PA completely freezes after several minutes of gameplay

Hi evryone,

I was hoping someone could help me with my issue, I just bought PA from steam and i really enjoy playing it, I however have been unable to play an entire game trough, since after a few minutes, (sometimes 3 minutes sometimes like 30minutes) my PA makes my entire computer freeze, i cant do anything until i manually reboot my computer,





i already tried reinstalling the game, verified my integrity, played a little with the settings, and updated my graphical drivers, my computer should have no issues running this game.

I love to play this game, but I would love it way more if I wont have to reboot every few minutes

I cant stress enough that i can play this game smoothly for a few minutes, i see the planets move around my commander and after a few minutes i spot the AI doing his thing.
I play other games without issues 2.

Im looking forward for a reply,

sincerely,

Tim

Can you please upload proper DxDiag.txt? Just use "Save all information" button.

Keep in mind, Planetary Annihilation is in beta. There are still many many improvements and optimizations to be made.

In the meantime, try lowering all of your settings to the lowest, turning off HDR, and playing on a single planet system.

That fixes the issue for the vast majority of players.

Hi guys,

first of all tnx for the fast response,

Here is a proper dxdiag attached to this post,
I already tried the standard stuff lowering settings using single planet ec, but it did not fix my problem,
I also searched the internet but i seem to be the only one suffering this.
I can play the game with medium and low settings hdr off and so on, until the freeze

I think first you need to check what exactly is your problem. There is few ideas:

1. RAM is exhausted and system start swapping which result in freeze-like behavior
2. Your video card overheat and system fail as result

I'm recommend you try to play and check both memory usage and GPU temperature (you can use GPU-Z for this purpose).

PS: Actually HD3800 it's old GPUs from 2007 and most likely it's they cause freeze. Or it's abandoned AMD legacy driver cause it. So I don't think you can fix it.

I do realise HD3800 is a bit of an older system, it however has never failed on me, i can even play games like Sleeping dogs, Starcraft II, max payne 3 ,borderlands 2 and a lot more games, in my opinion these games would require more of my system then PA should do right? expecially on low settings?

Im pretty sure my video card isnt overheating i've been there with my laptop and this is nowhere near that.
The RAM exhausting could be a possible problem, i monitored a game with my taskmanager at my other screen and noticed during loading all my free RAM is used, although when playing midgame i generally keep about 120MB free RAM save.

There is also no sign of crashing or little freezes beforehand, it just stoppes all of a sudden.

I will try using GPU-Z and see if anything shows up.

The moment i tried and opened GPU-Z an error was shown,
This error tells me an ATI OpenCL driver bug was detected,
I directly wonder if this could be the cause of my issues,
What do you think?

i don't think that should affact PA, PA uses OpenGL.

SXX most probably right it might be the version of the driver your using.
is it catalyst version 13.9 or later ??

I just ran a GPU-Z sensor scan until the crash, i attached the details in this post,

After the first crash, i updated my driver to catalyst 13-9 so i am currently running 13.9

If you feel safe enough trying, would you consider trying the 13.11 beta drivers?
they should be on ATI's site, if not i may be able to track down the thread with the links to them on guru3d.

also can you please post the PA-00-00-00.000.txt log file.
C:\Users\"YourUserName"\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log\PA-00-00-00.000.txt
"Click sort by date so the most recent one is at the top, And post that one here."

Also as one final fix.
some ATI cards of all series 3xxx 4xxx 6xxx 7xxx have had some issues,
i made a temporary fix for these issue, your crash may be a similar thing.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-performance-booster.53233/

i originally made this mod as an ATI fix, then evolved it into a performance booster for all systems

if trying the mod does not stop the crash, then please remove it before continuing any further testing so it doesn't interfere with anything

Here is the file you requested, altough i am unable to sort on date i dont think this will be a major issue since its a small file.
Ill try and download the beta driver you requested,
After that ill run another game and ill see what show's up,

I cant help myself but thank you guys already, although we made no progress so far, i really appreciate the fast reply's and the help you guys offer.

After installing and trying out the beta driver update i will try your mod, i feel reluctive into trying this mod, while reading the information i notice this is mostly to improve fps (correct me if im mistaking) i must notice that FPS doesnt seem to be an issue to me, i can scroll across the whole planet like im some kind of thunderbird without getting any lagg But if it can help me solving this problem i will def. give it a shot!

the community is just as important as the game
without a community there is no game, so i do my best an so do others to make sure the community is happy
you should read some of the awesome debates we have over things we have almost no idea about.. haha.

my guess is your at the point where you can load planets but not long after game crashes?

if this is true try my performance boost mod,
crash is most probably an incompatibility with a shader somewhere.
i have noticed turning the effects off in game setting doesn't always remove the code from the GPU it just doesn't use it. maybe it still eating up GPU resources and crashing.

Not exacly, as seen in my GPU-Z i played for about half an hour before it shut down. Intresting to note is the fact that the planets load in under a minute.

When i tried installing the newest catalyst driver, i came back to a frozen computer. Unable to restart i had to use a windows recovery tool to get my pc to work again.
As for it is now, Ill try playing with your mod and i might even try that newest beta driver i however am now going to get some sleep. its 0:32 local time here and i got to be up early tommorow, i will be back sitting behind this desk either monday or thuesday.

Thanks for your effort, i will be back

Have a nice day ^^

I would like to point out this game is entirely physics based as those are not. Now granted those games have physics but not as heavily as this game. That and it's constantly simulating day and night for an entire world or more. Even my computer has stuttering at times later game and I built it to run all games. Also how young the game is doesn't help.

Please when you recommend such things check AMD website first. He is using Legacy drivers because AMD abandoned HD 3XXX 4XXX support in mainline driver.

They not release new legacy drivers from April of this year and he currently using latest driver.

PA use many options that console games not using and as well it's much more advanced than StarCraft 2.

Unfortunately AMD adandon driver updates for your card and many features PA use might turn in problem. In normal situation game shouldn't able to hang your computer, so most likely you met some weird driver bug which might disappear with next version of game because something changed.

Nope, PA do not use OpenCL so it's not related.

sorry SXX im just thought it was an option to try to see if newer beta driver would function, i saw on site it had compatibility with the 3xxx hardware though it wasn't written specifically for that chipset.

i honestly think it maybe a shader causing something in video card to freeze up after long time of play.
is there anything we should suggest to test apart from my shader fix?