Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

8800GT freezes, during Windows gaming only

H

hkarlsen

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 26, 2005
30
0
Hi all!

Got my Mac Pro last week, added 8gb of OWC ram and 3x 750 F1s and yesterday a NEC 2470WNX. Could not be happier performance wise in OS X..

I have one problem though. I got the 8800 partially for some gaming performance asides from work, and have installed Medieval 2 Total War and Half-life 2. In both games I get crictical freezes, solved only by reboot (hard or the machine actually restarts by itself sometimes, after a minute or two.)

Details:

- The mouse stops, but the gets moving again with everything else freezes. After a while, the mouse also stops
- The sound shifts from headphones to onboard speaker, for no apparent reason
- I had one pixelmayhem-crash, but besides from that the screen just freezes with no graphical errors.
- I tried to lower several gfx details, just not the rez (I WANT to play native 1920*1200)

Any thoughts? Are Apple NVIDA 8800 drivers that came on my Mac Pro OSX disk the only ones I can use? The system is 10.5.2 with the gfx update.

Thanks!

EDIT: Spelling
 
hkarlsen said:
Any thoughts? Are Apple NVIDA 8800 drivers that came on my Mac Pro OSX disk the only ones I can use? The system is 10.5.2 with the gfx update.
Click to expand...
i've not tried this myself yet, but i'd assume that you should be able to install either the normal nvidia drivers or the omegadrivers although that would obviously depend on how and where the efi/bios issues start to crop up. worth a try anyway. i'm certainly planning to check em out.
 
it actually might be a sound issue, not video.

i had a flaky sound card in my PC that did things just like what you're describing to some games and not others. HL2 EP1 was particularly bad. Other games that would crash often were TOCA 3 and Battlefield 2. All of those are graphically intensive, so I figured GPU problems...But I know it wasn't the graphics card because I had the problem before and after upgrading from an ATI 9600 Pro to a GeForce 6600GT. Then i took out my (supposedly good) sound card and re-enabled my motherboard's onboard (cheap) audio processor. Problems disappeared.
 
hkarlsen said:
Any thoughts? Are Apple NVIDA 8800 drivers that came on my Mac Pro OSX disk the only ones I can use?
Click to expand...

No! You want to use the real nvidia forceware drivers under windows if you're playing games. make sure you uninstall the apple video driver first, then install the driver from nvidia.
half life 2's working fine on my vista install on my mac pro, along with psychonauts, COD4, tomb raider anniversary, company of heroes, etc,etc.
 
elvisizer said:
No! You want to use the real nvidia forceware drivers under windows if you're playing games. make sure you uninstall the apple video driver first, then install the driver from nvidia.
half life 2's working fine on my vista install on my mac pro, along with psychonauts, COD4, tomb raider anniversary, company of heroes, etc,etc.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I will try this as soon as possible. For reference, I have Xp Sp2 installed.
 
I have XP Pro SP2 and play COD4, FSX, and all the HL games with no problems. I would try reinstalling the drivers via your included DVDs, or perhaps download the NVIDIA drivers off their website.
 
Hi!

Installed the newest drivers off the NVIDIA page, but the game froze again after 10 seconds of play. This time I mangaged to get a look at the desktop for some brief second when I ALT Tabbed. and I saw a Windows Firewall Blocked message. It restarted before I could see what it was all about. I guess ill turn the firewall off before my next attempt. This reminds me in so many ways why I switched....

Any other suggestions?

EDIT: That did not work, same $()= freeze occurs. This is really getting frustrating. I get great FPS and quality for like 10 seconds, and then my only option is a hard reboot. Anyone else with this problem? How can I tell Apple about it?
 
I've had good luck with the NVidia forceware v171.17 drivers on my MacBook Pro with Windows XP 32bit.

I don't have an 8800GT yet so I don't know how well they work on the Mac Pro, but the 171.17 seems very stable on the laptop.
 
hkarlsen said:
*bump* I REALLY need to get this fixed. Any inputs? Thanks...
Click to expand...

If you are running XP right click on my computer, choose properties, click the tab that says advanced, there should be a box that says startup and recovery click settings. In the middle of that box is a section called system failure, uncheck the box that says automatically restart.

What this does is actually show you the BSOD instead of just rebooting the machine. Why do we want to see this? Well it will tell you which driver actually caused the problem. If it is a graphic card driver problem you should see something like nv4disp.dll (or thereabouts). If you don't get that, but you are getting something else, just post it here.


Also it should be logging the system failure before the reboot. That would be found in the event viewer (Start->Run-> Type eventvwr.msc).

In any case keep us posted.
 
I've had problems with lockups running Crysis. In one of the searches I did it suggested that the problem could be the sound card. Try turning your sound hardware acceleration down to "basic". Click on START and then RUN. In the window type DXDIAG. Under the Sound tab turn hardware acceleration down to BASIC (don't turn it all the way down to the minimum as you will not get any sound at all.
Worth a try.
Alan
 
Hi!

Thanks for feedback, have been really busy so checking things out now

My automatical restart was already off, and nothing is beeing written to my system log. I did turn down the hardware acceleration of sound, and I thought it worked for a second. But it froze like before, but this time I managed to alt-tab me out of Counterstrike steam, and kill the application from the desktop. So, some kind of progress. I will try and reainstall drivers, and then reinstall windows. Any other input? This is really annoying!
 
hkarlsen said:
Hi!

Thanks for feedback, have been really busy so checking things out now

My automatical restart was already off, and nothing is beeing written to my system log. I did turn down the hardware acceleration of sound, and I thought it worked for a second. But it froze like before, but this time I managed to alt-tab me out of Counterstrike steam, and kill the application from the desktop. So, some kind of progress. I will try and reainstall drivers, and then reinstall windows. Any other input? This is really annoying!
Click to expand...

Is Steam [HL2, CS, etc] the only app that is causing the freeze? EDIT: hmm, I hate to say, but maybe the hardware is actually flakey. I know a way to possibly get an answer, but it really doesn't seem like it would be worth your time. Basically you would have to dl the debug symbols for Windows and run a debug program that has been set to record when a hang happens. Then in theory, you would go back and see (through the analysis of the dump file) what was causing the hang.
 
I don't have any solutions for you, unfortunately, but I can tell you it'll be a cold day in hell before you get any support for issues like this. Believe me, I know—it's why I sold my Mac Pro (previous gen, w/ the Radeon X1900XT). Because the problem couldn't be replicated by Apple using applications built-in to OS X, they refused to perform any service, despite the fact that I could easily replicate the problem (vertex corruption leading to slowdowns and eventually crashes/system hangs) in Windows within a few minutes of using graphics-intensive apps like Bioshock or Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Moreover, screen corruption (random lines/blocks of static-like color noise that was attached to windows surfaces) would persist after turning the machine off and rebooting to OS X, and (if the machine was on for several days continuously, as it often was) would occur without any gaming activities. Despite this, I was also told that even if the issue was occurring in OS X while running games there, they still would not be able to act on the issue since the machine was crashing with third-party applications.

I was pretty disappointed in Apple's flimsy support options for their machines, especially ones whose graphics cards were KNOWN to have overheating problems. So I sold the Mac Pro to someone who wasn't planning on using Windows on it at all, and bought a second-hand MacBook Pro to replace it. Eventually I'll build a gaming PC for myself—I won't have support then either, but at least I won't have paid $2500+ to not have support.
 
diamond.g said:
Is Steam [HL2, CS, etc] the only app that is causing the freeze? EDIT: hmm, I hate to say, but maybe the hardware is actually flakey. I know a way to possibly get an answer, but it really doesn't seem like it would be worth your time. Basically you would have to dl the debug symbols for Windows and run a debug program that has been set to record when a hang happens. Then in theory, you would go back and see (through the analysis of the dump file) what was causing the hang.
Click to expand...

Thanks, do you know where to download this? To the guy with the ATI experience. Thats a shame. I do have hopes, since I dont get so many critical errors anymore. I downloaded the beta driver from jan. 10 2008, and the nTune software from NVIDIA. The stress test from NVIDIA did not replicate the problem. The temprature peaked at 70 celsius during some lone HL:DM playing, and I got the freeze issue. I dont think 70 celsius is to much...is it? I dont have a definite temp it froze at, but my guess is 70. And yes, it also freezes in Medieval total war

I guess ill try to download the debug software. GTA in OSX works flawlessly, so the problems from windows doesnt occour in OSX. I guess I will try a different Windows version, perhaps Vista, if nothing else works. Ahh, the humantiy...
 
70C is fine http://firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidia_geforce_8800_gt_512mb_roundup/page13.asp

You could try underclocking it though, I suppose. I used to run JK2 just fine on this PC laptop, and then all of a sudden it just began freezing... randomly. Totally hard freezes. As in no cursor either. Reinstalled it, no change. JKA runs just fine, so who knows. To this day I can't boot into JK2 without it freezing from (anywhere from) one to fifteen minutes into gameplay.

Lmao, one time it froze after three seconds. That made me happy.
 
hkarlsen said:
Thanks, do you know where to download this? To the guy with the ATI experience. Thats a shame. I do have hopes, since I dont get so many critical errors anymore. I downloaded the beta driver from jan. 10 2008, and the nTune software from NVIDIA. The stress test from NVIDIA did not replicate the problem. The temprature peaked at 70 celsius during some lone HL:DM playing, and I got the freeze issue. I dont think 70 celsius is to much...is it? I dont have a definite temp it froze at, but my guess is 70. And yes, it also freezes in Medieval total war

I guess ill try to download the debug software. GTA in OSX works flawlessly, so the problems from windows doesnt occour in OSX. I guess I will try a different Windows version, perhaps Vista, if nothing else works. Ahh, the humantiy...
Click to expand...

Windows Debug Symbols found here.

Debug Diag suite found here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back