Some games crashing, GPU related?

[Joeyboy]

gahh so now i just bought Universe at War and it crashes randomly like spore did! I've patched UAW so the crashing issues the game had should be fixed. It's not the card(HD4870) overheating as i have changed the fan speed to 40% and it's usually under 50c, never got above 60c even when playing.

Drivers aren't the newest I don't think but that's because for some reason they weren't installing properly, I got 8.5 I think but I never used to update drivers for my old 7600GS and for years it ran new games without needing an update.

So either it's something else hardware wise or maybe conflicts with Vista-64 bit? My friend has the same set-up as me bar a 8800GTS 512mb and vista-32bit and spore doesn't freeze for them.

So is more likely to be hardware or software? I didn't want to post the same thing to two different sub-forums so if this doesn't belong here i am sorry and please move it to were it belongs.

Oh just in case it's helpful the type of crashing is always the same, it goes to a screen, usually blue, with vertical lines(different shade of blue) going down it and the sound freezes up. I have to hold down power button to turn it off it's totally non-responsive.

i'm going be sure drivers aren't the issue by updating to version 8.11 which i believe is the latest driver for my HD4870.

 

[aaronkupen]

Nowadays with video cards, the driver situation is pretty crappy You can't just ride on a stable driver for years and expect it to work well. The updated drivers could very well fix the problem.

If not, check to see if the games have a patch of some kind -- or some sort of hotfix.
If not, it could be a vista 64 bit issue, I had weird quirks happen to me when I ran it on my old gaming machine.

You could also try to run the game in compatability mode.

 

[Joeyboy]

ok i will try running in compatibility mode as well as the new drivers i got, cant do any harm i guess?

Oh also how come i downloaded 8.11 suite but when i go on my display adaptor it says driver version 8.552?

It does say driver date 28/10/08 which is way more recent then it was before i just updated it and i updated it using the correct method, weird.

Must be new because now CCC has an option to manually use the slider to increase fan speed where as before you had to make a profile and edit the document and type "manual" and 40" to get it to spin at 40%.

but what ever i'l post if it still crashes, if it's like spore i bet it will and if i email them they will say " oh well we dont have 64-bit support"...why don;t games make it compatible, i mean it uses DX10!

 

[aaronkupen]

Driver version is different from the suite version, don't worry that sounds correct.