3D Gaming Problems

[loosername]

Hi All,

Hope someone can help, I've been struggling with a problem for the past few days. I've recently got a new box, and installed Win XP Pro on it. All seemed well until recently when my wife got on it and started trying to play Age of Mythology! She complained it seemed to crash after a few minutes play. I checked it and found she was right (shock!).

The game seems to bomb straight out (very quickly), without the usual 'xxx has caused a fatal exception etc'. It rights two unhelpful errors to the event log and does nothing further. I assumed it was just AoM, but it also does it with Gothic II and UT2k3.

I've done all the usual latest drivers for Gfx, Direct X and XP SP1, but it's still doing it. Any ideas?

Sorry for the long post, any help very much appreciated.

[dlh75]

what is your gfx card?

[Chuckiechan]

Welcome to Techimo!

The first thing I would do is see if there is a video driver update available. That is step one...

[loosername]

Thanks for the welcome!

I was going to mention the system, I didn't want to bloat the post any more!

The Graphics card is an ATI 9600 Pro, but I don't now think that's the problem. I've still got the old machine, so I dropped the old gfx card in (a GeForce 2 card) and the symptoms were exactly the same.

Also, I've been studying other threads and found a util for testing memory (the name of which escapes me), but it seemed to say there was some faults towards the higher end of the ram (1000 Mb +). Ram was my next thought due to speed and random nature of the fault. I guess Windows wouldn't use this much ram, but games might?

Any thoughts? What might be the best util to confirm this?

Thanks for your help people.

[wju425]

What's youe aperture size in the bios?. Did you say you have 1 gig of memory or so? Try increasing the aperture size.

\o/ Billy

[loosername]

Sorry to be dumb about this, but I don't seem to be able to find a function to alter the aperture.

The system has 1Gb of ram. Do you think the results could have been caused by incorrect aperture settings? I've got no qualms about sending back the ram if it looks as though that's at fault, I just want to make sure...

[wju425]

I doubt it's your ram. You have plenty ram but you might have paged out into the memory areas where programs reside. Setting the aperture size makes some memory areas avaliable to your video card if needed. It's in your cmos setup (bios) under graphic aperture size. Look for number like 64, 128, 256, etc. I think the bios defaults to 64 so you'll probably see that. Make it 256 if it's not there. This is not a surefire solution but it's what I think it is. I had to change mine from 64 to 128 so my Duke Nukem 3D won't crash. I have a 32meg tnt2 video so it's rather small.

\o/ Billy

By the way, it's under Advanced Menu but mine has a submenu called Chip Configurations.

[Redwolf]

Okay, you need to get and run a program called Memtest 86. Get it at:

http://www.memtest86.com/

you'll need a GOOD (preferably new) blank floppy to install it to. I believe they also offer a CD ISO, which is the best way to do it but a bit wasteful of a CDR (an RW is okay tho ). If you have one or two errors that show upon only one pass, you are okay. If you have a large or HUGE number of errors that show up after multiple passes, you have bad memory. Even at high memory areas it can be disastrous. Adn., of course, no errors is always good.

[loosername]

Thanks both for the replies.

I'll get onto the aperture size now, but I wanted to reply to Redwolf.

I already found that program (from another thread) and it came up with a bunch of errors with multiple passes. However, I've just been running another one (called Doctor Memory) and left it going overnight. After 32 passes, it found nothing wrong? Which should I believe?!

Anyhow, I'll try the aperture and let you all know.

Thanks again...

[loosername]

I've managed to locate the aperture setting (hidden by the bios - had to enable 'advanced settings'!)

I shifted it to 256 as recommended, and just successfully played an entire AoM game!

It seem this might well have been the problem - so thank you very much, all who helped (esp wju425).

Just one thing which bothers me, why so many errors in Memtest??