say, because I run this game on a Radeon 9600XT 256MB AGP card just fine. No stuttering except during the intro video and no freeze-ups/blackscreens whatseover.

Then again, I am running customized drivers, not default ATI drivers. Maybe you can try NGO, Omega, etc custom drivers and see if those work better.