CariElf - I just had a crash with all the options turned off. there's something in the game that is seriously tripping or something, it's really weird.

Did you also turn off anti-aliasing?

Driver Name: ati2dvag.dll Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6561

6561 is the 5.8 catalyst drivers which were released late summer 2005 if memory serves. Current drivers are 6.3 catalyst, so could be one possibility for a cause. Not outside the realms of possibility that one version of drivers causes something like this, nVidia 77.77s made DAoC crash like a bugger for me, rolled back a driver revision and problems vanished. Also notice you're in windowed mode, try fullscreen and see if that does anything?

Oh yeah, if it's crashing to reboot make sure you turn off automatic reboot in the System Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery, then at least you'll get a BSOD which can give you an inkling of what the issue is. STOP messages can sometimes be helpful.

SmartException may be also useful

6561 is the 5.8 catalyst drivers which were released late summer 2005 if memory serves. Current drivers are 6.3 catalyst, so could be one possibility for a cause.

The trick is, he's using a FireGL card, not a Radeon card. The drivers for high-end professional/scientific cards like that tend to be rather older than the drivers for the mainstream cards. I just checked and ATI doesn't have any more current FireGL drivers. That may be the problem.

Setting the CPU affinity of the game after it starts to just one CPU might also help with stability.

You can seriously doubt thats your problem all you want. But if your drawing more then 18amps on the 12 volt rail that enermax unit will trip and reboot. The 12 volt rail on the EG851AX-VH has a 14/14/16/18 split...
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1933038,00.asp

Your issue is either your power supply, your ram, or your ATI drivers, take your pick.
Its not the game, or it would be happening to a lot more people....

I"d suggest turning down the anti-aliasing and seeing about putting the afinity onto a single CPU and seeing if that helps it.

It is definitely an odd thing.

Have you tried checking your hard drive for bad sectors? Also, if your virtual memory size is larger than the space you have available on your hard drive, that could certainly cause crashes.

OK, sorry for the long delay, but i had a busy couple of days there. So i'll get to everything as i read down the list. So here goes.

Post #27 - CariElf: Yes it was with AA off, i deleted me prefs.ini file and restarted the game, the only thing i changed was me resolution. (i set it back up to 1280x1024)

Post #28 DeltaGorno - My Card is a FireGL, not A Radeon. Technically i *could* force the catalyst drivers to work on this card, *but* that would make my card worthless as a FireGL. So... meh.... Anyways, those are the most uptodate FireGL Drivers. Tho i have no doubt that the catalyst drivers they're based on are older than the newest ones, but that's not much that can be done about that i'm afraid. ATi isn't going to release new FireGL drivers b/c i asked them to. I did turn off automatic reboot, so we'll see if i get BSoD next time. I'll be sure to report the message.

Post #30 Arcanum - I will try that and report back with the results.

Post #31 Ibnarabi - As i said, i KNOW it's not the problem b/c i was monitoring all my stats with ASUS Probe the entire time i was playing my last game. The +12V line didn't even come close to 13V, much less 18. I was ALSO running a probe on the memory at the time. There were absolutely no anomolies. The memory is working perfectly. As it should be. it's quality stuff.

Post #32 FrogBoy - Tried with the AA, no help there, still have yet to try the affinity, trying that next.

Post #33 CariElf - My last check showed no bad sectors (that was about 4 days ago, i check once every month, run virus and spyware scan every week), on all 6 HDDs. I checked and i have 10Gb free on the drive i'm running GC2 on, and the PF is set at 4Gb.... I could try defragging the drive, but that's a pain in the @ss (it's a 250Gb drive), and i doubt it would really help.

This is really a stumper for me. Anyways, i'll be back with some results later.

Cool.  We'll be here. My money is on the CPU affinity at this point.

okie dokie, tracked down the problem it would seem. So, i disabled auto-reboot. Well after 45min of play, i got another crash, but this time, i got a BSoD with some info:

The problem occured in Ctoss2k.sys
An attempt was made to write to read only memory.

Ctoss2K.sys is a Soundblaster driver. So i am investigeting solutions now. Anything you guys can offer?

So only thing i could think of was to reinstall the Driver Update for my card. Which i've done. And to my surpsise (even tho it's the same update i already had) Ctoss2k.sys changed file size. Sooooo I guess we'll see. Will it work? Cross your fingers. I'll letcha know.

Drivers, drivers, drivers. This game is really the most driver-sensitive software I've seen in quite a while

I had problems with my Sound Blaster as well, update drivers didn't work for me so I went with disabling the card and enabling my on board sound which worked fine for me.

it's worked for several hours now... but might i direct CariElf and Frogboy's attention here... It's another game ending bug i've run into just now

Link

It's always been sound for me in all my other games. It got to the point that for Civ 4 I tore out my Audigy 2 and gave it to a friend of mine and started using my onboard MB sound. Sad, eh? But I haven't had a sound related crash since. Hmmmmmm?

Just so you're aware, I had a bug that crashed my game too, and Cari figured it out, I had updated the game originally with the direct download from the site and the second patch I used Stardock Central...something about that didn't jive and after I removed everything and just installed it all at once using SC, it's like magic. Magic!

Bingo! Amazing what a BSOD can actually tell you sometimes, glad it got sorted in the end

i have an Enermax 660watt PSU, i seriously doubt that's the problem

Random rebooting general is a power supply starting to fail. Even the most expensive ones fail upon occasion.

well that might be true, if the random rebooting was ocurring, purely at random.. But it wasn't, was it? it was only happening while playing GC2...


random rebooting is certainly not always caused by a PSU, in fact, it's not even the #1 cause. There are a great many things that can cause random reboots. In fact the most common causes aren't hardware related at all, but software or OS related.


And as far as PSUs failing, Of course they do, i've been building computers for years. I've seen them turn into fire and smoke balls when plugged in. I know they can fail. AND I KNOW WHEN THEY'RE NOT You really think i could have built my own system, god know's how many times over, and posted all this stuff, and not know when somethings a PSU failing, or something else? I pretty much asserted my belief it was software related from the beginning. And it was. At least it appears to be thusfar.

P.S.
Sorry if i seem to have come down hard, but i've had a really cr@ppy day, and that post was just a straw on my back. Sorry.

Well it didn't work, i had another crash. This time no BSoD. Just a Crash, had to reboot manually.

And i just had another crash, with a BSoD this time. I'll save you the boring stuff and get to the chase.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Problem occured with i8042prt.sys

so.....

Okay, you are having driver problems still it seems. I found this interesting Link about the file name, and also looked over your previous debug.err

You might try turning off your auto-save feature just to eliminate that as a possible source of the crash. If you could post your latest debug as well, that would help. ...and just when I thought it was fixed