Help! Crashlike pauses in all games

cwatkins

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Nov 26, 2002
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So far 3 games of mine have had the same problem that I have not been able to solve. During gameplay, the action will -stop- completely for a long time, then continue. In Silent Storm, it is almost tolerable because of the long distances between pauses, but in the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo, gameplay is an oxymoron. The same is true for Winning Eleven (soccer game) it can't even get past the opening cutscene of gameplay. I've updated my ForceWare (the March 15th update), defragged my HD, ran Windows Update, cleaned the registry, searched for viruses... now Im out of ideas. I dont want to format my hard drive but it is looking more like this will be necessary. Ingame detail/resolution/color depth changes do not affect this problem.

Games ran fine not too long ago. I could run Star Wars Galaxies at high detail levels with good performance. I didn't make any hardware upgrades or changes, I had and eliminated a few viruses and, what I think is the most likely culprit, upgraded to DirectX 9.0b.
Does anyone have any help for this -severe- problem?

Rig:
GeForce4 Ti 4200
1GB DDR SDRAM
P4 1.8Ghz
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
Crashlike pauses? Wow, I've been known to take pause for hours at a time!

It actually sounds like a program is running it the background, can you think of anything?

You might want to go to <A HREF="http://housecall.trendmicro.com" target="_new">http://housecall.trendmicro.com</A> and try their free online virus scan as well.

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cwatkins

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Nov 26, 2002
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I use AVG for virus scanning which has always done well for me. It's not a full fledged program running in the background but could be one of the processes. I dont really see anything suspicious though. Anyways, no problems start until 3d rendering begins in a game.

It has been suggested to me that there may be problems between DirectX9.0b and my GeForce4 Ti 4200 video card. Anyone else know anything about that?

The 'ForceWare' is the latest drivers I was directed to download by nvidia.
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
I don't know...usually stalls of such long periods are caused by another program sucking away most of your CPU clock cycles

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cwatkins

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I did some looking around and found this thread of a ton of users having the same problems and little in the way of answers. The thread goes from December of 2002 to now. Apparently Geforce4 Ti 4200s can be some nasty buggers. I think they really just dont play well with DirectX9.0b, which, I suppose, means I have to nuke my HD unless I can get one of those unofficial uninstallers to work.

Here's the thread:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/3878/?o=0
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
I'm sorry, that just seems so hard to believe. Perhaps DX9.0b plus certain driver revisions...

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cwatkins

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Want to know what's even harder to believe? I just solved the problem using the last message on that thread I mentioned. I used Riva Tuner to set my card's core clock to 225mhz and that was that. problem solved. Makes no sense to me.
 
Well you fixed the problem, so it's likely not an issue.

However the Forceware 55.55/56 weren't released on nV's site because of performance issues in UT2K4, so anything less than the 56.64 Forceware drivers I would think would have similar issues.


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tombance

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Jun 16, 2002
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Im kind of having this problem. I installed the 56.64's last night and proceded to play CoD. Now whenever I load a saved game I get control then after about a second it pauses for another second, and then goes back to normal. I never had this problem with 56.56's and I dont have anything in the background (Im obsessed with having a simple system in terms of software, adaware everyday for me). I think I'll try going back tonight to see if it is drivers that are the problem.

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