I'm not a heavy gamer, so I've only noticed this problem in the past few months. I'm on a 2.66ghz Mac Pro with the ATI x1900 card, owned in for a year now and only recently am I experiencing this problem.
What's happening is that when I play a game in fullscreen (it's happened in AoE3, C&C Generals, and WoW trial, the only games I've played recently) it will be fine for, oh, say about 5-10 minutes. Maybe a bit more. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, the Mac Pro stops outputting a display signal. My display just stops receiving anything. Sound continues, and I think I've been able to force quit the game. But there's no display signal outputting.
I end up having to force-shutdown the Mac. When I go to start it back up again, it has a bit of trouble. Usually, when I turn my computer on, I can hear the fans/hard drive spin up briefly, then within a few seconds they'll relax and I'll hear the starting noise. After a display crash such as this, the fans won't spin down and the computer will not start. Still no signal is sent. It will just keep the fans going with nothing happening until I force it to shut down again. It will do this at least once, but recently I had to start it up and shut it down around 8 times before it actually booted up. I usually give it a decent amount of time between tries.
This problem doesn't seem to occur when playing in a windowed mode.
Any ideas as to what's going on here? Help would, as always, be very much appreciated.
What's happening is that when I play a game in fullscreen (it's happened in AoE3, C&C Generals, and WoW trial, the only games I've played recently) it will be fine for, oh, say about 5-10 minutes. Maybe a bit more. Then suddenly, for no obvious reason, the Mac Pro stops outputting a display signal. My display just stops receiving anything. Sound continues, and I think I've been able to force quit the game. But there's no display signal outputting.
I end up having to force-shutdown the Mac. When I go to start it back up again, it has a bit of trouble. Usually, when I turn my computer on, I can hear the fans/hard drive spin up briefly, then within a few seconds they'll relax and I'll hear the starting noise. After a display crash such as this, the fans won't spin down and the computer will not start. Still no signal is sent. It will just keep the fans going with nothing happening until I force it to shut down again. It will do this at least once, but recently I had to start it up and shut it down around 8 times before it actually booted up. I usually give it a decent amount of time between tries.
This problem doesn't seem to occur when playing in a windowed mode.
Any ideas as to what's going on here? Help would, as always, be very much appreciated.