C&C3, Vista 64x, Nvidia 8800GTS - frequent quits, not happy

[koocha]

At random moments while playing the game will quit to the desktop telling my that my nvidia driver has stopped responding and has restarted sucessfully.

I've had a good search round forums and I've tried disabling AA but it still quits.

I've got version 1.04 of C&C3. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Clunk]

Mine is the same, as are hundreds of other people. This only started doing it today, and it was only at the desktop when it started (vista 32).

After googling it, it seems like the problem has been around for months and neither microsoft or nvidia are taking responsibility.

Back to XP again.

[Clunk]

I just changed back to xp and all looked fine until I installed FEAR, it froze at the intro, so I went into the bios and set the ram and cpu to stock and it has cured it.

Ill try vista again in a sec and see if it still does it.

If its a problem with the overclock, its not a good sign for the 680i boards and fast ram.

Just to make sure, I'll set it all up on the p5b tomorrow and see if there are any problems there.

Edit: just loaded FEAR up in xp and there is tearing and textures missing and it generally looks weird, full of artifacts. Oddly, 3dmark06 runs at 1920x1200 with no problems at all

[grayg1]

vista 64 isn't on the supported list for C&C3 so expect problems

clunk try turning off soft shadows

[koocha]

64 bit vista was a bad choice

[chuckskull]

This is an nvidia driver bug. I know because I get it every 30 mins

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=31913 and have a browse around http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=33

EDIT:After nosing about that forum i just found that 101.70 WHQL is available via windows update as an optional update. Trying it now.

ANOTHER EDIT: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1612 Not on the nvidia beta site yet, it seems.

[Clunk]

Cheers for these, I'll try them and report back later.

Edit: Nope, these are worse than the official ones, multiple crashing of the desktop.

I'm thinking the worst about this card now, both xp and vista both playing up. Might be time to rma it.

[koocha]

Tried them. It's stopped the "driver not responding" error...

...but now C&C3 quits and windows wants to send an error. so I let it. hopefully they'll get bombarded and get sick of it and do something about it

[chuckskull]

Yup fixed the driver not responding error for me too.

@clunk Try getting the update via Windows update if you can, it's 10meg bugger and doesn't have the install trouble you get with unsigned drivers.

C&C3 patched to 1.4 working great for me.

[koocha]

still quits for me, but with an error

EDIT: A C&C3 error, not a driver one. Still not got AA on

[Clunk]

Aparently I got them from windows update on the 8th and the problem only started today.

Ill try driver cleaner and then a windows update, but the flashing desktop has got more frequent (every few seconds) and got so fast that it ended up strobing and it rebooted itself .

Did i mention that I hate vista so far?

[koocha]

Did i mention that I hate vista so far?

I think you'll find I hate Vista more

[Clunk]

I think you'll find I hate Vista more

Well, I want to kill it with my shoe. Can anyone top that?


Did the driver cleaner, rebooted, still the same, so I did the chipset drivers and everything else that was nvidia, rebooted and its ok, but the windows driver update wasnt showing, so I had to uninstall all the windows updates, rerun driver cleaner again and then rebooted and did the update and it seems to have worked.

Just need to download the huge update for FEAR now

Edit: I just set the previously 24/7 stable overclock back and I got the flashing desktop as windows loaded, so backed off the overclock a bit, and it was a little bit better, but still crashed, backed off some more and seems to have worked, but I'm not happy with it. P5B and nvidia 6200 tomorrow for testing.

[chuckskull]

Heh spoke to soon, just got another TDR(desktop flash), But it's been a few hours now. Big improvement on the 30 min's i used to get but not perfect.

I found backing off my OC helped for a couple of days and then the problem sparked up again.

[Dreaming]

I blame nvidia, I have tended to shy from them in recent years due to some dodgyness, except my girlfriend I got her a computer with a 6150. Sporadically, it will stop working, so I need to boot into safe mode, clean the drivers, and reinstall the 'latest' (which are still 20th febuary drivers, which since the nvidia drivers aren't tip top yet, I would have expected monthly releases).

Also reviews of c&c3 have said that it works faster in all cases with an ati card pretty much, there seems to be a 30fps limiter though (25 fps on nvidia). Apparently. I'm running everything maxed at 1680 x 1050 on a sapphire x1950 pro with no slow down except when theres tonnes of units on the game, then the whole game slows down.