Edwin wrote:
> Hey guys been having some issues with PC games lately. The symtoms are when
> playing certain games it will freeze for like 8 seconds (no mouse movement
> everything just frozen) Then everything comes back to life but with strange
> graphics. Not distorted, just more like different colors and you can see
> boxes around objects especially with a 3rd person shooter you can see the
> box around the characters feet. Same thing with anything with letters in
> it. Any writing on the screen is suddenly replaced with colored boxes.
>
> Ive changed out the graphic drivers and installed older drivers I get the
> same thing thruout most of my games. Sometimes the games will play fine,
> and other times the games goes into this mode usually after about 10
> minutes of playing. It seems like only graphic intense games seem to do
> this but it has also done this with lower end older games.
>
> I did a virus scan and malware scan, took out and reaseated graphics card,
> and main memmory. still no avail. Ran some program called "Video card
> stability test" (thinking it was the graphics card) and the thing ran with
> its internal fan running pretty high and it ran for a whole hour with no
> freeze. Also decided to run the fan @ 80% with "Riva Tuner" while playing a
> game. The game froze and came back after about 10 minutes.
>
> This problems only seems to happen with games. Not with internet videos or
> while watching Netflix.
>
> Ive updated everything and begining to wonder if something is interfering
> with memory and causing this freeze. (sort of like when your dvd drive
> scans for whats in the drive when first turned on)
>
> I havent done memtest yet because I assume if it can run Netflix or other
> programs without any problems, I figure its not the memory. My computer is
> old but the games being played are from the same timeline as when this
> computer specs were around.
>
> My computer specs are:
>
> Asus P5LD2 mother board
> Pentium 4, 3.8GHz (clocked down to 3.2GHz due to heat problems)
> 4 gigs of Duel channel DDR 2 ram (only 3 being used due to xp)
> Windows xp home sp3
> BFG Tech Graphics card 1024MB GeForce GTX 285
> 2 298 Gig sata Hard drives
> Seasonic 650 watt power supply
> Memorex DVD+-RAM 525G drive
> 3.5 floppy disc drive
>
> yes I know its old and its time to upgrade, but the system has worked fine
> over the years and yes I do yearly full installs of the OS and blow out the
> dust of the inside of the computer. Appreciate any help.
Gaming code is some of the worst. They skip graceful recovery or
boundary checking because that takes time and would slow the game.
Sometimes you have to find the right mix between a game and video
driver, and often the latest video driver is not the best one for game.
As they tweak the video driver, they often encompass problems with newer
games while sacrificing compatibility with older games. If you have
video games that span a decade, or more, you're likely not to find a
best video driver for all of them.
What is the maximum resolution of the monitor? What type of monitor
(LCD or CRT)? At what resolution are you running the game? Your
hardware may not support the higher resolution you want to use so you'll
have to configure the game to run at a lower resolution.
You don't mention the games so no one here can check what are the
minimum and recommended hardware specs for them. Also, some games work
better with nVidia than with AMD/ATI and visa versa.
If you're overclocking anything then stop that and test. Why would you
reduce or limit the video card's fan speed to 80%? It may need to run
at 100% to dissipate the heat. If it cannot get rid of the heat then it
may throttle itself to lower its performance which can produce
artifacts, like the pixelation you noted. Don't do any management of
the video fan speed. Let it run at full speed and then test if the
games still exhibit the problem. If you're using Riva to up the fan
speed to make it run faster then the card may have its own temperature
management which is flawed and making the fan spin too slow. If the
card won't run its fan at 100% then use Riva to run at 100% ... and make
sure airflow through the case and PSU are not blocked. That isn't just
from dust and lint but also have flat cables oriented the wrong way so
they block airflow or having a daughtercard in a slot right next to the
extra fat video card.
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Your choice of antivirus software is spamming the newsgroup. "---" is
not a valid signature block delimiter line (which is "-- \n", or dash,
dash, space, newline). That means their spam is in the body of your
post. Your posts are spam because they added it. Go into the config
options in your program and disable the one that appends their spam onto
your posts.
