For people with Ati card crashes

If you have a problem playing sins because the game freezes/goes to bluescreen

from Sins Forums

I might have a fix for some of you.

I have had the problem with sins that after a while of playing, the game suddently freezes. (can be anything from 5-15 minutes) I get large pixels all over the screen and the only thing that is left to do is turing the computer off on the start button. This error never occours on new high end games, but does for Sins of a solar empire, Quake 3 and for some games that have really bad graphics.

For my system it "appears" that I have fixed it. (this is only for people with the same error and with a ATI Radeon card)
(I managed to play for more than 30 minutes without anything going wrong. I will try for longer later on, and will post again if the error appears again)

My system specs are:

Vista Buissnes 64X

Intelcore 2CPU 6400 2.13 GHz

6 Gig RAM

ATI Radeon Sapphire HD4870 512Mb GDDR5 PCI-E

My problem was with my graphic card that was "to good" (but has nothing to do with overheating). My ATI card comes with ati Cataclys Controlcenter. As all Radeon cards has. Just start the program, pick "advanced mode", then "ati overdrive" 
There you can see options for GPU clock and Memory Clock. This section is there for people to get more power out of their cards. Mine has "GPU 750Mhz" "Memory clock 900Mhz" as default.

So instead of overpowering my card, I tried to lower its output instead. I changed my GPU clock down to: 580Mhz and my Memory clock to: 600.
And like I said, I have been able to play the game for a long while without getting the problem again. So its possible that this fixed it for my system. And the card is still powerfull enough to run the game on max settings. And the game I tried was with 8 computers. I hope it will work with few opponents aswell. (running Entrenchement)


I hope this helps someone

technical
1,687 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Interesting.  Back in the old days I had to underclock my Radeon 9600Pro or it would cause artifacting in most of my games.  Was your card factory OCed?

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

There's a reason that the cards are shipped with the speeds they are--those speeds need to be stable on every unit. Some might be able to do better, while others may have very slight flaws and are already at their peak. Overclocking is always a very YMMV thing and, yeah, it's definitely the first thing to remove if you're ever having any issues with any game.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Was your card factory OCed?
End of quote


No the manufactor was Sapphire.

The strange thing, that I have to underclock it, is that the card can run any, demanding game out there. Fallout, Crysis you name it, on full settings. But not Sins or some games with "bad/outdated" grapthics