Problem with Asheron's Call and G400

[Dirk the Daring]

When I play Asheron's Call normally, the computer will crash after a few minutes with garbled lines going across the screen. I don't see this problem with the other games I play (unreal tournament, half-life, etc.)

The game, however, will run all night if I turn off hardware acceleration.

The system:
1Ghz Athlon in a K7V motherboard
128 Meg ram, G400 Max (4x capable according to serial number)
NetGear 100bT network card

[T'kul Bastile]

I have been running AC for several months with no problems.

Which drivers be ya using? I am currently running the latest greatest.

Also, if you are trying to FORCE 4X, you might want to go back to 2X. Not sure if that would cause a problem or not.

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System Specs:

One bourbon, one scotch and one beer:

[Maitland II]

Hi, I too had this problem in most Direct3D based games, and it took me a while to solve it. I found that I had to use AGP 1X to get D3D games running perfectly stable, 4X crashed consistently. Now this was on a Via based motherboard, and I believe yours is too so I think trying a lower AGP setting will work.

If I remember rightly, you can change the AGP setting when installing the Via AGP drivers.

I have heard that the new beta PowerDesk drivers from Matrox fix this problem, but I haven't tried them yet so I'm not sure. In any case, I haven't noticed any real difference in the speed of games with a lower AGP speed. I hope this helps you.

[Dirk the Daring]

I assume the board/card combo is running in 4x. How do I force 2x (or 1x even)?

Again, K7V motherboard.

[Maitland II]

To force AGP 1X or 2X, you can try the PowerDesk registry hacks, unzip them, and double click on the ForceAGP1x.reg or ForceAGP2x.reg files. You can get the registry hacks <a href="http://www.murc.ws/Utils/PD5RegHacks.zip"> here. </a>

If that doesn't work, you can re-install the Via AGP drivers for your motherboard and select Standard instead of Turbo AGP. Good luck!

Hehe that's too many edits

[This message has been edited by Maitland II (edited 23 August 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Maitland II (edited 23 August 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Maitland II (edited 23 August 2000).]

[T'kul Bastile]

You can also download a program from Matrox. It is a nice little utility that will help in this matter. And it has a few other settings you can adjust.

http://www.murc.ws/Utils/mtstutil.exe

Good luck friend. Let us know if this works or not

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System Specs:

One bourbon, one scotch and one beer:

[Electric Amish]

Hmmmm.... I've been running AC for many months now on my G400/Abit KA7/700MHz Ahtlon system without any crashes.

I've used both the 5.52 and the 6.01beta drivers. Never had any crashes.

You're using the latest 4-in-1 drivers from VIA right?

amish

[nerasp]

via is....crap

my suggestion to fix all of your problems is get a new motherboard, thta's what i did

i was using via apollo mvp3 or something chipset, i had SO MANY PROBLEMS

ACPI can also cause the garbled lines and crashes, at least it did for me, my card doesn't like to share its irq with anyone
stingy little bastage

[ayoub_ibrahim]

nerasp,your tone is a bit strong & most likely results from your personal problems with a via based motherboard.however,many people have had enjoyable experiences from their via based systems so maybe we can get back to trying to help Dirk(if we can) in this particular forum.by the way,I'm an intel man myself!!!!
just my 2 cents

[Targon]

The problem is that VIA has no concept of how to make a decent northbridge chip. Their AGP performance is very poor as well. The only decent thing that VIA produces is southbridge chips when it comes to performance. For those who don't know, the southbridge is where the RAM interface is generally located, and will provide the PC100, PC133, DDR SDRAM, or RAMBUS memory selection. The AGP is located in the Northbridge. Because of the lame VIA northbridge, I'm waiting for the first generation of Athlon boards that will use the Acer Labs(ALi) chipsets. These will support not only AGP 4x, but will also support DDR SDRAM as main system memory. IWILL has already announced a board based on the new chipset, and it will HOPEFULLY be available for the holidays.

Anyway, I'd rather run with AGP 2x and an AMD 751 northbridge chip than AGP 4x with a VIA northbridge. No compatability problems with the AMD northbridge.