ATI driver crashing

[Deathray2K]

I have a Powercolor PCS+ Radeon 5850, and I bought a bunch of games in the recent Steam sale. Two of those were Just Cause 2, and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Almost every time I play either of those, I eventually get a crash to desktop, and a message saying that the ATI driver has crashed and recovered. At first I thought it was an overheating issue, but I got better case fans, and logged the temp in GPU-Z, and it flattened out at 63-65'C for a long time before it crashed.

Now, I'm not sure if it's a driver issue, or a game issue, or a problem with my card itself. I would have thought a driver issue, but I can't find anyone else with an ATI card that's experiencing this problem. I'm using 10.6 now, but the problem occurred before I updated it as well.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Will Robinson]

What kind of power supply are you using and what is it's watt rating?
HD5850 requires a decent 500w+ PSU to perform as advertised,in my opinion.
Also are you using a sound card?
If you are,be sure to disable on board sound in your system BIOS as that can sometimes cause crash to desktop problems.

 

[Deathray2K]

I have an OCZ ModXStream power supply. It's at least 500W, but I can't remember exactly. It is an older one though, and only had 1 PCI-E connecter, so I had to use an adaptor for the other connector. I tried disabling on-board audio, but it didn't help.

 

[ModestGamer]

5850 can draw 200watt by itself IIRC.

 

[Acanthus]

I wouldn't blame the video drivers until you isolate the problem, just saying.

Are there other users with the same card as you complaining of crashes in these games? That is what i would check first.

http://forums.eidosgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=266

It looks like everyone crashes a few times a day in JC2 from what i'm seeing on the forums. There are both ATi and Nvidia problems so I would blame the game before the graphics card/drivers/power supply/etc.

 

[Deathray2K]

Like I said, I don't know where the problem lies. I looked through the JC2 forums, but couldn't find anyone with an ATI card experiencing the same problem as me. Plenty of NVidia users are getting similar symptoms, but for them it seems to be the NVidia-specific graphics options that cause their problems. For obvious reasons that's not the issue I'm having.

 

[Meghan54]

Given your OCZ is an older model, and OCZ power supplies never were top shelf power supplies anyway, I'd wager a bet that while gaming, you're putting too much stress on your aging ps and overheating it. Older caps, higher power draw, higher internal temps......fails.

 

[Acanthus]

Given your OCZ is an older model, and OCZ power supplies never were top shelf power supplies anyway, I'd wager a bet that while gaming, you're putting too much stress on your aging ps and overheating it. Older caps, higher power draw, higher internal temps......fails.

Wouldn't that make the problem span all heavy loads though and not 2 specific games?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Just exit out every hour or so.

Oblivion and Fallout did this for me (crash after a couple of hours) with both nvidia and ATI cards, with everything running at stock speed. Many games and engines have memory and resource leaks that kill them if you run long enough.

 

[Deathray2K]

It happens in under an hour, usually around just 15 minutes in (In JC2 at least. In RF:G it takes longer).

 

[dust]

It happens in under an hour, usually around just 15 minutes in (In JC2 at least. In RF:G it takes longer).

Is your system OCed? If so it may be that's not entirely stable. I used to have this issue with my current setup and Warhead, it used to crash to desktop every hour or so, until I dropped the settings to stock.

I was also told here the issue might have been due to the DRM and how it's not installing properly sometimes. I reinstalled the game(actually I went ahead and reinstalled all the games with DRM).

I didn't have an issue for the past year or so with this, so one of these things helped me.

 

[evolucion8]

Wouldn't that make the problem span all heavy loads though and not 2 specific games?

The HD 5850 sucks more power than any CPU currently, and not all games can load the GPU enough or the same way. A good example, Bioshock 2, it can't load my GPU no matter what until I force Super Sampling.