Lockups

[Bill KUnert]

I have a problem in SH4, which I had in SH3 to a lesser extent, where it will freeze up with the sound repeating the same noise it was making at the time of lock up. I have an A64 3500+ on an Abit KN8 SLI with 1.5 gig of Corsair Value Select. The video card is a BFG 7600GT OC and the sound card is an older Soundblaster PCI. Power is an Antec 400watt Smartpower which is providing solid stable power. I'm running XP home SP2 fully updated with latest DX9 files. It seems to happen when there is a lot of activity like a large explosion which will cause the frame rate to drop. The only way out is to reset the computer. Anybody else having this problem? I also get an occasional message that SH4 has encountered a problem and has to close.
Thanks

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Bill KUnert

sound card is an older Soundblaster PCI.

In my view that is the most likely culprit right there.

Im sure youve made sure you have all the latest drivers for all your cards ?

[Bill KUnert]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have all the latest drivers. I guess I could switch to the onboard sound to see if that makes a difference.

[Scoochy]

Couple things:

Re-install and try again

400 watts seems a bit underpower.

1.5 gig of ram most of the time will be slower than 1024. Rule of thumb is to keep it even.

G/C drivers up to date?

Had a similar problem with Pacific Fighters, turned out to be CPU overheats. Clean out that heatsink.

[peter_de123]

Hi!

I had something similar a while ago, for me the solution was to manually change the PCI Latency. There are Tools out there for this purpose, for example the "PCI Latency Tool 3 v1.2" from guru3d.com

If it doesn't help there are still two options:

1. Try a different soundcard or use onboard sound

or

2. Reinstall Windows with ACPI disabled (guides to this can also be found online)


I personally would prefer option 1... Btw, with 1.5 GB of memory it can't be running in Dual Channel mode or does it?

[NEON DEON]

What will screw up a lot is if you added a sound card to a mother board that has on board sound. Sometimes the on board sound is still enabled when running from an installed soundcard. Go into you bios and verify that your on board sound is disabled.If it is not, then disable it. See if that works for you. If still you have problems, go thru device manager and make sure that the only sound drivers are for your soundblaster. If only soundblaster exsist then remove the hardware from the OS (just make sure you have the sound card drivers handy) and reboot and let windows auto detect the sound card. Try it that way first. If that does not work then add the newest driver.This problem might also be detectable thru a DXDiag report.

[AVGWarhawk]

My vote is on the soundcard as the issue.

[Elder-Pirate]

Originally Posted by Bill KUnert

I have a problem in SH4, which I had in SH3 to a lesser extent, where it will freeze up with the sound repeating the same noise it was making at the time of lock up. I have an A64 3500+ on an Abit KN8 SLI with 1.5 gig of Corsair Value Select. The video card is a BFG 7600GT OC and the sound card is an older Soundblaster PCI. Power is an Antec 400watt Smartpower which is providing solid stable power. I'm running XP home SP2 fully updated with latest DX9 files. It seems to happen when there is a lot of activity like a large explosion which will cause the frame rate to drop. The only way out is to reset the computer. Anybody else having this problem? I also get an occasional message that SH4 has encountered a problem and has to close.
Thanks

Never had this happen with SH3 but it has happened with SH4 twice so far. Mine happened both times during a high TC changeing rapidly to 7/8 TC because of heavy traffic near by. I also had to shut down computer to get out of it. Specs are: WIN XP Home,Asus A7N8X Deluxe REV 2.0 Motherboard ( almost 4 years old ) , 3 Gigs Ram which is max for this MB ( Crucial 184-pin DIMM 128X64 DDR PC3200 Unbuffered ), AMD Athlon XP 3200+ CPU,Seagate Barracuda 120GB 8MB cache Serial ATA Hard Drive, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS 7.1 sound card.( Original drivers as Creative support said not to use lastest drivers as were not intended for this card.......put slider in hardware acceleration turned from full to 2nd from right......stopped popping sounds ), Coolmax with 120mm fan @ 500 watt PS,


BFG Nvidia GeForce 7800 GS OC Video card ( again useing older 84.21 drivers as suggested by BFG Technologies as the most stable of drivers for this card........They are the cards mfg and they DO know best! )






Found out that you need to force both the 'Antialiasing' and 'Anisotropic' at your card ( as I've read that some think its automatically done since 1.2......yeah right. ) The only one that is application controled is 'vertical sync' when checked in game.




With the setting of 'Vertical Sync' checked in game I can only max 35 FPS during F5/F6/F7/F11 except if lots of traffic and then its as low as 15 fps. Shown below is a max 35 FPS F11 shot with 'Vertical Sync' on,60 fps with it off but graphics are not as good.




And here at 20 fps probably because of explosion and also traffic in area.




So I do not think it is the soundcard ( in my case, but could be? ) The 7800 GS card is also AGP and the highest Nvidia card my computer will handle as It will not support PCIe ( wish it would though. ).

Other than freezeing twice in over 100 hours ( real time ) of SH4 all I have to put up with is the creepy crawling bugs on my boat. When are they sending out the "Bug Exterminator??"

Ok I'm done Bi----ng now and heading for the virtual pacific where I was at last.

[AVGWarhawk]

You are getting some decent FPS and you screenshot look great.

[Bill KUnert]

Originally Posted by peter_de123

Hi!

I had something similar a while ago, for me the solution was to manually change the PCI Latency. There are Tools out there for this purpose, for example the "PCI Latency Tool 3 v1.2" from guru3d.com

If it doesn't help there are still two options:

1. Try a different soundcard or use onboard sound

or

2. Reinstall Windows with ACPI disabled (guides to this can also be found online)


I personally would prefer option 1... Btw, with 1.5 GB of memory it can't be running in Dual Channel mode or does it?

I went to onboard sound and it seems much better. It is running in dual channel. Each channel has a 512 and a 256 meg memory stick