Cause of game crashing found?

[hamburgerphil]

Hi,

I have beaten episode 1 three times. The first two times, it was on my dad's computer, which has a Radeon 9800 pro with 128mb of onboard memory. Unfortunately, starting at the point where Alyx shoots the ladder with the sniper, my game would crash (hard, most of the time) after 3 to 6 minutes of playing, either when I quick saved or when it loaded the next portion of the map.

The third time I played was at my mum's house, where the computer is practically the same except for the video card, which is again a Radeon 9800 pro BUT with 512 megs of inboard memory. I did not see any crashes anywhere in the game, plus I could play it with 2X AA and 2X af as well as HDR without a hiccup.

Could the difference in onboard memory make THAT much of a difference in wether the game crashes or not?

 

[MorganFreeman911]

Definatly.
I have a 256 Allinwonder9600XT and it never crashes.

 

[Ridge]

I have a Radeon 9600 128mb, and Im crashing just about every 10-15 minutes on Urban Flight :S

 

[Darkside55]

Yeah I've got the same video card as your dad's computer, and once I got out into the city my game started crashing randomly, sometimes when entering a new area or when something was triggered, or even when I saved and loaded. It'd crash to the point where I'd either have to go back to desktop or restart the computer entirely. So that's probably one of the reasons.

It's also damn hot around here so my comp's been exceeding max temps, which I think also has something to do with it.

 

[UltraProAnti]

i'm getting mostly fatal crashes every time i play now, with a 6600GT. i never had this problem with lost coast, which i thought was the same tech. i still haven't finished it for this reason

 

[FRESCO_SUPREME]

I have a 128MB radeon 9550, the weakest of the weak these days and its never crashed on me.

 

[Saketi]

onboard GFX card uses the system RAM, so if u only have 512MB system ram, & a 128MB GFX card, whats that 512-128 = 384MB systemn ram available. Also if thie game requires say 100MB to run, ur basically tearing up ur HD to maybe get abit out of the game. U need a 3rd party GFX card, u can get em pretty cheap nowadays. What systems u got?

 

[hamburgerphil]

Sorry if I confused any of you.

Both systems I was speaking of had 1 gigabyte of ram already. The difference was in the memory present on the Video cards.

 

[Rossell]

I have a Radeon X1800 XT PCI-E 256Mb and it despises HDR

 

[Vass]

Make sure you have a large enough paging file. My hard drive went bad a few days back and corrupted my paging file, and because of this my game would freeze up.

 

[Apocalypse89]

I have a Geforce 6200, a somewhat crappy card by today's standards, and the only random crash I've had is on the escort section of Exit 17, once when I tried to quicksave.

 

[Moxie Wolf]

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Stuttering

 

[kupocake]

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Stuttering

This is outright crashing rather than simple stuttering though. In fact, my PC has never stuttered through a Source game but will suddenly just lock up, usually as new things are loaded. I guess it's probably a case of needing more Video Ram simply because of the fact that it occurs only when something is loaded into the game to appear...

Oh and I have a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb too

 

[hamburgerphil]

Yeah, it would just hard crash, or take 15 minutes to get back to normal, I would never have constant stuttering.

 

[Moxie Wolf]

I know the thread is about crashing, but I still posted it for ideas and thoughts that might help.

 

[skull24]

I also found out my zone alarm seems to cause my game to crash. But with the new update to zone alarm it has stop. Zone alarm can also go into "game mode". Where you decide to allow traffic to go out of your computer or you can decide to block traffic to your computer.