Annoying UT3 Problem

[Firos12]

Hey all!

I was hoping that someone may be able to help me with this problem. I just recently reformatted my PC replacing Windows XP 32-Bit with XP 64-Bit. I installed UT3, downloaded all the patches. So the problem is this: I turn on my PC and I am able to play UT3 for about 10 minutes and then it crashes telling me UT3.exe as encountered a problem and needs to close.

To be able to play UT3 again for another 10 minutes, I need to restart my PC, and that gets rather annoying after a while.

Here is what I've tried:

1. Made sure my video card drivers and DirectX were up to date.
2. Re-installed the game and patches.
3. Tried changing the following to true from false and sometimes back to false: PumpWindowMessagesWhenRenderThreadStalled in the UT3Engine.ini
4: Made sure OpenAL was disable which it was.

So what else can I do here?

PC Specs:

AMD Opteron 2.2Ghz Dual Core with 64-Bit Technology
GeForce 8500GT OC 512mb
2 Gigs of ram
Windows XP 64-Bit SP2

 

[Fuzz]

Just out of curiosity, why did you change to 64bit when you only have 2GB RAM?

 

[ambershee]

Well, what's showing up in the logs?

 

[oldkawman]

Are you overclocking? What are your cpu and gpu temps? Have you checked your bios to make sure your settings are OK? Have you used ntune to check things as well?

I have been running XP64 on my main game box and my spare since summer 2007. I have been running UT3 since it was first released and the demo when it first came out. Everything is stable for me and I do overclock the cpu in both machines.

I did have a UT3 crash problem with my one machine before I overclocked it. The HT was 1009 due to the stock clock being off slightly high. So, once I properly overclocked it, all was stable.

This is my backup box, an older socket 939 system --> AMD 4800+, DFI infinity SLI, 2x7950GT, 2 GB DDR400 GEIL. I did a clean install and everything at stock clocks. I kept getting UT3 must close errors. I used ntune to monitor system info and saw the HT was at 1009. The HT at default, should be 999 or 1000, never over 1000, because the HT does not OC on most setups. Stock BIOS settings are CPU base freq 200, CPU multiplier 12X, HT multiplier 5X, DDR 200, but the base clock was a bit over resulting in a small overall OverClock. For most programs, this would not be a problem, but UT3 pretty much is the ultimate load tester program. As a test a changed the HT multiplier to 4, making the HT freq 800 -> 1600. The UT3 must close error is now gone. So, that was the cause the problem in that system. I played around and did an OC of the system. These are my final UT3 stable settings, CPU base freq 230, CPU multiplier 11X, HT multiplier 4X, DDR 166 or 0.8, resulting in CPU freq 2.53GHz (2.618GHz), HT freq 1840 (1904), DDR368 (DDR381). The numbers in () are the values reported by ntune and are higher than the calculated ones and the ones seen by the bios due to the clock speed error..

 

[Firos12]

To Fuzz:

Windows 64-Bit is running fine on 2 Gigs of ram, Minimum requirement is 1gig of ram.

To Kawman:

The only part on my PC that is overclocked is my video card, it came that why I do not overclock my PC parts because I heard that overclocking shortens the life of your hardware and voids warranty

Any other ideas?

 

[oldkawman]

If you revert back to original settings on the video card, does it still crash? The 8500 series cards have thermal issues you know.

Did you check your settings in bios? Have you checked your HT freq using ntune?

 

[Firos12]

Well the stock settings of the video card were 600Mhz Core and 1400Mhz Memory clock, it came that way. I will try the Bios settings you spoke of and see what happens.

 

[Alhanalem]

To Fuzz:

Windows 64-Bit is running fine on 2 Gigs of ram, Minimum requirement is 1gig of ram.

To Kawman:

The only part on my PC that is overclocked is my video card, it came that why I do not overclock my PC parts because I heard that overclocking shortens the life of your hardware and voids warranty

Any other ideas?

There's 2 main reasons to run 64-bit windows for most people:
1) if you have more than 2GB of RAM. The main benefit offered by x64 versions of windows is support for larger amounts of memory.
2) to run native x64 applications. If you don't have any, there's not much point.

That's why he's asking. That said, performance loss on 32 bit apps is really minimal in my experience. Better to have more people running x64 so that developers will have a reason to support it.
(UT2004 has a 64 bit version available- though I stopped using it because it's not ocmpatible with the G15 patch.)