crashes to desktop for no reason

[mrcosti]

whilst playing on my laptop civ4 crashes to desktop with no error message. At first it was happening randomly but with more frequency as I got furthe on in the game, now it is happening at exactly the same point, I dont think there are any videos to load at the point of crash or anything like that. I have tried the unpac and updating drivers.
Have
AMD Athlon64 3200
1024 MB Ram
100Gb Hard Drive
128 mb Ati Radeon Xpress 200m graphics card

I'm sure the problem lies with the graphics card as the game runs fine on my girlfriends pc.

Anybody got any ideas on what I can do?

Thanks
mrcosti

[seebs]

On my system, the 4.12 catalyst drivers have worked much better than the 5.10 drivers did. Some people have reported success with leaked 5.11 betas, too.

If the game runs correctly at least for a while, the hardware is okay, you just need driver and or game updates, not all of which necessarily exist.

Do make sure you're current on motherboard drivers, BIOS updates, Windows updates, and so on.

[BleckLord]

Crashes 'may' be driver related, and some users are reporting sucess with the 4.12 drivers.

Other then that, a sure solution hasn't been found

[mrcosti]

thanks for the advice. i have tried to get the 4.12 drivers but they are no longer on the ati site and when i try to download from another site it says i am not authorised. any ideas where i can get them from please.

[seebs]

I got the 4.12 drivers by getting an old version of the Omega drivers based on them.

[miramis]

I'm also having CTD for no apparent reason but my video card is a Geforce FX not ATI. Looking through the CTD posts here over the last few days I noticed that the majority of systems with the CTD have around 1024mb RAM. Since the game runs beautifully right up to the CTD I'm at a loss to explain why it's happening. I did notice in Task Manager that Civ4 had a huge amount of page faults and seemed to use a heck of a lot of VM & RAM. Perhaps it has a problem managing memory correctly.

My Specs..
Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz)
1024mb ddr RAM (2x512mb)
dual boot 80gig & 40gig hdd
Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 TD 256mb (Asus)
SB Audigy 2 ZS
XP Home SP2
Home built pc ~ no OC ~ display settings @ 1024x768

For me the CTD happens mid-late game, depending on the map size & speed settings. If the CTD issue is driver related than I will be very surprised since ATI & Nvidia drivers are so different from eachother.

[mrcosti]

yeah i've read a lot of the different threads as well and notice this problem. i guess it must be something in the game, i'll just look forward to the patch and maybe try playing only on small maps with movies off and graphics low.
thanks for your reply

[marvinkosh]

I had a CTD just recently followed by a blue screen of death saying essentially that the ATI drivers (or a component thereof) is at fault. For the moment, I'm going to follow some of the suggestions here and fall back on older drivers. It wouldn't be the first time we've been conned into downloading 'new' drivers only to find that the old stuff is more reliable.

Edit: Just a brief update, I may have simply been lucky, but it seems that going back to older drivers has done the job.