Weird black squares and freezing.

[zer0747]

I've been having problems getting the game working and from looking at other posts, it seems no one else has had exactly the same problem as me. The game runs fine for about 10-20 seconds at a time, then it freezes for maybe 10 seconds during which time the audio keeps playing for 3-4 seconds then hangs and starts repeating itself. While the game is running there are also black squares popping up all over screen for a fraction of a second.

I meet all the minimum requirements as you can see:
Operating system: Windows Home Premium 64-bit Edition
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Memory: 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS PC3200C2PT
Direct X version: 10
Video card: Evga 7800GT 256MB
Video card driver date: 163.44 Forceware
Sound card: Motherboard's on-board soundcard (Realtek® ALC850 )
Sound card driver date: Realtek R1.74 (08-27-2007)

What I have already tried:
Running with " -dx9" added to the shortcut.
I upgraded my ram, but no dice.
I upgraded from Windows XP Professional 64-bit (lousiest OS ever) to Windows Vista Home Premium and I still get the black squares and 10 second freezes.

Has anyone else had similar problems and found a solution? Any advice at all would be very helpful. Thanks.

[zer0747]

bump bump bump

[Yabbering Yeti]

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/sho...=black+squares

just to consolidate - will be easier to get your fix in that thread.

I also get this in directx 9 mode.

[zer0747]

there was nothing helpful on that thread. any ideas?

[methylbenzoate]

I've been having problems getting the game working and from looking at other posts, it seems no one else has had exactly the same problem as me. The game runs fine for about 10-20 seconds at a time, then it freezes for maybe 10 seconds during which time the audio keeps playing for 3-4 seconds then hangs and starts repeating itself. While the game is running there are also black squares popping up all over screen for a fraction of a second.

I meet all the minimum requirements as you can see:
Operating system: Windows Home Premium 64-bit Edition
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Memory: 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS PC3200C2PT
Direct X version: 10
Video card: Evga 7800GT 256MB
Video card driver date: 163.44 Forceware
Sound card: Motherboard's on-board soundcard (Realtek® ALC850 )
Sound card driver date: Realtek R1.74 (08-27-2007)

What I have already tried:
Running with " -dx9" added to the shortcut.
I upgraded my ram, but no dice.
I upgraded from Windows XP Professional 64-bit (lousiest OS ever) to Windows Vista Home Premium and I still get the black squares and 10 second freezes.

Has anyone else had similar problems and found a solution? Any advice at all would be very helpful. Thanks.

Did you get the recent Vista hotfixes as well as the AMD dual-core optimizer?

As far as driver settings, in the nVidia control panel, let the application decide anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, vsync, and do not force mipmap optimizations.

Also, turn on triple buffering and Clamp the negative LOD Bias.

And if you have only one monitor, make sure that you set it to single display performance mode.

Hope that helps.

[zer0747]

what is this vista hotfix you speak of?

[methylbenzoate]

Try this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

[methylbenzoate]

This might give some more info too:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/windows..._hotfixes.html

[Maniac]

READ THIS!

Your system has the signs of overheating. It could be the sign of hardware failure (meaning one of your fans is dead) or just your room needs to be AC'ed.

[methylbenzoate]

Also, ASUS boards have a sneaky feature in the BIOS called PEG Link. PEG Link actually overclocks your video card if you set it to on, or auto, or some other enabled mode. The best thing to do is disable PEG Link so that you are not overclocking your video card at all.

7 Series nVidia video cards get very hot, and if overclocked even the slightest bit, they will get much hotter and become unstable. Heat issues with a graphics card can attribute to graphic anomalies in games and corrupt textures.

So, check your BIOS for PEG Link and disable it.

[zer0747]

Hokay, so:
1. I applied the settings you recommended in the Nvidia control panel.
2. I also tried downloading the Vista hotfixes. The first one installed ok but the other two gave me the message, "This update is not for your system," or somesuch nonsense.
3. I disabled PEG Link in my bios.

Result? The game runs clean for a minute or so, but then it starts freezing and popping squares everywhere. The game even freezes when im using the menu to quit back to the desktop. The black squares only show up when the screen is being rendered.

Thanks for all the help so far. I'm beginning to think the problem won't get solved until they release a patch (hopefully).

[Maniac]

I'm still convinced this is heat damage. You could have gpu failure. If you have another one, try swapping it out and seeing if it works.

[Yabbering Yeti]

Download ntune from the nvidia software section, you can use the nvidia monitor in it to monitor your temps while you are in a game. Your heat should level off at a certain point and hover around there. Post what temperature the card was hovering at, and if it kept slowly climbing your card is gathering too much heat for your fan to dispel.

however, if you have heat damage it doesnt take much temp to cause artifacts.

Have you had any problems prior to bioshock where your system would just restart while playing a game after a few minutes? if the fan was still operating, but not fast enough to dispel the heat, it could take longer for the crash to occur.

If yes, it could be heat damage. either from overclocking or failing fan. Its pretty common.

[Tech John]

I've been having problems getting the game working and from looking at other posts, it seems no one else has had exactly the same problem as me. The game runs fine for about 10-20 seconds at a time, then it freezes for maybe 10 seconds during which time the audio keeps playing for 3-4 seconds then hangs and starts repeating itself. While the game is running there are also black squares popping up all over screen for a fraction of a second.

I meet all the minimum requirements as you can see:
Operating system: Windows Home Premium 64-bit Edition
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Memory: 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS PC3200C2PT
Direct X version: 10
Video card: Evga 7800GT 256MB
Video card driver date: 163.44 Forceware
Sound card: Motherboard's on-board soundcard (Realtek® ALC850 )
Sound card driver date: Realtek R1.74 (08-27-2007)

What I have already tried:
Running with " -dx9" added to the shortcut.
I upgraded my ram, but no dice.
I upgraded from Windows XP Professional 64-bit (lousiest OS ever) to Windows Vista Home Premium and I still get the black squares and 10 second freezes.

Has anyone else had similar problems and found a solution? Any advice at all would be very helpful. Thanks.

Is this on a laptop? If so it could be a hardware driver incompatability as drivers are released a lot less often.

You could try to download and install the SDK update for DirectX. To do this follow the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

[Yabbering Yeti]

i dont think its a laptop, i never heard of a laptop with an SLI mobo.

[Yabbering Yeti]

ok that sounded snappy. I didnt mean that a snarky comment against you, john . just an observation as I know you dont have the time to look up components

[zer0747]

Hokay, so! I tried running the game in windowed mode with Nvidia MonitorView open to track the temperature of my gpu. The ambient temperatre of my graphics card is about 70C. When I started the game the temperature climbed steadily from 70C to 114C at which point the squares started popping up. After a few seconds the computer froze for ten seconds and then my screen turned completely black for about five seconds. Then the game came back online and a message popped up in the bottom right corner saying "Display driver nvlddmkm has stopped responding and has successfully recovered." I waited for the temperature to go down a bit then kept playing. Again, the temperature climbed to 114C and the same thing happened over again.

[Yabbering Yeti]

114?!?! OMG, lol return it!

Thats waaaay too hot. I believe that 110 is the max a card can take before it becomes damaged. Tho i never like mine to go above 75

Dont accept a repair on the product, the will just replace the fan. Include a note indicating that the fan has been defective for too long which has caused extreme wear 'n tear on the card which is due to the malfunction and you should not be held responsible for - hence a full replacement.