In 20 years of building/using computers, never saw anything acting like BF3

[Borealis7]

long story short: my cousin bought BF3. he has a Core i5-760 and a Radeon HD6850, the game kept crashing after 1-2 minutes of playing "without fail" (pun intended). CTD, no error message, no log, nothing. we updated drivers, tried the overvolting trick on the Radeon, noting helped. short of reinstalling windows 7 i've tried every trick in the book.

the problem has been solved now. what happened you ask?

turns out he had an old MAG 19" 1280x1024 monitor. he switched it to a Samsung 22" 1680x1050 and now the game doesn't crash! WTH?? i can't, for the life of me, think of any reason why switching monitors could make a game stop crashing.

just thought i'd share. kthxbye.

 

[JoJoman88]

Sounds like a hardware/ software bug to me. Maybe game didn't like 1280x1024 or the hardware had a conflict at that resolution. Seen stranger thing over the years.

 

[PrayForDeath]

Haha that's quote odd.

 

[Lonyo]

BF3 won't work properly for me if I have browsers open usually, specifically with any Flash content.
It acts like half the mouse and keyboard commands don't make it through to the game and I end up sliding or jerking about.

It does seem to have some "special" characteristics.

 

[Kroze]

BF3 sucks

 

[Kalmah]

BF3 sucks

Thanks for enlightening everyone by giving examples and reasoning behind your opinion. You are clearly a cut ahead of the typical "this sucks" then duck out the thread kind of troll.

 

[Kalmah]

My guess would be(as stated above) that there is a bug between the video drivers, the game, and that specific resolution. Chances are, if you would have switch to a non-native resolution the crashes would have gone away.

Now if Dice would fix the damn connecting to server issues I've always had. Waiting in que only to get the "you have been disconnected" the instant your game launches shit is annoying.

 

[rgallant]

-new monitor w\digital monitor drivers maybe
-old one analog and no monitor drivers ?
- lots of people forget the monitor drivers and leave as plug and play.

 

[Kalmah]

-new monitor w\digital monitor drivers maybe
-old one analog and no monitor drivers ?
- lots of people forget the monitor drivers and leave as plug and play.

You mean those driver cds that come with a monitor actually are important? Seriously, I just put the cd in my cd case just in case. (<--lol at that sentence)

I guess I should run it. Can't we assume that windows 7 has the drivers already though?

 

[Borealis7]

why on earth should switching from a D-sub (analog) to a DVI cable affect a game? it's just not supposed to be like that! i hardly believe this was the cause of the problem.

and Kalmah is an AWESOME band!

 

[Lonyo]

You mean those driver cds that come with a monitor actually are important? Seriously, I just put the cd in my cd case just in case. (<--lol at that sentence)

I guess I should run it. Can't we assume that windows 7 has the drivers already though?

Crysis wouldn't let me play at my native resolution until I installed my monitor driver, didn't offer it as a selectable resolution choice.
It can make a difference to some things sometimes.

 

[NinjaCat]

BF3 doesn't work properly for me, I like the game, but it's too much of a hassle to try to get the game running, I think I only played 2 hours and I had the game since release.

 

[Barfo]

BF3 crashes after 9 minutes of gameplay if I don't spank the monkey. But then I'm at a disadvantage playing one handed

 

[Bulldog13]

It doesn't work for me if I have Xfire running, otherwise works fine (Win 7 64).

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

why on earth should switching from a D-sub (analog) to a DVI cable affect a game? it's just not supposed to be like that! i hardly believe this was the cause of the problem.

and Kalmah is an AWESOME band!

It's hardly just the cable. A change like that would've changed resolution and aspect ratio as well. The latter is especially suspect because 1280x1024 is the only 5:4 mode that really gets used. 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 are much more common, and if the crash is caused by bad or missing assets, or bugs in the FOV code I can see that causing problems.

 

[Borealis7]

if the game is so sensitive to hardware configurations, it was not built very well nor tested as it should have been. that's what you get when you push deadlines too soon.

 

[DaTT]

Tons of people are having extremely rare, odd, and one of a kind issues with this game. I can now run it 90% flawlessly after buying a new PC. However, every once in a while the game hangs on the LOADING screen after a map change. Maybe once every 20 or so map changes.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

i thought you're supposed to underclock that card?

 

[destrekor]

BF3 is actually an amazing product.
But it has the strangest thing about the engine: it seems to be far more touchy and uncooperative than anything else out there.

When everything is working together properly: wonderful experience.
You use what obscure 50kb program to monitor RAM utilization? Hard Lock! (random statement: no idea if it has happened. Most likely it has happened at least once)

It is so finicky as to hardware and software combinations. Sometimes it even seems to have moods and dislikes if I so much as think about it in a negative light... probably won't be able to play here in a few minutes. :biggrin:
For the most part, I don't crash even with hours of play. Sometimes, with no pattern, it does crash. Sometimes a CTD, sometimes a hard lockup, sometimes a self reboot, sometimes a BSOD. I think I've experienced each once, how often from there I can't recall. A type of hard lock is most common crash result in my case: all hardware remains powered up (not sure about GPUs), video goes black, all inputs unresponsive with zero activity. Reset button is only way to get out.

I do expect that it's hardware in my case: likely display drivers (beta) bugging out, as I've had "Driver Stopped Responding" at random times outside of any games too. Some strange result of that bug perhaps.

It also could be my system configuration/overclocks. While the system remains stable 99.99% of the time, perhaps there is some minor voltage drop in the house's electricity for some reason that, while rare, if it happens at the right moment ends up ruining my game when the system would be most prone to crashing due to voltage stability. I've got extra voltage running in the system for overclocks, and the PSU should be handling that part no problem (considering all my monitoring has produced no evidence of anything other than perfectly stable and acceptable voltages in the readouts).

Not sure if it's the game itself or just a random quirk that happens [quite rarely] due to my hardware configuration and electrical concerns. Hell, it could still be entirely software related, some kind of strange conflict like I mentioned above. I truly believe this to be one of the most touchy games ever, based on the number of random issues that can be read about on various forums.

 

[destrekor]

i thought you're supposed to underclock that card?

underclock or overvolt.

In my case, I chose to up the voltage by about 50mV as I'm running at 1.050V (a.k.a. 1050mV) on my 560 Ti 2GB cards. I'm also running at 950/1900/2004MHz [that last one, memory, is stock, couldn't get anything more on that] but otherwise I've discovered this voltage level prevents crashes now and is still very healthy on these cards.

The various firmware updates that were rolled out after BF3 launched? All those did was up the P10 (Power Level) voltage by a small amount, probably 10-25mV was sufficient to prevent crashing at stock clocks.

 

[thespyder]

Yeah, it really sounds like a driver conflict between the monitor and the Video card. And probably something that wouldn't trigger on any but a very small hand full of programs. Even if you use the drivers that came with the monitor and aren't doing plug and play, you would do better to install/update to the latest and greatest by the manufacturer that are compatible with whatever platform you are running. Just to be sure.

Problem is today there are so many hardware configurations out there that no game developer can anticipate every single one of them and test for issues. So if you have a game that is specific enough it is more liable to trigger an issue than something more general purpose.

 

[postmortemIA]

BF3 never crashed on my pc

Spoiler

I don't have it :biggrin:

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Never had an issue in over 60 hours of gameplay since launch with Win 7 x64, i5 750, Radeon 5850, always running the latest (stable build) drivers. I must be lucky I guess.

And I have a lot of peripherals installed too. Luckily nothing has conflicted with the game I guess.

 

[WhiskeyD]

Thanks for enlightening everyone by giving examples and reasoning behind your opinion. You are clearly a cut ahead of the typical "this sucks" then duck out the thread kind of troll.

:thumbsup:



Back on topic - I have zero issues with BF3 on both my laptop and desktop aside from having to manually update punkbuster after the initial installation. They are completely different animals too. Desktop is i7 920, GTX560TI, with a 24" 1920x1200 display and my laptop is a i7 2630QM, GT540M with a 1080P display.

PhatoseAlpha's conclusion seems the most logical to me but who knows...

 

[QuantumPion]

underclock or overvolt.

In my case, I chose to up the voltage by about 50mV as I'm running at 1.050V (a.k.a. 1050mV) on my 560 Ti 2GB cards. I'm also running at 950/1900/2004MHz [that last one, memory, is stock, couldn't get anything more on that] but otherwise I've discovered this voltage level prevents crashes now and is still very healthy on these cards.

The various firmware updates that were rolled out after BF3 launched? All those did was up the P10 (Power Level) voltage by a small amount, probably 10-25mV was sufficient to prevent crashing at stock clocks.

This. As has been mentioned here countless times before, driver CTD's in BF3 are fixed by overvolting or underclocking your GPU. For whatever reason, BF3 requires more power on the video card than they were set for by the factory. Is it ultimately a driver problem, a BF3 problem, or a hardware problem, nobody knows. The fact that increasing your resolution made your problems disappear is likely due to reducing the frame rate, causing the game to be CPU bound, or something similar which caused the card to require less power and thus not crash.