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Dragon Age and Boot Camp: Blue Screen of Death?

V

voltare

macrumors member
Original poster
May 26, 2008
85
0
Hey All,
I am running Dragon Age on boot camp with Windows XP, fully updated. I am getting the blue-screen-of-death pretty consistently. This happened with the boot camp video driver and the latest one from the nvidia website.

Anyone else have this issue? Any suggestions?
 
voltare said:
Hey All,
I am running Dragon Age on boot camp with Windows XP, fully updated. I am getting the blue-screen-of-death pretty consistently. This happened with the boot camp video driver and the latest one from the nvidia website.

Anyone else have this issue? Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Running it like a champ on a 2006 Mac Pro 4x3.0 with 16GB of ram and a flashed 4870 1GB.
 
Re:

I've been playing it on my old Mac Pro (ati1900, 2gb ram, bootcamp windows xp) and it runs flawless, even with AA turned on it still runs without to much trouble. No blue screen of death here, I used to have that all the time with Oblivion though.

Hope u figure it out, this game is damn nice !!!

:apple:
 
1. Run a memory check and a vram check.
2. Find a way to increase fan speed slightly.

You don't mention what hardware you are running, other then nvidia for gpu. I would tend to believe the card is either overheating or has bad vram. When my 8800GT started going, it would show up pretty consistent in the windows side if I ran a game.

DAO has run perfect here. I have not experienced a single lock up of the game in over 100 hours of playtime (my video card is an ATI though). There are some glitches in the game, but they are things like if walking, can't go past top of stairs, darkspawn blood can be given to Duncan over and over for more experience points etc...
 
I'm not an expert on the BSOD, have never seen one, but this MS Technet article might give you some ideas.

Was there a point where you weren't getting the BSOD, then updated something, like your video driver, then it started? Worse case you can do what most Windows tech support people suggest- a clean install of Windows.
 
I have actually had more CTD's with Dragon Age than with just about any game in recent memory ... but that is still just a few.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I have not installed anything new or made any changes at all. I have played 3 or 4 games before this one. I installed DAO and, while playing, I get BSOD occasionally.

Something I forgot! Very regularly, I get a graphics glitch (about once an hour, at least). I get flickering lines through the screen. I then save my game, quit the game, and restart the game. Then it is fixed until the next time.

I am on a 2.4ghz MBP. 2GB of RAM and 256MB 9600GT. 500GB 5400rpm HD.

Maybe it is a temperature issue? I am playing on a table, not in my lap or anything. Is there a temp logging program for windows? Can I use SMCfancontrol to up the fans in windows?
 
voltare said:
Thanks for all the suggestions. I have not installed anything new or made any changes at all. I have played 3 or 4 games before this one. I installed DAO and, while playing, I get BSOD occasionally.

Something I forgot! Very regularly, I get a graphics glitch (about once an hour, at least). I get flickering lines through the screen. I then save my game, quit the game, and restart the game. Then it is fixed until the next time.

I am on a 2.4ghz MBP. 2GB of RAM and 256MB 9600GT. 500GB 5400rpm HD.

Maybe it is a temperature issue? I am playing on a table, not in my lap or anything. Is there a temp logging program for windows? Can I use SMCfancontrol to up the fans in windows?
Click to expand...

Sounds like a GPU issue to me defintely. SMCfancontrol when booted in OSX and used to increase the fan speeds will stay in effect when rebooting into windows. Try increasing your fan speeds and see if it makes a difference. Do you have any mac games installed that will tax the GPU? if you see artifacts there, I would consider taking back to Apple. As far as it happening in windows, I don't think :apple: will be much help for that....

Also, since it is an nvidia (notorious for these problems) you can try updating the drivers from them and also they have a program for moniotring the GPU temps etc. Might try that...
 
RealTemp tells the temp of all available cores and the GPU. RivaTuner logs just the GPU, so all related temps, fanspeed, and so on.

Generally when a GPU overheats, the screen will turn black, then the system will restart or completely lock up.

The last time I saw a BSOD, was because I was unlucky and purchased a defective Intel motherboard -- or I damaged it during the build. The BSOD would happen when ever the Intel activated its speed stepping blah and it got progressively worse over a week until my system would not boot.

You should also check your system RAM. The boot disk for a Mac can run an extensive test, which you'll want to do over the quick one, which in my experience has never caught a problem when one of the chips was really defective.

What are these notorious issues you speak of JollyRogers? ;) My 9600 GT(Not the mobile) and now my GTX 275 haven't given me even an ounce of problems under XP64. I can't speak for newer OSs, but I know that Vista was buggy with both ATI and nVidia drivers early on.
 
JackAxe said:
What are these notorious issues you speak of JollyRogers? ;) My 9600 GT(Not the mobile) and now my GTX 275 haven't given me even an ounce of problems under XP64. I can't speak for newer OSs, but I know that Vista was buggy with both ATI and nVidia drivers early on.
Click to expand...

I am refering to the whole 8600M and posibbly 9600M debocale. Apple put out a notice regarding the 8600M and there are a lot of peeps who speculate the 9600M also has the problem.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1820099&tstart=1
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...s-apple-macbook-pros-nvidia-bad-bump-material
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ook_pros_affected_by_faulty_nvidia_chips.html

These kind of problems would become very apparent during gaming in OS X or Windows I think. I see the OP has a 9600 and a MBP that is all.
 
JollyRogers said:
I am refering to the whole 8600M and posibbly 9600M debocale. Apple put out a notice regarding the 8600M and there are a lot of peeps who speculate the 9600M also has the problem.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1820099&tstart=1
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...s-apple-macbook-pros-nvidia-bad-bump-material
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ook_pros_affected_by_faulty_nvidia_chips.html

These kind of problems would become very apparent during gaming in OS X or Windows I think. I see the OP has a 9600 and a MBP that is all.
Click to expand...

On DA launch weekend my MBP ran DA for 35 hours straight. Nary a problem but I could have fried an egg near the ESC key. Similar marathons of Borderlands and DA again last weekend. No issues except heat - but stability was fine.

I am going to use this thing like a mofo so if anyone's 9600m borks out on them it will be me.
 
Well. I downloaded smc fancontrol and set the fans to high. Then I restarted into XP and the fans were still blowing hard. I played DAO for probably a good hour or hour and a half with no glitches. This is seems to be longer than normal, although it's hard to tell. Then I crashed to desktop a few times and then got the graphics glitch again. Finally I got the BSOD.

The error message is for NV4_disp.dll

I'm so confused. After searching, I don't see anyone else with the same problem...
 
Ahh, I see JollyRogers, I wasn't aware of those issues on the newer MBPros. :)

++++++

voltare,
If you had better results with your fans going, consider investing in a notebook cooler. I use a Belkin(Which is quiet.) on my MBPro when driving my HD 30" and it does an excellent job at keeping my fans from going crazy. I also never completely close the screen, since that allows more air flow above.

Regarding your error, try this fix that I found;
http://howtobyte.blogspot.com/2009/05/nv4dispdll-blue-screen-error-fix.html

It's specific for that DLL and the BSOD.
 
I've only run DAO for about 2 hours on my MBP 13" with bootcamp (XP) and I have seen the exact same thing. First there are white lines through the screen for a few seconds, then followed by a BSOD. Ran it on a cooling pad, so I doubt it was a heat issue. Don't seem to have any problems running Wow or Oblivion, so I don't know what the problem is.
 
Have you guys tried running the game will all settings on low just as a test?

Also, when it's crashed, was it during a calmer setting, or was it during a heavy battle? Just trying to figure out if the crashes are random?
 
voltare said:
The error message is for NV4_disp.dll

I'm so confused. After searching, I don't see anyone else with the same problem...
Click to expand...

I have seen that before on my old XP box...with a NV gpu in it. And so have a lot of other Nvidia/windows users... (see link below).

Is your MBP one with the 9400M also? Can you run that one with the settings a little lower and see the results? I know it won't run as well, however, curious as if it will/will not BSOD and give same results.

Also, the NV4_disp problem may happen with certain games and not others... It may happen with Vista's 3d display setting (what's it called visteo or somethin?) on, even at idle ...

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432&st=300&start=300 There are a lot of things in this thread to try. I would suggest reading through all those pages and look at the ones for settings, driver reloads, etc.

Have you run your memory tests on the laptop yet? If not, another good tool is memtest. Not sure of the recent version, but google it and make a bootcd from the iso and use that to test your system ram.
 
I was wondering if you are using a DVD or if you purchased the game via Steam?

I mention this as I was having a few crash problems in Bootcamp (Win 7 64, Mac Pro Early 2008). I purchased Dragon Age via Steam, and on validating the game files through the Steam interface, had some corrupted files downloaded.

As soon as Steam repaired the files, all the crashes went away.
 
voltare said:
Anyone else have this issue? Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

I experienced a bunch of blue screens when I opened Mac partitions in Windows Explorer (on Vista 64 with Snow Leopard's Boot Camp 3). My bet is on Apple's lousy file system drivers. Their Windows drivers are not very good.
 
Thanks for all your help guys.

I usually get the graphics glitch at an up close dialogue scene or when the game is loading a new area, but not always. I usually CTD at dialogue scenes, especially if I keep hitting escape to skip the dialogue. After CTD, it usually then does the BSOD. There does not seem to be any correlation to big battles or anything.

I cant run the game on the 9400M because in windows, it only lets you use the 9600 GT. I have never had this problem with any other games in windows or in OSX.

My game is from the DVD.

Snoball, that is exactly what I've had. Let me know if the BSOD lists NV4_disp.dll as the problem. I'll let you know if I'm able to fix it.

Ok... so I'm going to test my memory, reinstall drivers after using drive clean pro, and turn all the graphics down with fans at high.
 
I'll keep an eye on it, but TBH I'm not playing DAO much, as I just got the latest hack patches for Oblivion and I'm mostly playing that game atm.

Just as an FYI, my crashes happened during the closeups (when user is forced to watch the dialogs). It seems to happen during the longer dialogs.

Next time it happens I'll jot down the error code. I haven't loaded the newest drivers off the NV site yet. I'm thinking of trying that next.
 
voltare said:
Thanks for all your help guys.

I cant run the game on the 9400M because in windows, it only lets you use the 9600 GT. I have never had this problem with any other games in windows or in OSX.

My game is from the DVD.
Click to expand...

I didn'y realize that. I thought you could disable the 9600 in the windows device manager. AT least I can on my MP with 2 video cards in it...

Maybe a clean install of the game? and if it still does this, go back to store and tell them the DVD is corrupt and exchange for another copy? I only say this, because of "no problems with any other games".

Good luck. I am out of ideas other then the thread I posted above.
 
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