Nvidia Driver Failure?

**apieceoftofu** · April 04, 2009, 05:53 PM

Hey all i was just playing some empire ( i have recently created a personal mod for myself ( all i did was change unit ranges)) and i got a driver failure message. My game suddenly got blue and purple splotches on the map. I thought "ok its just cause im running Mozilla with the game" ( i was listening to music). So i exited and came back into the game and everything was fine. Then i finished my battle and selected to quit the entire Empire Total War program. It shut off the program but then my mouse froze and everything reverted to a rly bad resolution and only like 16 colors. Then i got the message:

The nv4_disp display driver has stopped working etc. etc. Then it told me to reboot and i did. It was fine after that but i havent tried playing empire again. Any ideas on what is causing this? Seems to me like it just started happening when i modded my ranges although that dosent make much sense because i didnt add anything relating to graphics or drivers.

Or is this just a problem with Empire and its typical issues?

Thanx?

**Brusilov** · April 04, 2009, 05:55 PM

Please post the technical specifications of your desktop (CPU, memory, graphics card and Operating system).

**apieceoftofu** · April 04, 2009, 05:59 PM

yea sry was just coming on to do that. I have Xp pro Sp 3 with 9800 GT, 2 gigs ram, and the drivers are the 181 i believe. It was the one from like march 4th on the Nvidia Website.

**Brusilov** · April 04, 2009, 06:13 PM

I'd suggest downloading the latest drivers which are 182.50 (2nd April). The splotches sound like a graphics card problem. Make sure that there isn't a dust build up inside the case (the fans suck it in) and that the case is well ventilated as well.

Did you keep a copy of the file(s) before you changed them? If you did then you can easily confirm if it's your mod that messed up the screen rather than the drivers.

**apieceoftofu** · April 04, 2009, 06:40 PM

My GFX card is not overheating. I have 3 case fans (one right on the side across from the gfx card) any other ideas?

**Toshiba** · April 04, 2009, 09:17 PM

Well... Drivers failing is a sign of overheating. Download RivaTuner and raise the fan speed.

**apieceoftofu** · April 05, 2009, 09:06 AM

hmmmm well it just doesnt seem like that would be it... i checked the fan and the air coming out of it was the normal temp approximately. But ill clean out the fan anyway.

**sgtcasey** · April 05, 2009, 01:21 PM

Originally Posted by apieceoftofu

hmmmm well it just doesnt seem like that would be it... i checked the fan and the air coming out of it was the normal temp approximately. But ill clean out the fan anyway.

You can't judge overheating based on how the air feels coming out of your computer. Use RivaTuner to check the temperatures.

Dave

**jmbuehler** · April 05, 2009, 09:18 AM

This driver crash has, except for some Vista specific issues, only two possible causes:
1. Your graphics card has run out of video memory, and the driver has crashed to the desktop.
2. Your graphics card is overheating, or running too high clocks resulting in the driver loading safe default values, effectively resetting the driver and interrupting/crashing the app.

Again, this is for XP. For Vista there are some other causes...

**apieceoftofu** · April 05, 2009, 09:22 AM

ok im running XP so could it be that the game has somehow taken up all of my video memory? I have heard of memory problems with Empire. It seems much more probable to me...

**jmbuehler** · April 05, 2009, 11:14 AM

Originally Posted by apieceoftofu

ok im running XP so could it be that the game has somehow taken up all of my video memory? I have heard of memory problems with Empire. It seems much more probable to me...

Try avoiding the memory overload by primarily reducing resolution, AA, AF and high quality textures. That should do it for you.