ATI GPU Hardlock problems and a possible solution

[Aiden]

Cut and pasted the information from COH forums

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Reposting this from another thread, as I see it cropping up a lot and a heap of misinformation and random conjection surrounding this (a few people have made suggestions which work, but are based on poor judgement)...It's not the only solution, but it's a very common and significant problem for ATI card users, and is easily worked around so I thought I'd post it, just to be clear.

I experienced very frequent hard locking with CoH, dispite being able to play other demanding games (e.g. PlanetSide, BF:Vietnam, Far Cry, Halo, etc) without issue on the same hardware and software install for the last 3 months.

There is a problem with CoH and certain driver settings with ATI's Catalyst drivers. If you reinstall the drivers (e.g. reinstall 4.4) your settings will be restored to the defaults, which CoH has no problems with. If you turn up or override some settings (e.g. FSAA, Ansiotropic Filtering, TrueForm, etc) then CoH will crash, I have been able to repeat this and confirm it, but I have not had the time to narrow down which settings it does not like.

I notice the change was triggered by the night day transition sequence (if you watch this, you can likely observe it, simply customise some of your ATI settings and stand in a spot and wait for the cycle to run and the sky to change where upon it will consistantly hard lock, at least I've found [though as I've said I've not narrowed down /exactly/ which specific settings it is, settings like the AF have been known to cause issues with other games], ).

Obviously this is highly annoying and needs to be addressed. The problem is exacerbated by a long standing bug in the 4.x series Catalyst drivers - namely that when you change settings like FSAA and AF filter levels, they are not applied until you restart (or unless you perform appropriate open/close/start 3d program/repeat vodoo, which is even more annoying to do than a restart). This means you have to change profiles and restart between games. *sigh*

The resetting of the graphics card settings to their defaults is why 4.4. seemed to 'fix' the problem for many - if you have a hard locking problem (where the mouse still works but everything else freezes) with your Radeon card, even if you have 4.4. installed already, reinstalling is a very likley fix. If you change settings in the ATI control panel after reinstalling I would expect the hard locking to come back. It could be restricted to just my specfic model of ATI, but I would bet it effects all or some of the Radeon 9xxx range.

There are very possibly (from the sounds of it) other issue's with specific cards (issues specific to the 9800, 9700, 9600, 9200 always seem to crop up now and then with various games) but folks should be aware that uninstalling/reinstalling the 4.4. Catalyst drivers will reset your driver settings and should stop hard locking for quite a few people and is *definately* worth a shot, as it's very easy to do. If you change any of the 3d settings (which inevatibly people will want to do) the hard locking may come back.

FWIW, my system specs:

P4 3.2 Ghz
Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB
2 GB DDR400
160 GB SATA RAID0
Windows XP SP1

Note that if your having complete hard locking where by the cursor does not even move then it's more likely to be a hardware problem such as a cooling issue or a timing problem. More graphically intensive games (like CoH, PlanetSide, BF:Vietnam) bring these to the foremore, and you can play other games like GTA3/VC forever without issue, it's not until something that's more demanding comes along that the issues crop up.

I myself had a problem with the cooling on my origional stock Radeon 9700 Pro back when I got it, even when clocked at the default clock speeds for GPU and memory it was just bombing out, I played underclocked on it till I could fit a 20 USD Thermaltake GIANT II cooler to it (both underclocking and the cooler proved rock solid solutions in their own right) - not something a consumer should have to worry about really, but there you go.

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Please note that reinstalling older/newer drivers, or installing Omega 'drivers' appears to fix the problem, because it does the same thing of effectively resetting your preferences in the car'ds control panel (which is arguably a BUG not a feature, but helps in this case ;-).

Personally, I would not advocate downgrading your drivers unless you absolutely have exhausted other avenues, and I would not recommend using Omega 'drivers' if you are having any sort of problem (ultimately, they will make your system stability worse, because all it is is a program for toggling various registry settings on and off, many of which are disabled for a reason [i.e. they are untested, or know to cause problems] and in any case, you can toggle those settings with much less invasive software than the Omega drivers ;-).


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heres a link to omega's latest after market drivers.

please note they arent supported by ati.

http://www.omegacorner.com/index_ati.html

[Ruccus]

I'm running FSAAx2 and performance AFx8 and have hardlocked only once since release (and that was your fault Aiden, because it was seconds after I told you in-game that I hadn't had any problems :p). My hardlock was in a mission as well.

But yes, if you have any problems running custom settings you should try the default settings (though instead of re-installing drivers there's a button in the bottom right corner of the 'Advanced Properties> 3D' section that resets the default graphic settings, labeled 'Defaults').

[Phantom Rogue]

my 9600 pro lags like a witch sometimes.

Then again, I alt tab out alot, have 128k radio goin, and a couple other background things, but the game lags/is jumpy when i run/fly around with the effects that are on (dash/combat jump/fly/ect)

Dunno if its just me, but I do lag a bit with my 9600 Pro.

AA is 4x
AF is 16x

It doesnt happen often, it could just be the memory leak within CoH, but who knows.

[Ruccus]

I find the performance decrease between AFx8 and AFx16 isn't worth the slight increase in visual quality; if you're running Quality AFx16 then that's a pretty big performance hit on its own. AFx8 has only a modest performance hit and looks almost as good as AFx16.

I'm also running 1280x1024, so I find FSAAx2 nicely knocks down the edges while still giving me good framerates.

[Phantom Rogue]

So you say I should knock it down some?

Go 8? Hrmm, I might give that a try and see if it still jumps on me.

[Ruccus]

If you're using Quality AFx16 you might want to just try switching to performance; performance uses bilinear filtering while quality uses trilinear.

There are certain levels of detail in a game's view, with the nearest being the highest detail; think of the number (2, 4, 8, 16) as the distance away the highest LOD will stretch. Performance and Quality just deal with how the next LOD level blends into the previous one (for performance it's a straight drop from one level to the next, giving you a stepped line, while in Quality the two levels overlap, blending it smoothly from one LOD to the next). If you go performance AFx16 the blend line may be too far away to notice.