FC3 keeps crashing

[Art Blade]

Oh, I was affected by it simply by having an intel Pentium CPU running back then so I wanted to know more. I'm using computers at home since day 1 -- remember the first Sinclairs? Does "ZX81" make you go back on memory lane, too? :) Let's just say, soon it'll be about 40 years for me :-D By the way, Space Invaders, Battlefield, Asteroids, Defender and Dragon's Lair were a blast when they came out, I still remember them  :-D

So on some Pentium processors, 1 + 1 equals approximately 2.

Brilliant 

[fragger]

Your experience predates mine, a mere 24 years or so :-() I got my first computer in 1988, a Commodore 64, and I played The Wizard Of Wor, Spindizzy, Ikari Warriors and Gauntlet II till I was blue in the face :-() I remember all those games you listed but I had to go to an amusement arcade or to the pub if I wanted to play them. I also have fond memories of Xevious, Frogger and Qix from my pub days. Heck, I remember when my mates and I considered Pong to be the duck's guts...

[Art Blade]

I was thinking arcade when I listed them. Man, those were almost all I ever played on (not much of an arcade gamer) and I remember a StarWars arcade flying towards the death star to destroy it, just like the scene in the film. And it was a cockpit I had to crawl in (low rider, hehe). It was great :) Back in the day, 1980-ish, I spent some time playing arcades in Brighton, UK :)

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, I remember that pentium bug. At the time I was still rocking a 486SX20 (as in 20mHz, lol) and didn't have to worry about it. By the time I got a pentium, that was fixed. Back then, you didn't even need a fan or even a heat sink on the processor. Well, maybe the pentiums did, forget at this point. But the 486's usually didn't. And forget about those easy drop in CPU sockets we have nowadays, back then you got a small thin blade flat screwdriver and pried the CPU out of the socket (carefully!!!) by starting at one corner, pry a little, go to the next corner, pry a little, repeat all the way around until the CPU pops out. Don't pry too much (how much is too much if you've never done it?) or you'll bend the legs and have fun getting them back straight again. Good times.

As for arcade games, I used to frequent the local video arcades quite a bit before computers were widespread. I even have a copy of Xevious sitting in the shed out back that I bought a few decades ago for the whopping (at the time for me) price of $500. I loved that game. Now I just play it for old times sake in MAME. If you're interested in old arcade games like that check out http://mamedev.org/ for the latest version, it's still alive and kicking and is the best of the arcade emulators, IMO. No idea how many games it supports at this point, I haven't updated my copy in years. It's up to version .147 and I'm using .067 or something, so that will tell you a little. The emulator is free, and there are nice windows front ends like MAME32 which I use. All things MAME can be found here http://www.mameworld.info/ except for the ROMs, which are the copies of the actual game code and are usually sorta not really legal to own. Best place for those is usenet. alt.binaries.emulators.mame seems to be the place nowadays. Look for your favorite games or expect several gigs of download if you want to get every game that MAME supports.

[Art Blade]

 :) Oh man. A long time ago I played mame, too   :-()

[Dweller_Benthos]

You must remember the day that UltraHLE came out and the whole scene exploded? I actually played all of 007 Goldeneye on that, bought a 3DFX Glide video card just to run it.

Back to the topic though, FC3 didn't crash on me once this weekend.... because I haven't played it, lol.

[Art Blade]

nice OT comeback 

Oh I do remember the 3DFX glide.. it was both elite and essential for "serious" gaming -- until openGL was released and nVidia's TNT came raining down on us with a serious bang  :-D

[Art Blade]

update: nVidia new beta out

GeForce R313 drivers also provide significant performance increases in other top games like Assassin's Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Far Cry 3.

http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/56529/nvidiaupdate

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yep, I was just about to post that

http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/56530#

Maybe, just maybe.......


If not, I was poking around the net and a lot of people were saying to downgrade to the 306 driver, think that was the number, so I have that as well. I'm also going to try hooking the video card up to a different plug on the power supply, just in case it's not getting the voltage it needs on the one it's currently on, grasping straws really. Had a serious blue screen last night that was a bit hard to come back from, but a little after midnight I had it going again, but didn't have time to check the offending dll, but I bet it was nvidia. Also, on my machine here at w@&k, running an nvidia 500 something, the driver just crashed and had to be recovered, first time that's happened on this machine. So, hopefully this new driver will help out.

And I lied, I fired up FC3 last night after I posted that, and of course, it crashed, several times, but I did get the last radio tower on the north island and one of the outposts before I gave up on it.

[Art Blade]

Yep, I was just about to post that

Hehe, I once told someone that I kept getting that line, as in I tend to post something just a tad earlier than someone else  :-D

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well, I installed the beta drivers and ran Uplay. Guess what?

[smg id=5515]

Didn't want to run at all. It's not that bad, I just uninstalled it and downloaded a new copy and installed that, then it ran fine. Guess what? Played FC3 for almost an hour with no crashes! Imagine that, it was the Nvidia drivers all along. Go figure. Not like I didn't suspect that the very first thing.

Maybe that 7% "performance boost" was the "ooops, better fix that crash bug". Of course, the release notes link goes nowhere, not that they'd admit that there was a critical, crash and blue screen inducing bug in their software, nope.

Now I just have to try it with DirectX 11 turned on. Wish me luck.

[mandru]

 :-X  Here's hoping D_B.  I'd really like to see this resolved for you.

[PZ]

Best of luck, D_B  :-X

An hour of contiguous play is rather remarkable considering the problems you've had

[fragger]

...I just uninstalled it and downloaded a new copy and installed that, then it ran fine.

Do you mean you installed a new copy of the same beta drivers? Forgive me, I just want to make sure I'm reading this right :) If what you've done works for you it may w@&k for me, although my crash issues don't appear to be as severe as yours. Last night I played for seven straight hours without incident. But that's not to say it won't crash within ten minutes at other times.

Good luck mate, hope you get it sorted :-X

[Art Blade]

the way I understand it, D_B downloaded Uplay as it had caused problems after the driver installation.

Cool, D_B :) Yay, let's get you a better 100MBit conx and you're all sorted out  :-()

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, it was Uplay that I had to re-install, don't ask me why. It would immediately crash when I tried to run it after installing the beta nvidia drivers, but a reinstall of Uplay fixed that.

Scuttlebutt on the net is that the drivers were a little twitchy when it comes to the voltage being used / supplied to the video card. Which is why I was going to try a different cable & power socket on my power supply, but the driver fixed it. Whether that was really the problem or not, we'll probably never know, and Nvidia will never admit it either. If that was the problem, then it could be a particular video card / motherboard / power supply combination that made the issue worse. So, if the power fluctuation only happened occasionally for one person, it might happen a lot more for another, depending on system config.

I may just buy that DLC pack now.

[Art Blade]

weird hardware combos causing trouble, wouldn't be the first time :) Now.. enjoy, have fun  :)

[PZ]

Dang strange problem, D_B, but I'm glad you have it sorted  :-X

Welcome to the immersion of the islands  >:D

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well, guess what? It's not sorted. Tried the Direct 3D11 setting, with multi-threading, and it crashed. Tried just Direct 3D11 and it crashed. Reverted back to Direct 3D9 and it ran a little bit longer, but still crashed. So, back to the drawing board.

[fragger]

Aw, man :D I feel for you, mate. I feel for me too, but more for you. At least I sometimes get a good few hours out of it before it goes belly-up...

Here's something I found on another forum, which I quote here verbatim from a player called Xtreme512:

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Im having crashes to desktop in far cry 3 while gaming, while loading randomly and sometimes sound disappears weird issues.. its patched to 1.04.

anyways, my systems stability is full, done memtest86+ no errors and intel burntest at maximum 20 test again no errors. I even increase the stable voltage of cpu and ram a bit for to make sure that system is fully stable. (usually you just have to increase your voltage just a bit even it is already fulll stable).

according to them, reducing gpu clock will do the trick, i tried it and i think it works buy why ? why reduce the clocks even my gpu is not OCed ? its something that makes no sense at all...
http://www.overclock.net/t/1337518/far-cry-3-crashing

by the way, I played crysis 2 and bf3 for hours at ultra full load and never had an issue.


*SOLVED*:

option 1) revert back to 306.97
option 2) set power target to 80% and gpu mem offsets to -100 MHz

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I wouldn't even know where to look to implement "option 2" above, but as if you should have to go to that sort of trouble anyway. It's a game, not the human genome project.

D_B, it certainly ain't just you and me. If you follow the link in Xtreme512's post, people all over are experiencing these probs.

Ubi has some explaining to do >:(

[PZ]

...Ubi has some explaining to do >:(

... as they often do, but never get around to.

[Art Blade]

"sorry, no time for that BS. We're currently taking our own time to make sure we do f@#k up the upcoming sequel FC4. By the way, since we don't know what fucked up FC3, we'll keep the code as is so it will happen again in FC4."

[Dweller_Benthos]

Thanks Fragger, I think I saw that same post, as that driver version looks familiar, I have one in the 306 family to try, but since the new beta ones seemed to w@&k, I didn't think I'd need it. Still have the file though if worst comes to worst. I also wondered about setting the GPU clock and how to go about it. Apparently the standard Nvidia driver used to have all sorts of settings for clock speed and voltage, essentially making it simple to overclock. Well, their new GPUs are supposedly "optimized" already and overclocking not needed. Well, what that means is they are overclocking them from the factory and any more boost by the user is just a recipe for disaster, so they took the ability out of the driver. They do have a tools package on their site that I never tried, but supposedly, it has the voltage and clock controls. I may grab it and see what I can find out.

I'm hoping (finger crossed) that somehow running FC3 in D3D11 somehow made the system "unstable" and then running in D3D9 crashed because of it. Slim hope, but I didn't have time to reboot last night and try again, so I will try tonight on a fresh boot and see what happens. Then I may try the Nvidia tools and drop my clock speed down a bit.

Guess what? Even the Nvidia tools app can't do anything on 600 series cards

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-system-tools-6.08-driver.html

Looks like I have to try the Asus app.

[Art Blade]

kind of depressing to see what the customers have to do by themselves in order to find something that helps the product to function. Why don't they help the customers?

[Dweller_Benthos]

I don't know, maybe Nvidia is trying to offload the overclocking stuff to the vendors? Seems each video card manufacturer has their own utilities. Anyway, I found the one I need on the EVGA site, since they are the ones who built my card. Tried upping the voltage, lowering the GPU and memory clock, no dice. I ran the built in stress test for an hour and it had no problems. FC3 still won't run for more than 15 minutes. I guess next is to try the 306 driver set.