Omega drivers fixed my crash problems!

[wysiwygbill]

After seeing in a post that someone had resolved his problems my installing the Omega drivers instead of the standard ATI drivers I thought I'd try it. I've heard of them in the past but never was much for installing 3rd party drivers before. However, now I can run on a 1600x1200 4AA high graphics map and it didn't crash! (so far anyway).

Omega Drivers web site

I've heard of these for a long time so I wasn't leery about trying them out. I didn't find any relevent posts with "Omaga" in the title so I thought I'd make a thread.

Before you install these you need to uninstall the Catalyst Control Center. I'd suggest using the catalyst uninstall tool after downloading the new drivers and then installing the Omega drivers after you reboot. I've always updated ATI like that but you can also try the Windows control panel Catalyst uninstall and it might be ok.

There are also Nvidia drivers but I can't say if those would help other issues.

The uninstaller may be downloaded from ATI's web site. Just go to the Drivers and Software menu and choose your OS. On the expandable menu to the left choose "Utilities" and "Various". The choose "Catalyst ATI Maintenance Utilities" and download the ATI Uninstaller. They don't make it easy to find it and you can't link directly to the page.



Please let me know if these work for other issues.

[BleckLord]

Negative. Still having trouble while using Omega drivers for a 9800XT 256 card.

What is your system setup? What problems did the Omega drivers fix exactly?

[wysiwygbill]

I have an ATI X850XT PE AGP video card, 1024MB of memory, and a 3.4ghz Intel processor with hyperthreading.

The problem I was having is that the game would crash to the desktop, and occasionally get the BSOD, if I panned across a large map. Every 15 minutes or so I'd try to move too far and too fast and it'd crash.

I was able to get around it originally only by changing to 1280x1024, no anti-aliasing, and medium graphics. Have you tried lower resolutions and settings to see if it still crashes? I started at the lowest settings and increased until I found the maximum I could do without it crashing.

Did you just download the 5.10a equivalent Omega drivers?

Have you tried the "unpacker" from Firaxis? It unpacks the graphics resources from Art0.fpk into your assets directory. You then move the original ART0.fpk file somewhere else to it'll use the unpacked resources. I'm not sure why this helped, perhaps the file is unpacked into memory.

[seebs]

I switched to the Omega drivers (based on Catalyst 5.10a) from the Catalyst 5.10 drivers. It still crashes, but now the Windows desktop generally comes back on its own; I used to have to "sweep" the desktop with a window to get it redrawn.

[TenderBranson]

Hey BleckLord, double check that you have not enabled Anti-aliasing in the Civ4 graphics option. Changing it back to 0 seems to have solved my crashing problems, and video stuttering with just the standard ati driver.

[seebs]

Disabling antialiasing seems to have had no effects, for me.