How I resolved the frequent crashing on my ATI system

[michaelschafer]

Full Story:
During Beta I ran into a problem with my ATI GPU based system crashing on a regular basis. I thought it was due to my power supply being too small for my video card's needs (my original P/S had burned out and the only one I had on hand was much lower wattage) and so as soon as I could afford it, I put in a bigger power supply. That fixed the problem for a week or so and then the problem came back - coincidentally the same time as a patch. Then after the next patch the problem went away and I was clear of crashes for the last 2 or 3 weeks of Beta.

Then the game re-launched and the crashes were back - with a vengeance. I would play for as little as 2 minutes or as long as 60 minutes (rarely!) and everything would freeze up, my monitor would lose signal and my HD LED would flicker and then either the system would completely lock up or I'd get a BSOD complaining about an issue with an ATI .DLL (ATI2DVAG.DLL I think) but the screen would be checkerboarded with multiple color square so it was impossible to read.

I assumed the issue was ATI related and so spent the last couple of weeks updating, downgrading, every possible driver configuration I could find to no avail. I had turned down graphics to a minimum, lowered the engine speed, reduced the max FPS, turned off DM Audio, turned off music, pretty much everything I could to make the game playable but to no avail.

I did notice that if I was voice chatting with someone when it crashed and they happened to be speaking that I would hear there last couple of seconds of sound repeated over and over until I hit reset... so I started thinking that maybe it wasn't my video sub-system at all - maybe it was sound related? My system has RealTek AC97 sound on the motherboard and so I disabled that, found a 10 year old Sound Blaster Live! value card and installed it. I rebooted into Windows, let Windows install it's default drivers, loaded up D&DO and WHAMMO - black screen as soon as I tried to load... So much for that plan...

So, I did a Google search for some official Creative Labs drivers and replaced the Windows drivers with those, rebooted and I've been playing 5 days in a row now without a single crash. Tada!

Considering that 5 days ago I was happy to go 5 minutes without a crash, you can imagine how 5 full days makes me feel! I've turned all the options back up to max and I'm amazed at how beautiful this game world is with everything turned on!

Executive Summary:
I disabled the onboard RealTek AC97 sound and installed a Sound Blaster Live! Value card and installed Creative Labs drivers for it and no more crashes!

[trebor.c]

I didn't think of my audio drivers as the source of my problem until seeing this post. ATI vidcard as well. I was able to resolve my freezing simply by upgrading to the latest drivers from Realtek.