COH: Europe In Ruins

EIR Main Forums => Technical Support => Topic started by: Scotzmen on July 17, 2012, 02:02:21 am



Title: Game Problems
Post by: Scotzmen on July 17, 2012, 02:02:21 am
Many of you may have noticed me dropping and crashing in a hell of a lot of games recently. Out of about 10 games, 1 or 2 have run fine without any problems.

My frame rates nice and steady, with everything up max, it's still above 25 FPS, even with things going completely nuts as they usually do in COH.

I'll randomly drop or crash when the games loading, or it's starting. it's completely random times too. I also get this in Anno 2070. Just random crashes mid game, for whatever reason. It does it sometimes in Singleplayer, but it's usually fine.

Drivers are all up to date, windows 7 32 bit, DX is up to date. I honestly can't think of anything else to do. 
Just basic details here:

Intel® Core™ i5 processor 2450M (2.5 - 3.1GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 3MB L2 Cache)
4GB DDR3 (1333Mhz)
AMD Radeon™ HD 7670M 2GB (3823MB Total: 2GB discrete memory + 1775MB shared memory)

More details here: http://www.mytoshiba.co.nz/products/computers/satellite/l850/pskaca-03d011/specifications#details

The only thing i can think of is there not being enough ram. For some reason, 1302mb of my physical memory is marked as "Hardware reserved" and i have 2794 of it left.




Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: Ahnungsloser on July 17, 2012, 04:57:11 am
At first of all I would recommend to disable the shared memory because you're graphic card has so much RAM that it does not need any extra memory space.

And I can insure that less main memory space can't be the reason for crashing a game. If the memory management from Windows went out of RAM
it will require "virtual memory" (Common: Swapfile) to remove all unneeded data into the swapfile that the programm are able to allocate RAM for programms. The only problem you get is that this will slow down your machine, because everytime when the system got a page-miss (The memory management addresses data which is not in the RAM) it needs to load it from the slow hard disk drive into the RAM again to continue calculation.
(or whatever)



Are this just program crashes or full system crashes? (depended on what it is I have several ideas)


Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: PonySlaystation on July 17, 2012, 05:07:23 am
try playing on lowest settings and update your BIOS.


Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: Demon767 on July 17, 2012, 05:07:51 am
reinstall coh


Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: Scotzmen on July 17, 2012, 06:28:45 am
try playing on lowest settings and update your BIOS.

Already done that, updated bios a few days ago, still no anvil

reinstall coh

Already done that too.

At first of all I would recommend to disable the shared memory because you're graphic card has so much RAM that it does not need any extra memory space.

And I can insure that less main memory space can't be the reason for crashing a game. If the memory management from Windows went out of RAM
it will require "virtual memory" (Common: Swapfile) to remove all unneeded data into the swapfile that the programm are able to allocate RAM for programms. The only problem you get is that this will slow down your machine, because everytime when the system got a page-miss (The memory management addresses data which is not in the RAM) it needs to load it from the slow hard disk drive into the RAM again to continue calculation.
(or whatever)

Are this just program crashes or full system crashes? (depended on what it is I have several ideas)

It's just crashing to desktop, never whole system crashes. Sometimes it comes up with a relic error or Anno 2070 closed unexpectedly. Sometimes without any warning at all and i have to use task manager to end the process.


Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: Ahnungsloser on July 17, 2012, 07:45:56 am
Can you type in the windows search box in the start menu "dxdiag" to start the directx self-diagnose programm and add this log file here into
this forum that i can have a look of it.

And can you post a picture of this windows of the taskmanager too.
(http://s1.directupload.net/images/120717/8odnhrl9.png)


I noticed that you only have a 32Bit x86 operation system installed and I want to have a look on the memory management of it.


Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: Scotzmen on July 17, 2012, 08:20:50 am
Heres the task manager and dx log as attachments


Title: Re: Game Problems
Post by: Ahnungsloser on July 17, 2012, 08:47:47 am
Thanks! Now I have some ideas for you.

1.Recommondation:
I know it's anoying to reinstall the operation system and everything else but I would recommend you to reinstall the whole operation system. I'm not sure if this is the actual problem you have but when you carefully watch the taskmanager you will see that your system has just 2794 MB main memory available, but normally there should be a value of 4076MB.
(Memory: 4096MB RAM Available OS Memory: 2794MB RAM)

(You have 4GByte = 4096MB. With the reservation for the hardware (20Mbyte) equals a value of 4076MB. As you can see in my picture I have 8Gbyte = 8192 Mbyte and including the reservation 8172MB main memory)

The problem is that a x86 (32Bit) operation system has a address puffer which can organize 4GB in total. The mainmemory and the graphic card share this address puffer and so the system is not able to address all your memory (4GB main memory and 2GB graphic ram) and cut the address space of this seperate memory sections to be able to handle both of them.

Normally this should not cause any problems BUT:
You paid a lot of money for your new system and with using a x86 (32Bit) operation system you can't use all the hardware you have paid for. I would recommend you to install a x64 (64Bit) operation system to be able to use all you hardware you have. Then you can try to install everything again (That's the shitty part of my recommondation) and check if these errors occur again.

When you still get this error we can go in more details.


2.Maybe a easy hotfix:
You're dixdiag says that you have a page file which have a total space of ~100GB.
(Memory: 4096MB RAM Available OS Memory: 2794MB RAM Page File: 3299MB used, 99493MB available)

I'm not sure if this a bug of the operation system/dxdiag but: Go the pagefile settings and set it to 4095MB fixed size. 100GB is way to much
and costs a lot of space of your harddisk, additionally this huge swapfile eats all hard disk peformance when the operation system needs to store/load data in this swapfile.

If you don't know how To-Do it: Here's a small guide how to switch the swapfile settings
http://tweakhound.com/windows7/tweaking/7.html