sebastianNZ sebastianNZ

Constant crashing now - originally stable?

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Constant crashing now - originally stable?

from Sins Forums
Hi guys,

Great game but after enjoying some long sessions initially, I now crash after a few mins of playing.

My specs are

P4 2.8
GF 6600
1 gig ram
Soundblaster 5.1
Win XP

System is very vanilla, no o/cing, and all settings are bsaically default, including in BIOS.  The winxp install is quite fresh too, maybe 2 months old.

When I first started crashing, I updated to the latest Geforce drivers , but they were even more unstable than the previous ones (84.21's).  AFAIK these are the most solid drivers for the Geforce 6x00 series. 

I'm pretty stumped as to whats causing the crashing.  One explanation is that the game is a little buggy.  But I doubt this because most people seem to be having no problems.  The other explanation is that because my graphics card is getting old now, Ironclad haven't tested it as much as the newer cards.  Hence the instability I'm experiencing.  Ahh this is why I stopped pc gaming and got a 360 :P

My other theory is that the video card is overheating and locking up.  I have had it overclocked previously, but for most of its life its been at normal speed.  The CPU has also been overclocked, but similarly, has been clocked back to normal speed for stability.  I've never run either at o/ced speeds for long periods of time, mainly because I prefer stability over the relatively small performance gain.  The weird thing is, the kind of lockups I'm getting aren't the kind that I usually associate with CPU or video card lock ups.  For CPU lock ups, I find the whole computer locks up, and you have to do a hard reboot.  But when I lock up in Sin's, I can quit to windows and end-task on the game.  And for video card, if theres a problem, usually you'll notice artifacts, and there is rarely a hard lock.  In Sins, I never notice any artifacts.  So I'm not entirely convinced its overheating...

My money is on the video card, and the drivers I'm using being glitchy with this game :/  Anyone want to recommend some drivers to use for my 6600 GT? 

Cheers guys

This is a great game, I just wish I could play it.  I'm one of those pc gamers that very rarely has crashing problems with games.  Unfortunate that my luck had to run out when I finally found a wicked game to play!
13,082 views 28 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
I've had the same problem... Installed the patch, game doesn't work.... Minidump at startup... Just gonna play it as 1.0... I'm still learning the game so not into Multi yet...
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top
I would also appreciate staff not yelling at me like a 3 year old when I know perfectly well what I'm doing.
End of quote

To be fair... turning off your page file is an extremely unusual way of improving your performance, and were I in his place (I have a LOT of computer knowledge) I would most certainly shout at you the same way. I would assume, correctly or incorrectly, that you were a kid who has no idea what he's doing, as turning off one's virtual memory is ill-advised in most situations.
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top
I would also appreciate staff not yelling at me like a 3 year old when I know perfectly well what I'm doing.To be fair... turning off your page file is an extremely unusual way of improving your performance, and were I in his place (I have a LOT of computer knowledge) I would most certainly shout at you the same way. I would assume, correctly or incorrectly, that you were a kid who has no idea what he's doing, as turning off one's virtual memory is ill-advised in most situations.
End of quote


How is it unusual? 8ms access time for HDD vs way less than 1ms(can't recall exact numbers off hand, its in the low nanoseconds tho) access time from ram, and the bandwidth from CPU to ram is approx 2.8 gb/s from the ram, as opposed to 320 mb/s from the HDD, thats WITH a sata 2 striped raid array(once you get past the 32 mb dram cache thats built into the drive that has a burst speed of ~ 3.0 gb/s), but its still way more than 10x faster to turn the PF off when you are multi tasking with several large resource intensive programs, assuming of course you have the ram to handle it, which I do. You may have a lot of general computer knowledge... performance knowledge evidently you do not. Don't bring up the memory referencing access speed of 4gb being slower than 2gb for XP32bit either, the actual difference in time isn't that much and I've got the extra ram for the above mentioned multi tasking purposes.


To be fair... assuming I'm a stupid kid, isn't fair. I was indignant at the assumption that I was a 10 year old that just got a computer and went "virtual memory? what the hell do I need that for? lets just turn that off..." Less of this attitude(towards many situations, not just this one) in the general "Computer Person" field would make me a much happier person.

@Anschlagen: They decided to ignore this thread a long time ago... contact support@stardock.com and they might be able to help you with your issue... on the up side my problem disappeared w/ 1.04 O_o.



As an aside, I recently bought the ultimate desktop package from stardock, simply to support them, and found that programs minimized on an extra desktop on the Virtual Desktops program don't cache to VM as most programs minimized normally do (at least partly).