Help! GTX285 anyone?
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Hi folks!
Just being on some severe “retro gaming trip” I also remembered Freelancer and dug out the CD again (German version). Unfortunately this seems to be my first PC having serious trouble with it…
At first, the game runs flawlessly, but sooner or later graphics get completely garbled, i.e. textures seem to be mixed up, graphical elements (e.g. UI related icons or text) appear in places where they are not supposed to, text fields are overwritten with game textures and the like. The effect looks quite similar to what has already been reported by people using Intel integrated graphic chipsets (recent thread: “Windows Vista graphics error” ).
This always happens after the game freezes for a few seconds, mostly when I’m docked somewhere and visit the traders, but sometimes also in free flight.
Although the menu becomes unreadable I still find my way to quit the game because I know where to click, and then any of the following may happen:- I happily return to the desktop, everything normal.
- the screen turns black. No further interaction possible, reset required.
- the screen turns black, but then the desktop appears in 640x480. A message box says that nv4_disp.dll is not working properly.
- the screen turns black, but very slowly desktop icons start to appear one after another.
During the last 3 days I googled a lot and tried many things to get around this, but with absolutely no effect:
- pure unpatched vanilla installation
- QuickFix 1.0c
- Unofficial patch 1.4
- flconfigdatabase
- restricting FL to one CPU core
- a couple of things with NVIDIA 3D settings
- running FL in Win98 compatibility mode
I’m trying to play in 1600x1200. And of course, 3D audio is switched off…
Now here’s my system:
Asus P5KC
Intel Core2Duo E6850 (3,0GHz)
4 GB RAM
GTX285 (NVIDIA driver 195.62)
Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer (latest driver)
Windows XP Professional SP3 (32 bit)
latest DX9cWhat puzzles me is that I can play all my other games without any problems, and even the oldest ones run perfectly (like Deus Ex or Fallout 2, with Hi-Res mods). Now I’m close to despair… during all my testing I managed to get through the first missions of the FL story and traveled to some of the Liberty sectors, but at the price of a huge lot of reboots.
As my GTX285 probably doesn’t have a temperature problem (because I can safely play things like Mass Effect, BioShock, Risen, Anno 1404 in 1920x1200 at highest detail for hours) I really don’t know what to do.So is anyone out there who can help or managed to run FL with a GTX285??
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I also had trouble with my new system and suspected the GTX 285 at first. I went through a month of RMA back and forth and the problem persisted with a brand new one. Surfing, Descent 3, no problems. Freelancer had the occassional crash and reset. Half-Life 2 would crash the system within 3 minutes. I swapped memory, tried every video driver and a few other things. Now I suspect the ASUS P5Q motherboard.
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Have you tried updating your video drivers? From your description of the problem it sounds like it could be driver related.
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M0tah wrote:
Have you tried updating your video drivers? From your description of the problem it sounds like it could be driver related.Actually I didn’t because my driver version is the second latest available, that means it’s about 3 months old, and I doubt that there were any changes affecting me. However, that doesn’t mean I won’t try when I’m back from work…
By the way: are there any ways to give FL a new DX renderer? I’m asking because I did this with Deus Ex, where a “customized” DX9 (or OpenGL) rendering DLL is necessary in order to use enhanced textures. Now such a thing can be downloaded - and it really works!
Maybe one of those large contemporary mods like Discovery or Crossfire does something like that? I wouldn’t mind playing one of those if I could.
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Meanwhile I installed the latest NVIDIA driver, and it seems that I can play a bit longer now (1-2 hrs.), but the problem still persists.
Now I found a “DX8 -> DX9 Converter” mentioned in the “Freelancer Problem Solutions FAQ!” thread, but the link just leads to some Russian error page (all this ENB stuff doesn’t seem to be reachable any more).
Anyway, what does this converter do? Mapping DX8 API calls to DX9 DLLs? Maybe this could help me somehow… does anybody know where to get the file? -
jase240 wrote:
try updating your graphics drivers to an OLDER version like older than September of last year, there is a bug with the Nvidia 200x drivers they made recently causing a lot of problems.That did it!!! I mean I can’t be 100% sure yet, but I installed driver version 190.38 (from July 2009) and was able to cruise the universe for hours without any errors.
Thank you SO MUCH for that hint!!
