Freezing Game with Vista
 

I have still lot of trouble when running IL-2 1946 4.08m or 4.09mB1 with Vista OS. After a randomly changing period of Time (10 mins up to 2 hours) the game freezes and the following message is displayed:

'Display Driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has recovered'

I googled for nvlddmkm and got more than 40.000 hits !!!!!

Okay, if you have the same problem with nvidia drivers you can read this

NVIDIA Statement on Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) Errors

to get more information.

But most important: Launch a bug report at the Nvidia Quality Assurance site using this form

Nvidia Windows Vista Graphics Driver Bug Report

Only if many users launch a bug report Nvidia will react and release a solution for IL-2 with future drivers. We should use the power of our community to get a solution.

Many thanks for your support

Rango

Hi,

This is not just an Nvidia thing ATI have their own version of the error.

Over at UbiZoo a few of us were going through the same kind of grief. Here is a link to the discussion

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/t...127#3141073127

There were a number of possible solutions. I did them all and have not had the problem since.


I still stand by the librarian solution. Cheers! and all the Best!

I also had the same problem. I have Vista64.

For me the solution was to lower my clocks in my 8800GT. I lowered core(-50MHz) and shader clocks(-100MHz). Good thing is that they dont affect at all to my performance in IL2. Only memory clocks seems to affect and I was able to overclock the memory 40MHz.

Also I installed this hotfix.

Vista64
http://thehotfixshare.net/board/inde...&showfile=8295

Vista32
http://thehotfixshare.net/board/inde...howtopic=11094

It could have helped too.

S Antmano

Thanks for reassuring me in my decision to leap-frog the entire Vista genre.

COME ON WINDOWS7! Should be here by September/October. I'll change OS's then.

Do you know if there is a fix for ATI users ?

I'm just did the ffdshow thing...let's see if it works

Sorry,

I've got a Nvidia card, just know that when I was searching there were a few threads on the ATI problem. It would be interesting to see how you go with ffdshow.

Cheers.

I'm with you on this one... And I will be going 64bit because only NOW is it making sense.

The problem does occur with faulty or not fully accessable RAM. I tested it with 2x2GB RAM and didn't have any problem at all, then replaced them by identical RAMs and got the error all the time. I got a new pair, now it works like a charm, even with 8GB.


@ JG27CaptStubing & Thunderbolt56

It's fascinating how many people fall for the new marketing, that Win7 is just soooooo much better than the Vista it is 100% based upon. :rolleyes:


Well, anyway, since you read the links posted so throuroughly, you must have noticed, that the "nvlddmkm"-Error was confirmed in Win7, too, and was already posted not to be fixed for the initial release, as it is not finally cleared out, who is responsible for the error.

Not for me...

I just ran MEMtest86 3.4, no errors. 1 pass took, almost 2 hrs.

Confirmed.

It seems they found the bug and corrected it. The bug is gone with SP2 RC1 for Vista. Played for more than an hour, now, without a crash or lockup.

Have you tested Windows 7 beta yourself? Yes it is based on the vista kernel but it is much better. I've been testing it for months now and it is superior to Vista, and I like Vista so it's no bash against it but win7 really is much better.


P.S. I've been wondering about all these people getting the NVK errors and why I never saw it, then it came out that SP2 solved it and I said "Ohhh, well I've been running SP2 beta for months, no wonder I never saw the error", lol.

Yes and yes. Win7 basic installation is better (for playing) than Vista Ultimate standard installation.

However, my configured Vista runs better than the Win7 beta with almost any game and program I used, so I doubt the difference is so big. It looks differently (it has to, to be obviously different from Vista) and it has a different approach to install things needed instead of things available. But most things are exactly the same and I see no improvement in loading times and FPS in any game I tested so far.

Just to make it clear: Win7 is the better OS. It is, because it is easier to use, not because it is new.
Check out this site for some tests of the stunning similarities of Win7 and Vista behind the new looks:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...ndows-7_1.html


To your PS:
The error depends very much on the hardware-combination. Some boards and memory-combinations are less vulnerable to this addressing problem, Overclocking, Power-Supply and even the amount of memory (RAM & VRAM) influences the error enormously. That is, what makes it so difficult to handle and why there are so many ways to solve it.

What has worked for a number of people, at least using Vista 32bit, is to open MSCONFIG, then open the BOOT TAB and click the ADVANCED button.
In this there are two check boxes at the top... one for BOOT PROCESSOR NUMBER, this is for the number of cores. Tick the box and select the number of cores which are present in the system.
The other checkbox is for the amount of RAM present in the system. Tick this box also and dial in the total amount of RAM present (this is for 4GB users as well), or the maximum the selector window will allow.

REBOOT and run

DETECT HAL checkbox should be ticked automatically after reboot.

I'll stick with "Windows 98" thank you... ;)

Your not alone out there jumping past Me 2 ;) XP32-SP3 is the best gaming platform out there now... SP1 sure made Vista better, but it's still not good enough. They had a lot of good thoughts locking things down and restricting direct access to hardware etc - too bad they did not get it to work. The Windows 7 beta is what they really wanted Vista to be. Let's hope they get all the pieces together for the release...

I've been running a dual boot with XP32 and Vista 64 Ultimate since the beta days. I think that I've been booting in XP 97% of the time...

Excellent example!

Comparing a complete business-version against the basic stripped for download-beta....

Why did you buy Ultimate? Do you need shadow-copy for protection against data loss? Do you need Fax-Services? Do you need network rules for shared work on documents? Do you need automated maintenance routines? Do you need Aero? What for? Did you at least disable these things for your benchmarking?

Just a hint when buying Win7: Don't get the Ultimate-Version again. Ultimate does not mean ultimate solution for gaming. It means complete package for business operations, which is quite the opposite.

I will let you guess once why I use Ultimate ;)

EDIT: And I don't quite follow you... I compare Vista 64 Ultimate SP1 to Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate. Stripped down? My Windows folder is 12 Gb on an almost clean install...

Just to play the devils advocate here...I think its funny how so many people are hinging their hopes on "Windows 7".

Upon its release "Windows 7" may very well have as many problems as Vista did (has) when it was first released. And (years ago) I remember getting in a heated discussion with some "kid" (on another forum) where he was vehemently defending Vista as the "Ultimate platform of the future". He accused me of being an "old person" who was afraid of the future and he claimed that I couldn't see the superiority of "Vista" because I was "holding on to an aging & flawed platform"... I remember pointing out the that many times (in the past) micro$oft had failed to deliver on what they had promised, and that even with a beta floating around the internet consumers still can't be sure what the final product could be...

That's a role I love too ;) There are so many companies out there that have decided that Vista is not the right choice for their DTS platform - and hope that Windows 7 will be the savior. You have to believe in something ;) The problem for Microsoft is that the troublesome rollout of the Vista platform has been one of the factors that have revitalized the thin client alternative (hand in hand with the virtualization wave) - and as it is now Citrix, vmWare and Sun can rub their hands on the potential death of the thick client on large corporations... The big losers are naturally the hardware mongers but still, when running in an environment like that you will reduce the number of OS licenses needed. Thats part of the game...

Regarding the hope for Windows 7 vs Vista the big thing is that W7 is really NT6.1 - but for marketing reasons it will be called 7.0 to not get tainted by it's older brother (but it's not the father)... By this I mean that they are not starting from scratch as they did in a lot of areas for Vista. Windows seven is rather Vista SP2 (which is soon coming - I know). I'm also an old man beeing bashed by "kids" that I do not understand the potential of Vista, have not tweaked it right etc ;)

I have migrated to Vista already 2 years ago and I still keep XP install at another HDD just by this problem(or bug)!
So I have to boot into ooooooold XP Pro interface just to play IL-2. :-x
Who's to blame? I don't care & I can't know but just wish someone would solve this. Pleeease!!

I had it, followed the solutions that were linked to in my previous post and now I don't have the problem. Is there a fix? As far as I'm concerned yes!

Its kind of "funny" that the personal choice of sticking with a stable (proven?) operating platform (and waiting to see how things pan-out with Vista) is seen as "short sighted" thinking. I think its odd that a "forward thinker" would just accept micro$oft marketing at "their word", and would "jump-on-the-bandwagon" before doing research on the final product (in RW conditions). I guess that "thinking young" means that you believe the hype and you run before looking...experience has taught me that even though I have the green light I should still look both ways before entering traffic.

i have vista as well and had that problem. being lazy, i just run the game in dx mode. though i can't run it in perfect mode, it still looks awesome in excellent mode. game has been rock solid under dx.

I removed the nVidia drivers I downloaded and rebooted and let Vista load it's own drivers. Drivers that came with one of the Microsoft updates.

Anyway, no mo problemo

There is a new beta driver out 182.47 that has opengl 3.1 included, perhaps that's worth a try for those still having trouble.

I have had this problem with my X64 Vista Home Premium edition. My problem was solved when I used RivaTuner 2.2 to increase the FAN of the video card to 100 at all times.

I found out that the GPU would overheat during the game and hence issue the error that you see. Once I changed the FAN to run at 100 at all times this problem disappeared.

Hi all,

it seems that I found a working solution. First I installed the oldest driver (GeForce 177.35) available for my ZOTAC GTX 260 AMP2. Then I used the ZOTAC tool Firestorm to set the NVIDIA standard clock and VRAM frequencies (ZOTAC had programmed an overclocked factory default setup). Now, with a driver not optimized to sqeeze the last frame out of the card if running modern shooter games and Nvidia reference clock settings IL2 1946 runs smooth with Vista and without any stutter or freeze.
Graphics settup in game is OpenGL rendering with ultimate settings and pushed the conf.ini parameters to the top (water=4, trees=3, visibility Range=3).
FPS enough and really an eye candy.

Okay, seems problem is solved so far. Otherwise I will post here again.

Rango

Rango have you got the "rings" in the water like this ?

Note: I have enhanced the image to show the problem more clearly.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...a1/nvrings.jpg

I have the rings. They are really ugly. Anyone have a fix for this?

Same ugly rings here ! :(
No matter I choose water 1 2 3 or 4...

No, I didn't see that rings with my setup so far.

But during my tests I saw some strange effects too. Once all rivers were showing no textures at all (only grey rectangles) while planes, buildings, airfield were displayed correctly.

I found out, that it's not only the conf.ini or not only the driver settings. It's always a combination of setting the single parameters in conf.ini and the setting of the single parameters of the driver. Only little changes might cause big problems. So a big testing effort is needed to find out a working setup without problems.

The stable setup I stated above can be loaded here (zip-file with conf.ini and shots of driver settings):
http://www.laubstein.de/temp/RangoIL2Setup.zip

The stable setup contains no anti aliasing overrides by the driver, because IL2 doesn't support additional antialising by game default. Only anisotropic filtering is set (16x).

Now I added a forced driver antialising override (8Qx, supersampling) for the next (and final) tests.

There are no rings too.

Screenshots of current test setup:

http://www.laubstein.de/temp/test1.jpg
http://www.laubstein.de/temp/test2.jpg

If this setup is stable too, I will post here in a few days.

Rango

Here is a great link to help you resolve all kinds of Vista problems, setups, fixes, etc.

I bookmark it and use the site all the time. I have not Vista documents...thanks to MSFT.

This is a great source of informaton

http://www.vistax64.com/

Rango

zoom out and above your plane looking directly down , you will see them, I can see them in the picture (top) you posted.

I tried your settings and it made no difference with the exception I had more "jaggies" on aircraft edges.

This is a low level screen shot and its hard to see the "rings" at this angle you need to be above.

Okinawa Map

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1.../nvrings34.jpg

Hi Alpha,

concerning the "Jaggies" please note that the linked setup doesn't include antialiasing yet (set to "off" in the driver settings) because I was searching for a stable setup without freezes using only features directly supported by the game. Now I go forward by small steps to find the best mix for optimized graphics still running stable.
Hm, the rings are not a big problem for me (I didn't noticed that as a problem until you told me they exist). No idea what is causing that effect, sorry.

Regards

Rango