Henious amount of freezing up going on

from Sins Forums
I'm running on a dual core with a 7950GT nvidia card, using the latest 169 driver available. I have 2GB ram. The system has dual monitors and is runnign Vista 64.

The game constantly freezes up on me. The screen freezes, music keeps going, and then my monitor looses connection to the video card and restores itself almost immediately.

After I exit out of the game, I see a long stream of error in the system tray telling me " nvidia display driver nvlddmkm.sys has stopped responding and has been restarted."

WTF? Good game but it starts out freezing every ten minutes then gets progressively worse in battles, such that its spending 80% of the time frozen & restarting, and 20% of the time in battle.
technical
11,919 views 22 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
There was another post earlier on a machine running vista 64 experiencing some problems. Is it a coincidence.

If it is NVidia 7 series related then I am worried as I am running a 7 series card. I may need to upgrade if I experience problems. At the moment I am still downloading so hope for the best
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top


If it is NVidia 7 series related then I am worried as I am running a 7 series card. I may need to upgrade if I experience problems. At the moment I am still downloading so hope for the best
End of quote


I too run a 7 series card and have the same prob on vista 32bit, but I don't think it is worth upgrading over. It is likely a driver issue and will be fixed before too long as is often the case with new released games these days.
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Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
I too get the occasional lockup, but mine is related to the sound card I think. It will freeze the sound and screen (you know, where the sound repeats over and over) for about 10 seconds and then will unfreeze. This is a crappy built-in Realtek HD Audio card that comes with the motherboard. I usually don't have any issues with other games with it though and the sound is usually just fine so I don't waste the money on a nice Audigy or whatever the high-end cards are today.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Many sound card issues can be solved by turning off bloom or multisampling. Still working on the nvidia stuff guys sorry :(
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
I get lag, but im not complaining, because its CPU lag, and Im to obsessed with graphics to turn down the bump mapping....I have a HUGE bottleneck on my system, so its very obvious when its CPU lag now...Which this is...Non the less, awesome graphics, awesome gameplay
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Ive got a 7900GS and ive got everything turned on including bloom and 2x multisampling and i get no slowdowns at all. Im using the 169.04 drivers on a windows xp 32-bit.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
Ive got 7900GT with most things turned on and with Vista64 bit, and im getting this darn annoying temporary black screen of death, though for me its like every 15-20mins i get these black outs.

I can play the game fine but its really annoying, otherwise loving the game so far :D
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
7900 GTX on Vista x32 here. Getting the random freezes with the same error message and some weird sound issues. The video freezes occur sometimes 15-30 minutes apart...sometimes I'll get two or three right after another though. Also running the latest video drivers form Nvidia. Just updated them tonight. The sound thing only seems to occur when I set ANY of the graphics settings to Highest. It will be fine, then I'll get this fuzzy, digital distortion which goes away after around a minute or two. Both errors are VERY annoying.
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
7900GT on Vista 64. Freezes every 15-20 minutes. Everything set to High or highest. It's definately a driver issue. "The screen turns black, disconnects, then reconnects." It's the same thing that happens when you reinstall your driver, not to mention the fact that I get a bunch of errors after I exit the game telling me that my drivers stopped working.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
the driver has been restarted thing is key to this bug. if you're not getting a bunch of taskbar popups after you quit, ITS A DIFFERENT ISSUE (reduce your settings, you're probably just pushign your system too far).
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Im running a Q6600, 2gb ram, 7950GT OC forceware 169.21, and XP32bit. Everything on highest except high planets at 1152x864. No freezes or slowdowns so far.
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top

the driver has been restarted thing is key to this bug. if you're not getting a bunch of taskbar popups after you quit, ITS A DIFFERENT ISSUE (reduce your settings, you're probably just pushign your system too far).
End of quote


What makes you say it's a different issue if you get taskbar pop ups? Do you mean the " nvidia display driver nvlddmkm.sys has stopped responding and has been restarted." pop up? There's another thread going around that has people listing 8800 GTX cards that are experiencing the same problem so I'm doubting it has anything to do with pushing the system but if you have other ideas I would like to know. So far my laptop (core 2 duo, 8600 GT, Vista 32) and desktop ( core 2 quad, 7800 GTX, Vista 32 ) experience the same problems others are having.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
From the looks of it, it seems to be centered around vista. People with XP(32bit) at least dont seem to be having any problems, however, so far only myself and one other have XP 32bit and posted in this thread.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
I have a nvidia 9700 GO GS with a dual core laptop with vista 32-bit and I am also having this problem, definitely annoying. I haven't tried to lower the settings.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
Yup. same problem here running on an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS and vista 32 bit.

Playing happily, suddenly my screen goes black, my monitor goes to sleep, then the whole thing resets and then it does it again. When I manage to get out of the game the display driver my taskbar says nvlddmkm.sys had shut down and restarted. Its a very annoying error. I've got the latest drivers and this kind of a bug should've been weeded out fairly early on.
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
Mine locks up with XP and a 7800 GT, 1GB of RAM, and a dual core AMD 4400+ Toledo. The farthest I have gone without the complete computer freeze is about 5 minutes into a tutorial. Otherwise the entire computer needs a hard reset.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Just to let you know I'm running on the 7600GT and so far haven't had any problem. Playing game great with max setting and 10 players.

2GB of RAM also. Running on XP Media though.
Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
Running dual 8800 GTX's in SLI (1.5GB Video RAM)
Windows Vista x64 Ultimate
4GB RAM
150GB Raptor HDD
Dual Core x6800 Conroe X-treme edition CPU (liquid-cooled)

Getting the lovely lockups and black screen under the new 169 Nvidia drivers as well. This seems to be a 64-bit/ Nvidia problem.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
Also getting lockups.

Randomly, usually in battles between ships, I get black screen for a second, then screen freezes completely but music continues to play.

Computer only responds to hard reboot.

Windows Vista x64 Home Premium
Dual 8000GTX in SLI
ForceWare v169.28
Quad Core 2.4GHZ Intel Core Duo Q6600
Soundblaster X-Fi XTreme Gamer
Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
Same problem with a 7800gtx and vista32 home premium. Hopefully nVidia will release a driver update or something.

BTW, Vista isn't that bad. I've been playing tons of games, both old and new, and I've experienced very few problems.