Desperate, sad, lonely.

[Primal]

Greetings all, thanks in advance for your time.

I write here as pretty much my last resort after having exhausted all my known alternatives. I know that the game has issues with ATI cards, and I'm fairly sure that's the root of my problem, yet I still truly hope that by some miracle a fix is just around the corner. I really would love to play this game, but it just does not stop freezing.

I'm running an ATI 8500 64meg, with the latest catalyst drivers, under windows XP.
The freezing forces me to reboot, and I've tried pretty much every setting I could. I've found that if I match my PS in game resolution with my desktop resolution, the freezing is put off to about the 3-5 minute playing mark. If I don't then I do not last even 30 seconds before it freezes.

I've played with most graphical settings, but I still freeze, I was hoping that if the settings were low enough, the game may work. But I don't have a bad system (2.26 gig intel, gigabyte Motherboard, 512 megs of RAM) yet in those 30 seconds I play, my framerate is disgusting if there is any movement on the screen.

I pray for a fix, or I'm going to have to return a game that I really would love to play.

The strange thing is that I can play the tutorial missions fine without locking up on any res. Yet online .. no joy.

I've seen it run on my brother's machine, he has an ATI 9500, and suffers no problems with the latest drivers.

Thank you all for your time.

[Hamma]

Have you contacted SOE support?

[Daleon]

I played Beta with a 8500/64 with little to no issues at all. Make sure you don't have any AA/AF turned on under windows video adapter properties. Default settings seemed to work best for me.

Other than that, the usual things:

Run smartgart at command prompt and make sure fast writes are turned off. Also check this in bios
Also if you are at 4x agp, try 2x. I actually had better performance at 2x
Adjust agp apature, try 64-128-256
If your oc'ing, make sure your not clocking the agp port up to high
Maybe increase voltage to AGP port some
If you are using Via MB, reinstall 4in1 drivers
Reinstall directx
Use a driver uninstall utility to fully remove all driver components
Remove control panel
Reinstall all, maybe going back to cat 3.1 or 3.2's even

[Primal]

Thanks very much for the replies guys.

Yes I've emailed SOE but they haven't gotten back to me yet.

Thank you for the suggestions Daleon, I very much appreciate your input.

One quick question, my comp doesn't seem to have smartgart at all. This is kind of worrysome considering my bro's newly reformatted computer has it.

I guess that may be linked to the solution. Is it possible to get smartgart for an 8500 board? Excuse the utterly noob question, but to be honest this is the first time I've heard of the program

[Daleon]

I've had problems getting it onto my system also. Generally have to do a full clean removal and reinstall of the Cat drivers to fix it.

Go to device manager and uninstall your video adapater, if you have a secondary remove it also. Do not reboot
Remove ATI Control Panel from Add/Rem Programs
Reboot
When windows redetects the board point it at the latest Cat drivers
Reboot
Install the ATI Control Panel, make sure you have the right one for that version of drivers
Reboot

This should do it. Also you can look under video adapater properties for Smartgart, though its a little different there than running it at the control panel.

[Hamma]

Try the SOE live tech chat rather than the email. Usually quicker

[Primal]

Thanks for your help guys. I've tried it all, and the longest I can stay on for before freezing has been a whopping 7 mins.

I'll try to catch the tech chat, but I doubt that with everything I've done, they will be able to shed any light on it.

The longest I've lasted was using the 3.1 Cat drivers, really bummed (

[Onizuka]

my friend has a radeon 9700 and his kept crashing every 10 min. All he did was reinstall the drivers and ta da.

Of course youve probabley allready tried that hehe