Some help please

[AttilaTheHungry]

Hi, I got CMBB about 3 weeks ago and have been playing it ever since. Just in the last two days during some scenarios, after several turns of play, the screen freezes and turns black. Then I get a message saying "(ATI) VPU RECOVER has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver command". And this continues every two or three game turns. A few times it stayed black and I had to shut off my PC.

I have read the tips given and can someone tell me where I can find the Full Screen Anti-aliasing for my video card? If you think it's some other problem please let me know.

thanks

Dell Dimension DMO61

Intel® Core 2CPU

6400 @2.13GHz

2.13GHz, 2.00GB of RAM

Windows XP

Radeon video card

[ April 19, 2007, 05:47 AM: Message edited by: AttilaTheHungry ]

[bitchen frizzy]

I had a similar problem, posted it here and got lots of advice.

ATI card problem

Nothing worked, though. All I was left with was a best guess that the problem was a hardware defect in the card itself. I hope you don't have that problem.

[AttilaTheHungry]

Oh god, I hope it's not a defect. Although it is a new computer, I got it in January. It was "build your own" type. I asked for all the best specifically for gaming.

What do you think I should do? I'm not that computer smart.

[Schrullenhaft]

The first thing you may want to try is to upgrade your video driver to the latest version. For most of the X1x00 series the latest 7.4 Catalyst should work (I assume your system is actually a Dell Dimension E520 with a Radeon X1300 Pro videocard). You should probably uninstall your current driver and Catalyst Control Center (both from the Add/Remove Programs control panel). Remove the Catalyst Control Center first, don't reboot yet and then remove the actual Catalyst driver. Once you've rebooted, then install the driver and control center.

A driver upgrade however doesn't always fix some issues. As mentioned in the thread linked-to above you may want to turn off the VPU Recover option. What this does is it pretty much forces the driver to crash instead of having the ATI driver attempt to 'rescue' it. Sometimes turning off this feature just prevents certain problems, while in other cases it will show you a blue-screen error that may help to narrow down the possibilities as to what is happening.

Some of these errors may be due to overheating. I'd assume that most Dell systems would be built fairly well in this regard, but perhaps something is malfunctioning. If that is the case, you may want to call Dell tech support and have them troubleshoot or setup a warranty repair (onsite or send in, however they do it).

As a more 'recognized' benchmark, you may want to download and run 3DMark 2006. Run this in whatever 'looping' mode it may offer (if there is no 'looping' mode, you may have to run it several times manually until you get a failure) and see if you get the same error or something similar. If you do, then you most likely have some sort of hardware problem (overheating, etc.) and hopefully Dell support can direct you in what to do next (replacement, etc.). You'll want to make note if the lockup appears during a certain test consistently and/or how long the benchmark has been running once you do get a lockup. If the computer seems to take a certain amount of time running the benchmark before it locks up, run the test again (after letting the computer cool down for a little while). A consistent problem should hopefully convince the phone support tech that you may need a replacement.

[ April 19, 2007, 10:44 AM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]