Age of Mythology

[FriendofTom]

Sometimes (not always) when I play Age of Mythology for about an hour it will suddenly freeze, the the screen will go black, (the music keeps playing). This never happens during startup. A small frame will come up that says "Memory System Error". I assume the frame is an incompletely rendered box with a OK button in the lower center, when I click this area the black screen returns to desktop, AOM is shut down and everything is normal.

I could start AOM again and it will run normally, it might freeze again after 45 min. to an hour or it might run perfectly fine for weeks. this doesn't happen with any other game I play.

I run the game on a Dell XPS 430 4 core with 64 bit Vista Home Prem. and 6 GB of RAM. The display is a ATI Radeon HD 3600 with 3 GB video RAM and DirectX 11. After the game freezes and I shut it down a sidebar gadget that shows CPU and RAM levels says the game's RAM usage almost tripled when it froze using almost 2/3 of all available RAM.

Another post on this forum described a similar freeze when the game starts and they said to make sure Direct3D is enabled, (it is), to disable anisotropic filtering, and to get the latest ATI drivers. None of these steps made any difference. When I downloaded the latest driver, the new ATI control panel didn't have a provision for disabling Direct 3D or Anti-aliasing or Anisotropic filtering or any of that stuff - not that it ever helped anything.

I've started AOM in XP SP2 compatibility mode, changed the virtual memory and page file size, (it seems to be a memory problem), maybe it's because its an AMD chipset working with an Intel CPU.

Thank you for your consideration.

 

[rwayne]

From what I remember I had the same problem years ago. I had a Dell with a Pentium 4 processor and about a 200 Watt power supply. After having the PC for about a year I decided to upgrade the graphics to an Nvidia GeForce MX400 video card. (It was a minor upgrade but an upgrade none the less)

What I found was this.... Power supply units have efficiency ratings. The hotter a Power Supply Unit becomes the less efficient it operates over time thus producing less wattage. The average power supply probably has an efficiency rating of 70%.

In my previous case my 200 Watt power supply operated at 200 Watts when the system was first booted. However after 40 some odd minutes of use the system would heat up (from being under load gaming) and the efficiency dropped.

70% efficiency rating x 200 watts = 140 effective watts. When this occurred the power supply was no longer supplying ample power to the video card and the computer would freeze, video would go out, or the PC would reboot. Upon rebooting the game would work fine again for about (15-30 minutes) then it would start all over again.

Other symptoms I noticed was memory errors or USB devices would stop working (from the system being underpowered)

What I experienced may or may not be related to your problem but to me it sounds like that is what is happening to your system. Do you know the wattage on your current power supply?

 

[Herr_Koos]

I'm nitpicking here, but you can't be running DX11 with that OS/GPU combo.

 

[FriendofTom]

No, I don't know wattage of the power supply, I just assumed that the power supply and the video card were matched by the manufacturer. I went to BIOS-Boot settings and enabled something called "Speedstep" which puts the unused cores into a lower power setting. This is supposed to lower temperatures and increase efficiency. I haven't had a freeze since then but it'll be a while before I know it's fixed.

The DirectX Diagnostic Tool says the GPU is an Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Quad CPU Q8300 @ 2.50 GHz (4CPUs) ~2.5GHz running 64 bit Win Vista 6.0 build 6002 , the chipset is a ATI Radeon HD 3600, and it is indeed DirectX 11.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Vista supports DX11, but the Radeon 3600 most definitely does not. Anyhow, this doesn't help us solve your problem.

 

[Carc369]

Lol.. doesn't support DX11..

The ATI Radeon HD 5xxx series and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 4xx series were the first to support DirectX11.

Your 3600 is 2 generations behind. Your diagnostic tool is reading that your OS is capable of supporting DX11. Your card, however, is not.

 

[Carc369]

On topic, your game is an old game. Maybe it only supports one core. Try setting affinity to only one core while running the game and see if that helps at all.

 

[FriendofTom]

I had to find out what "Set Affinity" was. We'll see how it goes.

 

[FriendofTom]

Best answer selected by FriendofTom.