Random freezes

[caw132]

Hey Guys,

Looking for a solution to random freezes during game play.
The game will run smoothly and then all of a sudden freeze for approximately 30secs. It then unfreezes and game play continues as normal until the next freeze.

System : AMD Athlon 2500+ with DX 9.0b 1.3GB DDR ram
Video : GForce 4 Ti 4200 with AGP 8X 128MB ram
OS : WinXP Home

[Kheldin]

Has this always happened while playing the game, or is this something that has just happened recently? If this has always happened playing the game, it sounds to me that you may have a virus/spyware that is hogging your processor time here and there. If it just started to occur, never having so before.. Well.. i dunno.. hehe

[caw132]

It's always been there. I also noticed something odd when I first installed the game. On the first run I had to increase the brightness to at least 7 otherwise I got what looked like 16bit graphics.

[whisky]

Are you o/c ing your graphics card? this can cause long pauses as it overheats and cools down again.

If so try knocking it down 5mhz and trying again.

When I used to o/c my card some games would freeze some didn't, so just because other games are fine doesn't mean it's stable.

[Ryboflavin]

I've been having something similar. Game freezes for about 10 secs with the sound looping in half second (or so) chunks then runs again until the next freeze. As i'm going along the freezes get closer together til it freezes for good. Tried all the performance tweaks i could find in the tweak guide but to no avail. Even did a long overdue reformat, still no joy. Any ideas?

System: P4 2Mhz, Geforce 3 Ti 500 64Mb, 2Gb Ram, 120 Gig HD, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card, XP Pro

[Kheldin]

Originally posted by Ryboflavin
I've been having something similar. Game freezes for about 10 secs with the sound looping in half second (or so) chunks then runs again until the next freeze. As i'm going along the freezes get closer together til it freezes for good.

System: P4 2Mhz, Geforce 3 Ti 500 64Mb, 2Gb Ram, 120 Gig HD, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card, XP Pro

Hello Ryboflavin,

Theres your problem right there! Thief 3 needs at least a 1.5GHz processor, seeing as you only have a 2MHz... I think your way way under requirements.. heheh okay, just kidding...but could you imagine a 2MHz system with 2GB of RAM? :confused:

Anyways, you have more than what you need to run the game thats for sure. And judging by your description of the problem, it sounds like a Sound Card Driver issue. Im assuming your running the latest manufacturers driver for your soundcard? If not, or your not sure, goto their website, http://www.tbeach.com and download the latest drivers for your card.

That's a start anyways, and if you get it figured out, a quick post on what you did to make it work would be much appreciated. :)

[Ryboflavin]

I meant GHz!

oh and found an answer last night. Searching through the forum, seems like a lot of people had the same problem when the demo was released and sorted it out. Turns out that a lot of slightly older 3D cards (ie mine) have absolutely rubbish fans on them and as Thief DS is very graphics intensive, it was overheating. This explains the fact that if I played TDS from booting I could get 10 mins out of it and then less and less time between each lock up.

Past postings suggested that underclocking my graphics card using cool bits (go to http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/a_coolbits/) would help, I slowed my GPU and graphics memory by 15% or so and now it works fine. From the looks of it a lot of people have had this problem and i think that as more 3D card intensive games come out people are gonna have to upgrade their case/3D card cooling fans.

[caw132]

Finally figured it out.

For the GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X:

You need to manually set:

Antialiasing settings - I've set mine to 2xQ
Anisotropic filtering - 2x
Vertical sync - On

The default for them is application controlled which for some reason buggered things up.

Now things are smoothly sailing onward. Although I've come to hate those puppet men...

CaW

[RageHeart]

I have 2 things in this I myself have a silmilar setup and have had a similar problem for a while.

First, I have found that the latest version of Beta nVidia drivers reduces the stuttering drasticly. ( Forceware 61.80: http://downloads.guru3d.com/downloadget.php?id=812&file=8&evp=cd6f53d60beb1f2c89ba38d4d37d4f5f )

Second, check your Power supply! ...specificly use a program like MBM5 to check your voltages. My +5v line frequently gets down to +1.5v due, assumablely, to the a64 on such ... er, generic wattage. I have seen posts on other forums that say that the 5v line Powers the AGP slot and will cause problems if insufficient. Needless to say I have a new power supply on order.

I hope these this helps. Please let me know if you have any improvement from this.

[uranys]

Originally posted by caw132
Finally figured it out.

For the GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X:

You need to manually set:

Antialiasing settings - I've set mine to 2xQ
Anisotropic filtering - 2x
Vertical sync - On


CaW

Same problem on my Geforce 4200 but your tips work fine for me !
Good job !