Call of Duty crashing on me

[Mark]

Hi. I have recently purchased call of duty. I am experiencing
intermittent crashes after playing the game for extended periods of
time. I have a gigabyte ga-7vax mobo, amd 2100+ xp cpu, ATI radeon
9800 pro with catalyst 4.3 drivers, and onboard sound (Realtek AC'97
audio). I have tried changing video/audio drivers, I reinstalled the
game, redid my via 4in1 mobo drivers, reinstalled directx 9.0b,
disabled fast write in my ati settings and am still having the
crashes. It will play fine for a couple hours then crash, then if I
try to keep playing it will crash every 5-20 mins or so. I have
checked my cpu temp as well and it seems relatively low and stable
(for an amd). I am at my wits end, and tips, comments, or suggestions
(however inane) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks: Mark

 

[R Thompson]

Hi. I have recently purchased call of duty. I am experiencing
intermittent crashes after playing the game for extended periods of
time. I have a gigabyte ga-7vax mobo, amd 2100+ xp cpu, ATI radeon
9800 pro with catalyst 4.3 drivers, and onboard sound (Realtek AC'97
audio). I have tried changing video/audio drivers, I reinstalled the
game, redid my via 4in1 mobo drivers, reinstalled directx 9.0b,
disabled fast write in my ati settings and am still having the
crashes. It will play fine for a couple hours then crash, then if I
try to keep playing it will crash every 5-20 mins or so. I have
checked my cpu temp as well and it seems relatively low and stable
(for an amd). I am at my wits end, and tips, comments, or suggestions
(however inane) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks: Mark

I have a Ga-7vax, 9800 pro - cat 3.10, xp-2500, Win2K pro, DX9.0b, and
haven't had any lockup issues at all, runs great. My son's computer,
Ga-7vrxp, Win98SE, xp-1800, ATI -Crucial 7500 cat 3.10, DX9.0b, locks up
after playing a while, maybe 1-2 hours requiring a hard reset. Thought it
was the original drivers, cat 3.4, no difference, all MB drivers up to date
as well. Only does it on CoD. Temps fine on both systems.

I know this doesn't help you, but, may be a similar issue??

 

[Michael W. Ryder]

Hi. I have recently purchased call of duty. I am experiencing
intermittent crashes after playing the game for extended periods of
time. I have a gigabyte ga-7vax mobo, amd 2100+ xp cpu, ATI radeon
9800 pro with catalyst 4.3 drivers, and onboard sound (Realtek AC'97
audio). I have tried changing video/audio drivers, I reinstalled the
game, redid my via 4in1 mobo drivers, reinstalled directx 9.0b,
disabled fast write in my ati settings and am still having the
crashes. It will play fine for a couple hours then crash, then if I
try to keep playing it will crash every 5-20 mins or so. I have
checked my cpu temp as well and it seems relatively low and stable
(for an amd). I am at my wits end, and tips, comments, or suggestions
(however inane) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks: Mark

I know you said the CPU temperature was fine, but how about the video
cards temperature? I had similar problems with a 9700 Pro in Morrowind
until I put a slot fan in below it to vent out the hot air from the
card's fan.

 

[Mark]

I have a Ga-7vax, 9800 pro - cat 3.10, xp-2500, Win2K pro, DX9.0b, and
haven't had any lockup issues at all, runs great. My son's computer,
Ga-7vrxp, Win98SE, xp-1800, ATI -Crucial 7500 cat 3.10, DX9.0b, locks up
after playing a while, maybe 1-2 hours requiring a hard reset. Thought it
was the original drivers, cat 3.4, no difference, all MB drivers up to date
as well. Only does it on CoD. Temps fine on both systems.

I know this doesn't help you, but, may be a similar issue??

Definetely sounds like a similar issue, only difference is that I only
crash back to my desktop...luck my . I'm going to try disabling vpu
recover and having fastwrite, under smartGART, turned off next. I'll
let you know how it works out. After that maybe I'll roll back to
3.8's. Havent tried those yet!

 

[johns]

It probably is the AMD temp. I don't care what the
mboard temp reads, those chips are running too hot,
and there is no cure because the ceramic coating
on the chip is too thick. It simply will not dissapate
the heat. I've dropped them in my CAD labs, and
will only spec the Intel P4 chipset. Also, I noticed
on those mboards a small fan on another chip ?? That
fan fails often, and I noticed intermittant crashes from
that too. I simply will not use AMD on VIA again.
I have CoD running on a nice P4 with ATI Radeon
9200 ... no problems crashing. I did notice that the
new 4.3 drivers for XP were kind of stupid ... esp
running OpenGL game demos. I'm getting pretty
good at the QuakeIII console correcting the mess
the 4.3 drivers make. It is a shame that ATI can't
write a display driver to save their butts. It is a joke.

johns

 

[RobundConny]

Turn off VPU recover and fast writes, every game works fine for me with
this.

 

[R Thompson]

Turn off VPU recover and fast writes, every game works fine for me with
this.

My ATI software doesn't have smartgart anymore, or VPU or fast writes.
Running 9800 Pro, Win2K Pro SP4, Cat 3.10.

Seems like it showed smartgart when I had Win98SE on.

 

[Mark]

Well I dont know if my vid card is getting too hot or not, but I play
with my case open and a 16 inch fan pointed directly inside it on
speed setting 3. So if thats not keeping my vid card cool enough then
I dont know what else I could do!

 

[Mark]

Turn off VPU recover and fast writes, every game works fine for me with
this.

well I tried turning off fast write and vpu recover, and it didnt
help. I tried cat 3.7's, didnt help, now I'm gonna try the omega 4.3's
and try again. I'm hopelessly frustrated. My comp should be able to
play this game.

 

[DaveW]

Call of Duty has known conflicts with the Radeon drivers.

 

[Bandit]

Call of duty would crash on me to, till i went back to the cat. 3.10
drivers now all runs fine

 

[John Lewis]

Hi. I have recently purchased call of duty. I am experiencing
intermittent crashes after playing the game for extended periods of
time. I have a gigabyte ga-7vax mobo, amd 2100+ xp cpu, ATI radeon
9800 pro with catalyst 4.3 drivers, and onboard sound (Realtek AC'97
audio). I have tried changing video/audio drivers, I reinstalled the
game, redid my via 4in1 mobo drivers, reinstalled directx 9.0b,
disabled fast write in my ati settings and am still having the
crashes. It will play fine for a couple hours then crash, then if I
try to keep playing it will crash every 5-20 mins or so. I have
checked my cpu temp as well and it seems relatively low and stable
(for an amd). I am at my wits end, and tips, comments, or suggestions
(however inane) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks: Mark

Go to the following:-

http://www.avault.com/pcrl/patches_temp.asp?patch=callduty

and follow the links. It appears that Ati did not widely publicize the
fix they generated specifically for COD. COD uses a heavily modified
Quake engine. Ati have always had sporadic problems getting the
drivers for their latest silicon to work transparently with legacy
graphics engines. Apparently, in this case they had to rewrite
chunks of the COD code to eliminate the crashes.

VPU recover is a driver and/or over-temperature crash band-aid.
Ati have been deceptively coy about its functionality. The
explanation on their web-site is all weasel-words.

John Lewis

 

[Mark]

Well folks, I want to thank you for all your tips and suggestions. I
followed the link that the last guy posted but I had already tried
that fix, its the cat 3.9 cod driver and it didnt fix my problem
either. I'm fairly convinced now that its a heat issue based mainly on
the fact that when I start out for the first time in a day it lasts
for an hour or 2, but after that it crashes every 5-20 minutes. I'm
getting a whole new system in a couple months anyway so I guess I'll
just deal with it until then because I'm out of ideas. Thanks again
for the help though!

Peace: Mark

 

[Bandit]

Yea that's the cat 3.9 my system would lock up or crash with that
driver and call of duty to, I got the 3.10 driver's from ati and it
worked for me here's the link to the Release Notes for the 3.10
scroll down to game fixes
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/catalyst_310_release_notes.html#167878

and Turn the vpu recover off