Different black screen issue.

[Saicosis]

I have tried everything I can think of and I can't get this issue to go away.

My game runs flawlessly all the time, except randomly in game (whether in im a dungeon, in town or afk or busy) my screen will go black. The sound will still be fine and I can see the mouse cursor, and based on the sound I am even able to send chat messages telling my party that I need to restart the game.

With DirectX 10 enabled, when this happens I have to Alt-Tab and kill the game thru the task manager.

With DirectX 10 disabled, when this happens the screen goes black exactly the same but goes back to normal a few seconds later.

I have tried many graphics options to see if its just a simple setting. I have tried with AA on and off and etc etc.

Anyone have a similar issue, or possibly know a solution?

I am running:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (and i have disabled UAC)
6gb RAM
Intel Core2Quad Q9600 (2.5ghz)
Nvidia 9800GTX+ and i just updated the drivers last night. My card is one of those 'factory overclocked' cards. The small amount of overclocking on it has never been an issue before, BUT even if I wanted to test that I can NOT seem to find the utility to let me change the speeds. I tried NVtune but you have to have an NForce mobo to use that apparently...

[MysterX]

Only thing I can think of is to try a later distribution of DirectX.

While the DirectX version may not have changed, there are DLLs that do get updated in more recent distros of the DirectX installer, and I can recall in the past that it has helped with other games to get a more recent install of DirectX and try that.

For instance in NWN2 I was able to increase my frame rates and fix an alt-tab black screen problem when I used a newer build of the DirectX 9.0c install.

However, it looked to me like the most recent DDO and LOTRO updates actually install the latest DX build as part of the update, so that might not work.

But try searching for DirectX November 2009 (seems to be the most recent build on the web) and look for a link to the MS web site in case that helps.

[dasungeheuer]

That sounds exactly like the issue I was having, down to the behavior differences between DX9 and DX10. See http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=211193

To clock your card down to reference clock, use "RivaTuner".