Freeze after start of the game (disk corruption included)

Hello!

I just bought the game and installed it on windows, osx and linux (ubuntu).
Ubuntu doesn't run at all, on OSX it has super slow performance and on windows - well, it manages to crash my computer to a point where I have to fix my bootlaoder with the windows installation disk (yes, it is that bad!)

Okay, now a bit less emotional. I'll try to give as much information as i possibly can. Let me know, what else I can do to help.
I just updated my video driver (because the gamma update announcement tells me to do so) to catalyst version 8.00.0915 and video driver version 13.251.0.0000 (which is the latest package). I run an ATI HD 5770.
The game starts and runs smoothly until a certain point, where it starts to freeze for less than a second. Then the game resumes just fine. However, after a few seconds, another freeze appears (with freeze I mean: The screen freezes, I have a moving mouse pointer but no key combination like alt+ctrl+del works. The actual game seems to run in the background, because after the freeze ends, the in-game-time has advanced). This time the freeze is a little longer than the first. Then the game resumes.
It goes on like that, but the freezes get longer and the time between them gets shorter until eventually the whole game just freezes. There is no error message. And there is no way of killing the game. As I said, alt+ctrl+del does not work, neither does the windows key (it sometimes pops up the windows menu, but then the whole windows start menu freezes as well so I can't click anything).

I had to hard-kill the computer. Then afterwards the bootloader refused to start windows and I had to fix it with the windows installation disk.

I tried this two times now. Don't want to do it a third time to be honest.

To me it sounds like a huge memory leak or something along those lines. It sounds like the page file eventually gets very large and the constant write-access to the hard disk drive causes the disk to be corrupted after the computer gets hard-killed. On an 8-core i7 processor there usually should be a bit of processing power left to start the task manager - but when the whole system crashes that way, it sounds more like a memory problem to me.
I see no way of checking my theory though, because once the game got inresponsive, the whole computer is dead, too.

Is this a known bug? What can I do to help out? Where can I find more log files to post?

KaptainPowder

upload dxdiag.txt

1. press windows key + r
2. type dxdiag
3. press enter
4. save all information box (bottom right I think)
5. upload the dxdiag.txt here

okay, here is the file. Thanks for the fast response

I've not heard of any thing as bad as corrupting the hard drive, but I have heard of similar performance issues caused by running some kind of auto over clocking utility like MSI Afterburner. If you are over clocking your video card or CPU I would suggest setting it back to the default clock speeds and try again... If you're feeling adventurous. If not just let us know if you're running overclocked or not.

Basically the performance issues you're describing are the kind I expect to hear about when your video card is overheating.

Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? Could a corrupt hard drive have caused the game to crash? I'm not saying the game is anywhere close to stable yet, but I have never heard of this happening to anyone else.

There have been reports of bluescreens. So I suppose this is within reason.

Hi!

you are right, over-heating sounds like a reasonable idea.

I do not have any auto-overclocking utility, in fact my whole system is not overclocked and running at "stock" settings. My graphics card is a MSI HD5770 Hawk, which has a very large cooling system.

I just started another game to log the temperatures of cpu and gpu. I did this in windowed mode, so I can watch the temps more easily. In fact, there was no freeze at all this time, I played a nice game against an AI.
The max temps are:
GPU: 62°C
CPU: 49°C
My two hard disks: 23°C and 27°C
Motherboard 39°C

Not quite hot

I'll now start another game in fullscreen, just to be shure. Maybe the problem only appears in full screen?!
I'll report back what happened.
EDIT: No freeze at all. Strange, why is it working today, where it was reproducably crashing yesterday?! I changed nothign on my computer except for todays update to the game client.

KaptainPowder

PS: I did todays update - have there been changes to the game engine?
PPS: @cptconundrum: I am pretty shure my hdd was not currupted before. I repaired it after the first crash and then the thing happened again. At least for my second attempt, the hdd must have been okay.

Overheating issues with PC hardware is incredibly difficult to diagnose. Often times if there is faulty hardware or aging components they can overheat and slow down or cause errors and crashes even though the system may report normal temperatures.

There's a blog post by a Valve employee on trying to track down performance issues that talks about a similar situation. They found it is surprisingly common for CPUs to lower their clock rate internally due to internal checks against overheating that are not reported by any diagnostic tool they can find. Temperatures will show fine and the clock speed will be reported normally. They added code to their error reporting tools to do a simple repeated loop of math that they've found can be used to determine the real clock cycle of a particular CPU instead of relying on official utilities.

Can you find a link for that? Sounds interesting. So far I would've thought that tools like cpu z or hardware monitor should show such issues.

Is it normal, that the game consumes 4.6GB of memory (6.8GB including page file)?
I tried to play a game with AI on 4 little planets.

After a while that can happen, yes.
Seems to be a bit leaky when playing multiple games one after another to me.

Wow, thats crazy, considering that the complete download was less than 1GB. There must be a massive amount of redundancy
But good to know its not an error on my side...

FYI - The size of an application on disk has little to nothing to do with how much memory it consumes.
Esp. one with procedurally generated content like PA.

Without being a professional game developer or knowing the inner workings of PA: 6.8GB of data is _massive_. Of course there is no direct relationship between the download size and memory consumption - but unlike a digital audio workstation or a video editing software, PA does not have to hold large buffers of memory for incoming streams of data. I guess the most part would be textures, hight maps and so on. Stuff that you load into memory to have it at hand fast. PA does generate content by itself, but as far as I understand, the only generated stuff is the shape of the planets. And I doubt that they consume anything close to 1GB. There is of course more content than this, but still: 6.8GB is unusually large IMHO.
(Comparing PA to other games with large maps, e.g. RPGs like Risen: They should have much more problems with memory, but interestingly they don't.)But this is not meant to be an offense. I don't want to question the work of the PA team - I guess they know what they're doing I was just surprised by that number and couldn't stop my brain thinking about it.

PA does hold streams of data for the chronocam.
Also it holds massive amounts of geometry for the planets... I think