VPU Freeze in Halo Combat Evolved

[rockinup1231]

I bought a new graphics card (among other things) to squeeze what life I could out of my system, and so far it's gone great :)...but that's not the problem

Whenever I play Halo, if I get into a confined space, like, the service paths one has to walk through in the first level of campaign mode, if I shoot in there, or start shooting too soon after (if I managed to) leaving them, the graphics card would lock up and vpu recovery would reset the graphics card.

It's only a problem there, and in wider parts of any map for the game it's not an issue. I tried disabling AGP fast write and vpu recovery itself but it didn't help any. I know the card isn't overheating (doesn't go over 50"C the entire time). I'm not sure what else to try.

The system specs in my sig are up to date, including the graphics card. I should also note I'm using the AGP hotfix drivers, and although I want(ed) to blame them, some other forums seem to hint that it's been a problem with other ATi graphics cards in the past, although there was no solution to it.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. :D

[Midknyte]

Are you overclocking the system? If so, clock it back to stock specs and see what happens.

[rockinup1231]

Nope, no overclock (fast enough). I looked a little more on this also, and on the AMD Game forums a found a thread discussing a similar issue, with the Raedon HD 4870. Someone proposed it could be incompatibilities between new drivers and the older games. Not sure.

The crashes seem to occur in any closed area in general. I tried playing a wide open map online and found as long as I stayed out of buildings it wasn't an issue.

I installed the Catalyst hotfix drivers which were released yesterday. Fixed a bug with shadows on one game, but Halo still has problems.

[Midknyte]

You didn't say which driver set you are using.

[rockinup1231]

Sorry. Catalyst 8.12, only it's the hotfix version for AGP graphics cards.

Driver Packaging Version 8.561-081201a1-072281E-ATI
Catalyst® Version 08.12
Provider ATI Technologies Inc.
2D Driver Version 6.14.10.6891
2D Driver File Path System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Video/{980E5FB2-A2EA-4BBB-A5A6-0CAFC8DD723F}/0000
Direct3D Version 6.14.10.0630
OpenGL Version 6.14.10.8304
Catalyst® Control Center Version 2008.1201.1504.27008

[Midknyte]

did you try using an older driver set? did you install just the display driver or did you do the whole suite with CCC?

[rockinup1231]

I installed the whole suite. Lots of reviews said not to bother with the CD drivers (said they didn't work well at all), but I'll give them a try to see if they help any.

Some people said they had success in thwarting vpu crashes (on one site) disabling the Windows page file, so I tried it. Didn't help.

[rockinup1231]

(Sorry for double posting.)

I tried older drivers. Windows rejected them and said they were for an older Windows version even though I know they were for Windows XP. I reinstalled the new ones again.

[Midknyte]

I normally don't install CCC because it requires .NET.

I don't remember seeing an error about older Windows version (as in 98 or 2K). I have seen where it says the driver set you are installing is older than the current ones. Make sure you uninstall the old drivers first, then run Driver Sweeper in safe mode.
Best of Video Cards & Monitors (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=162277)

Unless you have a lot of ram, I wouldn't even consider disabling the pagefile. I definitely wouldn't if you only have 768MB of ram.

[rockinup1231]

Yeah, it told me that AFTER they installed when i went to adjust the display properties.

After a little thought, I tried forcing Halo to use older shader models. Started with use15, failed, then useff, worked (but very ugly) without crashes, and I used the use11 options and now Halo works without crashing. Not as appealing as the 2.0 shaders, but works.

And...yeah, I turned the pagefile back on when I found it didn't help any.

I was also trying to find out why OpenGL didn't work for my card even though I know it supports OGL 2, and I was told to get the 8.07 drivers. Other users tried the 8.12 ones and found OGL stopped working for them too. So, I'll follow the steps for installing the drivers as you suggest for that. :t

Thanks for all the help. You guys are simply the best at this. :cool: