NVIDIA Driver Woes with a Happy Ending

[eljeffe]

I bought the game the day it game out, and the only problem I had was a mislabeled "Play" cd. I read of all those having graphical problems, but the game had been running seemlessly for me.

Unltil I updated my drivers. I went from Forceware 71.89 to 81.85 and the game clearly objected to this change. After updating (twice, I might add, just to make sure I got a clean install) I experienced frequent freezes. Often while scrolling around to look at other civs all the graphics except the ground (i.e. Trees, buldings, units) would vanish for a 10 second freeze. After an hour of playing, the CTD would come. Sometimes less. Last night I couldn't play for more than 15 miunutes without a CTD.

Another problem was that my refresh rate overrides were being ingored making my monitor incapable of diplaying anything on higher resolutions without my first lowering my desktop refresh rate.

So this morning I rolled back the drivers to 71.89 and all is well. The game runs fine. No more freezes, no more CTDs, and refresh overrides are adheared to.

Hopefully my experience will help others--or possibly the devs. The game is great, it's a shame so many are having these graphical issues.

For the record.

AMD Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2GHz
1GB DDR
GeForceFX5200 256Mb
SB Audigy Platnum Ex

[Backpack]

Please oh please report back after 12+ more hours of gameplay.
I started at 81.85. Tried 81.87 (BETA). Rolled backwards to 78.01 and am still there with moderatly better results but I STILL crash. (seems to be about every 3-4hours of continued play but faster in later years).

I would VERY much like a 'no crash report' from you (or anyone else) who has 12 or more crash free hours game hours, AFTER rolling back to an earlier driver, and AFTER confirming that thier configuration was crashing.

I'm not questioning your results, I'm just looking for something more substantial in the way of verification because I've thought I've fixed it several times, only to have a crash sneak up on me an hour later.

Thanks

(Also, please report back if you DO crash again too)

[ulyanov]

I can't give you everything you need, but what I did is upgrade from 71.89 to 81.85, which had much the same symptoms as eljeffe.

I then rolled back to 77.77 and it was no better, so I went back to 71.89. I still had crashes, and looooooong hangs at the end of turns, but no more of the silly looking at land and sea with no other graphics.

I have improved my crash situatioin markedly by taking someone else's advice and turning off Anti-Alias and Anti-stropic filtering under your display settings, Nvidia tab, "Performance and Quality Settings" and changing the global profile from "application controlled" to "Off"

Thats solved the majority of the issues I have had on Large Maps. I am probably more careful about using the mini-map, too...

Adding 512Mb of RAM has elimiated long delays at end of turn, too...

PIV 2.8Ghz
1536MB RAM (Was 1024Mb)
Ti4200/128Mb

[eljeffe]

I just had four hours of crash free playing.

Compairing how the game played with the recent drivers to how it plays with my dated drivers is night and day. Those freezes I mentioned, where all the graphics exept the terrain disapear for about 10 seconds, were gone. With the newer drivers, those freezes would happen at least once a turn, and always when I was scrolling. The way I remember it, all the CTDs happened when the screen was scrolling as well.

But with the 71.89 drivers, I get the same flawless play that I've been getting since buying the game. Three days with the new drivers and I got, I'd guess, about 20 CTDs.

The game I was playing was a large continents map, with whatever the default number of opponents that map has. I started it with the old drivers, played till the 1700s somewhere, then switch drivers. The CTD got so bad I had to set the autosave to everturn, so I wouldn't lose so much progress evertime. I was never able to play more than an hour. I switched the drivers back in the early 1900s. Those in four hours I just played I increased my millitary six fold, increased my territory about three fold, but have completely stable gameplay.

Like I said, maybe this can help the devs. I don't know what it is with 71.89 compared to 81.85, but clearly the newer drivers and Civ did not get along.

[eljeffe]

And to clarify, I have hangs at the end of turns on large maps--never more than 15 seconds, I'd say--but I had those in Civ3 as well, and I know thats all the number crunching for the AI turns.

The hangs and crashes I was getting with 81.85 were always in the middle of my turns and seemed to be associated with scrolling around the map.

[gjramsey]

I went back to the 71.89 drivers from the 81.85. With 81.85 on a standard map, I had many CTDs. With the 71.89, on Standard, I can play but will have an occasional Blue Screen, but no CTD. Have tried any maps larger.

I have a
P4 3.06 Ghz HT
1.26 Gb memory
128mb Gforce 5200fx

[CivNonFreak]

I rolled back as above. I am playing a six player, Noble, hub on a large map. I frequently had LOOOOONNNNGG delays scrolling or the map would go to just terrain. I also would get CTDs from clicking on the mini map. After the rollback, both of these things stopped. Now, i am only at 1870 or so (which is in the area I would start to get random CTDs on other games) but no crashes at all so far. Played 4 hours last night (from 1600 to 1870) and had zero problems.

Specs: DFI NFII400-AL, Athlon XP 2800+
1 GB RAM
5200 GeForce, 128

[Backpack]

eljeffe -
Your problem description sounds much like mine. Thanks so much for reporting back. I'm downloading 71.89 and I'll put it through a game session and report back tonight.

Thanks

[Backpack]

Well - Here I am reporting back.... Just crashed. (At least it was a CTD instead of a reboot. Total playing time about 2 hours in a late game, so just a bit above average.

So I have to report that 71.89 Nvidia Driver is NOT a total solution, at least not for me.

Oh well, Thanks for letting us know what worked for you.

[Mazra]

Hi Guys,

Just to add to the mix! My bottom basement Intel video card that came with my Dell did not have T & L. Needless to say I was getting the dark terrains and Chessire cats running CIV IV. I went out and bought an nVidia 5500 card. I immediately upgraded the drivers to the 81.85. In the late game on a huge map, I experienced major league crashes on my XP, the likes I haven't seen since the Win98 days. I rolled back to the drivers that came with the card, a 6x.xx series. It did not have the severe crashes, but the movies would not run, and it too would have CTDs from time to time, or about every 5 or 6 turns after 1870 or so. Finally, I tried the 71.89 drivers, an increased Virtual Memory to 2048. Guess what??? I haven't had a CTD after many hours of play. Now, I am not playing on a huge map; it's a large map. I will update here if I start having problems again.

What do you want to bet that Firaxis play tested the game on an nVidia card with 71.89 drivers? This was probably a standard driver at the time they were testing the game.

Thanks for noticing,

Mazra

P.S. The only problem I am having with my game, is that I picked a random civ for myself, and the computer gave me the French. Then I made the poor decision to stay with them.

[eljeffe]

Hey Backpack, do you let windows manage your Pagefile? If you do, it's constantly resizing it and fraging up your hd. Even with a great deal of RAM most games rely on virtual RAM for reasons that are a mystery to me. I think the optimum is like 2x or 2.5x the chip ram, but i've got my pagefile at an even 3gigs with 1gig of chip. Try giving yourself at least 2.5 gigs (Make the min and max 2.5) then defrag, and certainly don't let windows manage it for you.

Also, what kind of process load does your computer run with? Nvidia drivers themselves put in a bunch of crap processes and services that you don't need and just slow things down.

Oh and, I must ask, when you rolled back, you untistalled the newer drivers first, right?

[Stone-D]

For vram, the '2.5x rule' is only valid for low/insufficient amounts of ram. The rule goes down as your ram improves. I myself have 512 megs of ram in one machine, whose vram I set to 768-1536, the windows default. On a machine with one gig I have it set to 512-1024.

This is only valid for XP. My windows 98 se installs all start at 10 megs for the page file, I rarely see it go over 60 during use.

Microsoft's implementation of vram is a tad strange and has been throwing alot of people off since initial inception. Vram, AFAIK, first showed up on the Amiga. The basic rule then was that vram was ONLY used when the system ran out of real ram, so if you needed 1 gig of ram (yes, I know, amiga, just an example) but only had 512, you set your vram to 512 and have really slow response.

All vram implementations post windows 3.1x have been awry - windows likes to use vram 'just because' and fills up your pagefile quite happily even though it has plenty of legit ram to work with.

[jfischer5175]

Though I still get the rare ctd, going to 71.89 seems to have definitely helped. Thank you.

[Backpack]

Eljeffe -
I have to sheepishly report that I did not install and test 71.89 the yesterday. I had planned on installing it... got distracted... forgot about it, then thought I had already installed it the next time I sat down at the computer. (That's what I get for trying so many hardware and driver changes in a short period of time... they start to blur together.
So I went to install it last night when I realized I was still running 78.01. I found out that 71.89 doesn't even support the 6xxx card series at all, so I rolled back to one in between and now have 76.44 installed and testing.
I haven't crashed yet on this driver (Only have an hours play on a new game so far) but the video is still choppy etc.

As for, when I rolled back, did i uninstall? The answer is No. The Nvidia installer appears to handle uninstalling the currently installed drivers quite nicely. The standard warning "The drivers you are about to install are Older than the ones you currently have installed.... are you sure?" - Followed by install, reboot, reset up video options in windows after new hardware wizrd runs...THen a confirmation that the new, old video drivers are installed by checking the driver versionvia the Nvidia tool. (Which is the step I didn't do before posting the 71.89 report) (Chuckle)

As for the virtual memory, Yes I let windows handle it, but I cranked the "Minimum" up from 1 gig to 1.5, which gives me a minimum (visible to the game) total RAM of 2.5 GB. (I used to run with a 'set' pagefile size on Win98, but I've found that XP handles the odd time my minimum is too small quite nicely. And whenever I get that message it dynamically increases the amount allocated. Then the next time I reboot I crank up the minimum anyway. I haven't gotten an out of memory message at all in the past 5 months, since I went from 640 installed 768 Virtual, to 1024 installed 1024 virtual.

I've been playing on Small and Tiny Maps since the memory problem was recognized in CIV in an effort to keep the memory footprint smaller to no avail. I can't upgrade my RAM as this MB is maxed out with 2x512 sticks.

Oh well, Back into the trenches

[eljeffe]

The issue with the pagefile having a different minimum and maximum, and with letting Windows manage it, is that when the pagefile is resized, it is not done in a pretty fasion and it fragments the drive something horrible. This is why many of us simply set a min and max to something very high and take it out of the hands of windows. Nothing should ever use 3gigs of vram, which is why I set it to that. I feel that the performance I gain with a c drive that stays unfragmented is worth the loss of a little space.