Greetings. Another build, yet my crashing issues persist. I already semi-posted in the General board and got some replies, but I guess the Support forum is the better place. The game will frequently freeze ... basically whenever it wants to. Sometimes after alt-tabbing, sometimes when loading, when re-connecting, mid-game, in small games with few players, in large team battles. Apart from that, the game runs fine. Please read first: Yes, I am running a Radeon HD 4850 with legacy drivers which date from late 2013. These are the latest drivers available. Another user managed to fix his problems by tweaking the page file settings; in my case, Windows already decides automatically The crashes continue whether I'm running windowed or fullscreen mode. I'm running the PA.exe directly, as the launcher will constantly check the manifest. Not using the Steam version. I could re-install the game on my SSD in case this would make a difference (currently it's on my basic HDD). My two main questions: Is the outdated video driver truly the core of the problem? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks. I'm really at a loss here and it's becoming more and more frustrating dealing with all these crashes. My DxDiag is attached; yes, it's from early July, but nothing has changed since in terms of settings, hardware or software.
While the core of your problem is HAL. (9000) OMG In all seriousness it's probably time for a graphics card upgrade. Pick your budget and if you need assistance will help you. P.S. page file would work if you didn't have enough system memory but it would be dog slow. you have a 8 gig that's not the issue here.
AMD Legacy drivers never worked well for PA since alpha, but if your problem only start to occur since this build situation might change in future because there at least one possible problem that need to be addressed: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...file-usage-on-windows-and-nvidia-linux.62251/ Though if your problem with often crashes was here longer then it's not likely going to be fixed.
Well, since most of the machine could use an update except for the RAM and the SSD I'm very hesitant on spending anything at all. Regarding low-budget graphics cards, an R7 250X is around 80 € here which is around the most I'd like to spend. Hell, the HD 4850 was only 120 € back when I bought it (sometime around the stone age). The problem has occured since I started playing PA a month or so ago.
Upload some game log with crash dump from latest using this how-to: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/648814845443326834/ If somebody of developers will have time I'll ask them to check it and possible it's will tell if this problem related to drivers or not.
Here's the log from my latest crash - I tried loading a replay. I couldn't find the dump file, as the strings from the tutorial you linked don't appear in that log. Thanks for your time!
I found a .dmp file from the same minute the log was created; I guess this is it. Note: I changed the file extension from .dmp to .txt because it wouldn't let me upload a .dmp file.
I've always followed a 'tick-tock' approach to upgrades. Upgrade the graphics card on year, look at better processor etc next time (as the PCIe interface isn't going away any time soon). So hypothetically you *could* get a reasonable graphics card now, and keep it when you upgrade other parts of your system later (just a suggestion). My previous card was an HD 4670 which was just too old. Btw you mentioned your machine is a Core 2 Quad- honestly I don't think that will bottleneck modern cards as much as you think. I run a GTX560 on an ancient Phenom II X3 with no issue (play quite a few different games as well). Main thing is if you do decide to get a new GPU, make sure it has *at least* 2gb of GDDR5 graphics memory (don't be tempted by the various DDR3 equipped cards available, the ram is just too slow). The Radeon R7 265 is a really good value option at the moment, and also the previous gen Nvidia Stuff (e.g. GTX 650ti cards are pretty fast and not too expensive). The New 750 / 750ti cards are really nice (very power efficient) but a bit pricey imo. Edit: In answer to your original question, I'm pretty certain your problems are related to the old legacy drivers. Uber have been working on improving stability with older drivers I think (offering fall back to earlier OpenGL for example) so there is a chance it *might* get fixed this end, you'd have to ask Varrak or Bgolus on that though. The fact the game runs at all on 2013 drivers is a big improvement from earlier builds so that's a plus
A small bump. I added the .log file and the .dmp (changed into a .txt file to enable the upload) to my initial post.
Another bump. How often may we bump threads, anyway? I really don't want to spam, but I'd also love to see some progress. These crashes are driving me nuts :/. Thanks.
As I said in the PM your unsupported graphics card is the issue. You could try seeing if @varrak could help you. When in game hit F11 and then go to C:\Users\"your_username"\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\PerfLogs this might help; upload the .upf file to hear. In all seriousness your graphics card needs to be updated. note: unsupported means in this context that AMD no longer provided driver updates form this series of cards.
Thanks for the hint with the probe, I'll give that a try. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that my GPU is the issue, but you know ... I kinda don't want to give up hope before a dev comes here and says "definitely, absolutely no chance with legacy drivers". I'd really like to continue playing PA without having to buy an upgrade. And it's utterly frustrating to see the game run perfectly fine on weaker hardware than mine just because AMD can't be bothered to update the drivers for this specific line of GPUs. In the meantime I've resorted to playing PA in a smaller resolution (1280x720 instead of 1920x1080); perhaps this will help.
