Video Crash with 1.8.1

Hello,

I did a search and no reports quite matched mine. Since the latest patch-
After playing for 10-15 minutes the screen becomes unresponsive
the mouse pointer will move along it's current horizontal plane but no vertical motion
after a minute of being frozen the monitor powers down
computer stays up and audio runs so I believe it is purely a graphics issue

I have upgraded to the latest catalyst drivers for my ATI Radeon 9800

when upgrading the nVidia drivers I get a close message from the installer that I have no compatible hardware for the driver

DirectX latest version is installed

I have tried some of the suggested preference fixes I did find when searching for crash reports, no go.

Any ideas?

ok well if the screen is powering down that means its no longer getting a signal from the card wich means one of two things:

1) your card isn't getting enough power to run. What kind of powersupply do you have? The minimum nowadays is 350watts.

2) you got a faulty card wich needs replacing.

Also you mensioned you tried installing nVidia drivers but it gave you an error, you do relize that you need an nVidia card in the first place? nVidia drivers won't work with an ATI card. Also I recomend clearing out your old drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro 1.3 (its free) and clean out your old drivers and replace them with either the Omega or NGO ATI drivers as SL doesn't seem to like the Catalyst drivers all that much.

I believe that the mother board's built in video card is nForce, and that is why the nVidia drivers were there in the first place. Thanks for the hints, BTW. I have a 450 watt power supply, so I think that is not the issue, also this only occurs while playing SL, not during DVD watching, streaming video, or other 3D heavy games.

I am concerned about removing the video drivers and being left with a non-functioning video card. Is that a valid concern, or do the drivers sit over the hardware's inherent drivers? Meaning, if I uninstall all nVidia and ATI drivers, and use the cleanup to get rid of them, will I be left with a permanent black screen? Newb question I know, but I have never uninstalled video drivers before.

EDIT- I do have nVidia drivers installed currently, but when installing hte latest versions I get that error, so I know (but can't even vaguely remeber) that earlier versions of the drivers were installed before.

On an otherwise healthy system, it shouldn't leave you crippled like that. In my experience, after uninstalling those drivers, your screen may be on a lower resolution and you'll notice it's slow to drag windows because of the lack of hardware acceleration. And if you can, make a Windows XP System Restore Point before you do it.

Another thing you may want to check in SL, with DEBUG menu up (CTRL-SHIFT-D), use FAST TIMERS (CTRL-SHIFT-9) and see if anything weird manifests in the stats. With certain kinds of glitches, you'll get numbers high in the hundreds or thousands. And you can click the colored bars to freeze them for easy viewing and compare them to the numbers on the left.

ah hah!

I finally got an error message. A warnign from SL that I needed to be runing in 32-bit. Duh!

We'll see how it goes now.

Pray for me!

If you uninstall all video drivers youll just get a lower resolution not a black screen and it will be abit sluggish since it dont use any hardware on your vid card to speed it up.

a 450watt psu can lying to you depends on what Amp it manage to delivers, to low and youll get unstable wierd behavoir, i just got struck by that few days ago.

exsample
500watt, 18amp on 12v+ , is not recommended on a pc with 4-6 harddrives, pcie 6800 gt card, why?, it fails for me finally i been barly holding it : p , one of my pc just refuse to boot up with that, changed to a 500watt, 34amp on 12v+ , havnt had a problem yet.

For pc builders this rule apply mostly tho, check your psu specs VERY close before buying one, a 500watt can sometimes be worse then a 350 ~.~ brand varies.

Your Ati had the same sympthoms (speeelling?) as my 9800pro had, it worked forever and one day it just refused to work with hardware enabled, drivers failed , some games worked awhile and just "hello restart", was faulty , returned it got 100% money back ... and its a old card now , so was kinda nice since i got it when it was quite new.

another possibly silly thing to check.

If you had onboard graphics and then installed the ATI card. YOu may need to go into your bios and turn on your AGP slot.

This problem bit a family member awhile back.

I checked the AGP slot. It's on and appears to be set right.

Switched to 32 bit on the video preferences.

My crash persists, although a cleaning of old ATI Catalyst drivers and replacement woth Omega ATI drivers did make the crash less frequent.

I am planning on putting in another gig of RAM soon (currently running 1 gig) and will check the power supplies amperage.

I will try the debugging stuff in SL.

-Peace

Okay, I am not bright 100% of the time.

When you google NGO ATI you get a bunch of resutles.

The first one reads - NGOHQ.com

The second one reads - NGOHQ.com - NGO ATI Optimized Driver

The first link goes to the front page (of course) and has a bunch or reviews and handy bits, and the NGO ATI driver is conveniently buried.

The second link takes you to a page touting the amazing benefits of the Omega ATI 2.87 driver, the latest and greatest. Just what I need!

Of course if you follow the buried links on the first page you get to the Omega AT 3.82 driver.

YEESH!!

I have been running 2.87 ever since attempting the fix.

Now installing 6.1.

Pray for me.