Mass Effect constant freezing

[Piuc2020]

I just got Mass Effect for PC, from the moment the game began the game blew me away, I'm really excited about this game however I seem to be having a bit of technical troubles.

I'm running Windows XP, a 8800GT and a Core 2 Duo E6750, I'm going to try changing my drivers (I'm running 177.41 with modded inf, will try regular drivers) but I'm worried that might not work.

Here is the problem, every now and then I get unrecoverable freezes, it first happened during the introduction cutscene, that one lasted about 5 seconds but the game recovered, then it happened again when I first landed on Eden Prime and approached one of those gas pods, this time I had to alt tab to task manager and kill the masseffect.exe process, it happened again when I opened my map (again alt-tab) and then it happened when I throwed a grenade at those weird spiked cyborg-y thingies at which point I gave up and restarted the computer.

Any ideas, any suggestions, anything I can do? Is this widespread? The game doesn't crash my computer (most of the time) it just crashes itself.

 

[nakedfrog]

It's crashed on me very infrequently in Vista... it appears to have always been some sort of problem with the video card/driver.

 

[ronach]

My game runs just fine in XP home using 169.21. Good Luck

 

[Piuc2020]

I installed 175.19 (latest WHQL) and the game won't even load my savegame anymore, I'm so pissed, I was really into the game.

I'm going to upgrade my onboard sound drivers now, hopefully that'll work.

EDIT: MOTHER****er! It looked like it worked fine with the onboard upgrade but then bam, crash again.

 

[Aberforth]

I use Vista 64 with nv 175.19 driver, it didn't crash even once. But i had to reload save game many times due to in-game bugs.

 

[SergeC]

Not a single bug/crash so far....though I'm not terribly far through the game yet. Vista x64, 8800GTS 512.

 

[Piuc2020]

Reverting to 169.21 seems to have pacified the freezes but they are still not completely gone.

Next step is trying the game out on Vista.

EDIT: Well apparently Mass Effect does not play nice with my onboard sound (Realtek HD), the suggested EA workaround is setting sound to work in software mode but that didn't seem to fix the issue.

I know people have played it seamlessly but apparently I'm not the only one with issues like this, I can't believe EA let something as buggy as this get out, here's hoping for a patch real soon, I can still play the game somewhat if I use 169.21 drivers so it's not all bad.

EA sucks almost as much as 2K Games, they really give amazing developers like Irrational and Bioware bad fame.

 

[Mem]

Piuc2020 Have you got lastest DX9.0c installed (June 2008) ,you can get it from here (for both XP and all Vista versions).



Personally never had any issues with ME on my Vista x64,have you got anything overclocked?..that can cause freezing.

 

[Ganeedi]

I was getting random General Protection Faults, gMatrix2d errors and other CTDs about every 5 to 20 minutes. I've traced it back to a RAM timing issue that i am still trying to get a handle on. By moving to less aggressive RAM settings in the BIOS, i was able to play crash free. Seems the game is pretty sensitive.

The hard lockups/freezing might be a different story however.

I am surprised by how buggy this game really is, with no patch out yet. There are a number of other issues that arent game breaking. No hardware mouse cursor sometimes, disappearing enemies, poor sound card support (5.1 sound?), awful ally AI (shooting walls in front of them, etc).

Even with these problems, this is still an amazing game.

 

[chizow]

I played through the game 2x without any crashes in Vista 64, often leaving the game running and just alt-tabbing between sessions. The one thing that would get the game to lock-up was if I hit other buttons or windows after trying to resume. Basically switch back and give it the 15-30s it needs to resume full-screen without hitting anything else.

One thing to check out is PhysXcore.dll and sound driver conflicts. There was a thread about it on the official ME forums but it sounds like the OP isn't using a Creative card. Also check your BioEngine.ini and see what it lists under "ISACTAudio". The launcher config tool is broken and may be wreaking havoc on your .ini file and game settings. Check your logs folder under User > Documents > Bioware and see what the crash dump says. Also as others stated, if you're overclocking your CPU at all, go to stock to see if that's the problem. ME is *very* CPU intensive and may certainly expose any overclocking instabilities.

 

[Slick5150]

I just finished it and didn't encounter any of those problems, but there definitely are some bugs that I can't believe they haven't ironed out yet (wait until you get stuck in an elevator and have to reload teh game, or the always enjoyable permanent weapon overheat)

 

[Nik]

You're in the wrong forum to be playing Mass Effect. Console forum is that way ---->

 

[CP5670]

I started playing this two days ago and have not encountered any major issues so far. I disabled the frame smoothing (which basically causes microstutter) and the film grain effect right away, but otherwise everything is good. This seems to be a very good game in general, but it does have some interface-related flaws. The story is excellent and I love the wide range of dialogue options that are available, but the combat in general feels sort of clunky compared to a typical FPS.

I played through the game 2x without any crashes in Vista 64, often leaving the game running and just alt-tabbing between sessions. The one thing that would get the game to lock-up was if I hit other buttons or windows after trying to resume. Basically switch back and give it the 15-30s it needs to resume full-screen without hitting anything else.

Alt-tabbing is the one thing that is causing trouble for me in this. I just get a black screen when I go back in. Maybe I'm not waiting long enough.

 

[Ganeedi]

From what i have read, ME definately seems to be less buggy in Vista compared to XP, believe it or not.

 

[mazeroth]

My brother was getting constant crashing with his computer. He read on a forum to turn one of his cores off and it worked!

To do so load up Mass Effect. Go out to Windows and hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE to go to the Task Manager. Go to Processes, then right click on the Mass Effect process. Go down to Set Affinity. Turn off one of the cores.

Let us know if that worked.

 

[Piuc2020]

Originally posted by: mazeroth
My brother was getting constant crashing with his computer. He read on a forum to turn one of his cores off and it worked!

To do so load up Mass Effect. Go out to Windows and hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE to go to the Task Manager. Go to Processes, then right click on the Mass Effect process. Go down to Set Affinity. Turn off one of the cores.

Let us know if that worked.

Wouldn't that hinder performance?

Anyways I think it's good now I just played for 3 hours without a problem (well my computer bluescreened when I loaded my game but then it was perfectly stable though it was weird).

Mass Effect is an awesome game though, it's so easy to lose yourself on the story, I just spent those 3 hours basically talking to people, maybe 10 minutes or so were of combat (and BTW the combat is really well done), the cinematic angles and the film grain and blur effects really add a lot to the atmosphere, I'm loving this game, I love how you can play your character as you want it (ballsy, arrogant, compliant, polite, etc) and have it actually mean something.

Despite the incredibly annoying and game-breaking crashes (that forced me to revert to a very old video driver) I don't regret purchasing Mass Effect, I just hope there's a patch soon.

 

[Captante]

Originally posted by: Piuc2020

Originally posted by: mazeroth
My brother was getting constant crashing with his computer. He read on a forum to turn one of his cores off and it worked!

To do so load up Mass Effect. Go out to Windows and hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE to go to the Task Manager. Go to Processes, then right click on the Mass Effect process. Go down to Set Affinity. Turn off one of the cores.

Let us know if that worked.

Wouldn't that hinder performance?

Anyways I think it's good now I just played for 3 hours without a problem (well my computer bluescreened when I loaded my game but then it was perfectly stable though it was weird).

Mass Effect is an awesome game though, it's so easy to lose yourself on the story, I just spent those 3 hours basically talking to people, maybe 10 minutes or so were of combat (and BTW the combat is really well done), the cinematic angles and the film grain and blur effects really add a lot to the atmosphere, I'm loving this game, I love how you can play your character as you want it (ballsy, arrogant, compliant, polite, etc) and have it actually mean something.

Despite the incredibly annoying and game-breaking crashes (that forced me to revert to a very old video driver) I don't regret purchasing Mass Effect, I just hope there's a patch soon.

So the only thing you needed to do to minimize crashing was roll your video drivers back to v169.21?

 

[Piuc2020]

Originally posted by: Captante

Originally posted by: Piuc2020

Originally posted by: mazeroth
My brother was getting constant crashing with his computer. He read on a forum to turn one of his cores off and it worked!

To do so load up Mass Effect. Go out to Windows and hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE to go to the Task Manager. Go to Processes, then right click on the Mass Effect process. Go down to Set Affinity. Turn off one of the cores.

Let us know if that worked.

Wouldn't that hinder performance?

Anyways I think it's good now I just played for 3 hours without a problem (well my computer bluescreened when I loaded my game but then it was perfectly stable though it was weird).

Mass Effect is an awesome game though, it's so easy to lose yourself on the story, I just spent those 3 hours basically talking to people, maybe 10 minutes or so were of combat (and BTW the combat is really well done), the cinematic angles and the film grain and blur effects really add a lot to the atmosphere, I'm loving this game, I love how you can play your character as you want it (ballsy, arrogant, compliant, polite, etc) and have it actually mean something.

Despite the incredibly annoying and game-breaking crashes (that forced me to revert to a very old video driver) I don't regret purchasing Mass Effect, I just hope there's a patch soon.

So the only thing you needed to do to minimize crashing was roll your video drivers back to v169.21?

Yeah apparently that has worked for a bunch of people, even so, the game is not completely stable for me yet, at least I can play it though.

 

[Piuc2020]

I tried the 177.73 drivers and I got a GPL (general protection fault) error when I even tried to open the game, I downgraded to 169.21, updated the nvidia physx software runtimes and even though it runs now the game suddenly has some failed to render error every now and the freezes are more frequent and more of them are unrecoverable from (before, most freezes would last 20-40 seconds).

Seriously, I can't understand how EA let this one go out the door, what's even more surprising is how these lazy ass bums at Demiurge can't even bother to post at the very friggin least a hotfix or something almost 3 months after release.

I'm officially pissed.

P.D: What's even more confusing, the game works perfectly on my Mac Pro, of course my Mac Pro has a 7300GT so I won't play on it but man, seriously they should do something about this, there are lots of threads and posts about this problems, might as well just upgrade to a HD 4870, it seems ME hates NV cards.

 

[The Keeper]

I never had any other problems with Mass Effect except for alt-tab not working and cursor disappearing a few times during the playthrough. This was on Vista x64 SP1, Radeon 3870, Realted HD Audio 889A, C2D E8200 and 8GB RAM.

 

[Zenoth]

On my system Mass Effect runs generally well. I do get a few freezes here and there, very occasional, and very random, but no actual crash or errors sending me back to the Desktop. But when I do get the freezes, they are absolute, I always need to hard-reset my system when it happens, it doesn't even "crash" per se, I never see my Desktop again, the screen just freezes.

The sounds and/or music resume, but Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't work, nor Alt+Tab or just the Windows Key... nothing, system silence. But other than that, it runs well (I'm still on my first play-through at the moment, I'm exploring on Noveria, the second planet I landed on after getting out of the Citadel, only 8:40'ish hours of play at the moment).

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Piuc2020
I tried the 177.73 drivers and I got a GPL (general protection fault) error when I even tried to open the game, I downgraded to 169.21, updated the nvidia physx software runtimes and even though it runs now the game suddenly has some failed to render error every now and the freezes are more frequent and more of them are unrecoverable from (before, most freezes would last 20-40 seconds).

Seriously, I can't understand how EA let this one go out the door, what's even more surprising is how these lazy ass bums at Demiurge can't even bother to post at the very friggin least a hotfix or something almost 3 months after release.

I'm officially pissed.

P.D: What's even more confusing, the game works perfectly on my Mac Pro, of course my Mac Pro has a 7300GT so I won't play on it but man, seriously they should do something about this, there are lots of threads and posts about this problems, might as well just upgrade to a HD 4870, it seems ME hates NV cards.

Why are you running the NV PhysX drivers on your system? Your card is unsupported with the current PhysX package and may have even more issues if you start pairing it up with older drivers.

Like I said originally, look in your log folder and check the last few lines in the log before you crash. Each crash log file name will be timestamped the exact second you crashed. This will give you a better idea of what's causing the crash.

The game ran flawlessly on both an 8800GTX (175.16 drivers) and a GTX 280 (177.41) in Vista 64 for me so I don't think its only NV drivers at fault here. Also for you alt-tab folks, as I mentioned earlier, give it at least as much time to go fullscreen as it takes to load up the first time. You can find the startup time in the log file as well. For me it took 15-35s depending on the rig.

 

[CP5670]

I waited longer this time and it does indeed get back into the game eventually, but it fails to recapture the mouse and keyboard so you can't do anything with the game.

I found some strange bugs after playing it more, although there have been no actual crashes. One example occurs during the side quest to win five times in the casino. When you complete it, the camera gets stuck and you can't leave the area.

 

[Piuc2020]

Originally posted by: chizow

Originally posted by: Piuc2020
I tried the 177.73 drivers and I got a GPL (general protection fault) error when I even tried to open the game, I downgraded to 169.21, updated the nvidia physx software runtimes and even though it runs now the game suddenly has some failed to render error every now and the freezes are more frequent and more of them are unrecoverable from (before, most freezes would last 20-40 seconds).

Seriously, I can't understand how EA let this one go out the door, what's even more surprising is how these lazy ass bums at Demiurge can't even bother to post at the very friggin least a hotfix or something almost 3 months after release.

I'm officially pissed.

P.D: What's even more confusing, the game works perfectly on my Mac Pro, of course my Mac Pro has a 7300GT so I won't play on it but man, seriously they should do something about this, there are lots of threads and posts about this problems, might as well just upgrade to a HD 4870, it seems ME hates NV cards.

Why are you running the NV PhysX drivers on your system? Your card is unsupported with the current PhysX package and may have even more issues if you start pairing it up with older drivers.

Like I said originally, look in your log folder and check the last few lines in the log before you crash. Each crash log file name will be timestamped the exact second you crashed. This will give you a better idea of what's causing the crash.

The game ran flawlessly on both an 8800GTX (175.16 drivers) and a GTX 280 (177.41) in Vista 64 for me so I don't think its only NV drivers at fault here. Also for you alt-tab folks, as I mentioned earlier, give it at least as much time to go fullscreen as it takes to load up the first time. You can find the startup time in the log file as well. For me it took 15-35s depending on the rig.

I just updated the software runtimes which some UE3 games like UT3 and Mass Effect use, heck, UT3 won´t even boot if you remove the NVIDIA PhysX thingie from the add/remove programs, someone suggested to update the runtimes on a forum so I did.

Well it seems a lot of people are having less trouble in Vista, I think it might be time to give Mass Effect a try on Vista. Does anyone know what the news are on the whole patch thing for MEPC?

 

[wrangler]

Originally posted by: CP5670
I waited longer this time and it does indeed get back into the game eventually, but it fails to recapture the mouse and keyboard so you can't do anything with the game.

I found some strange bugs after playing it more, although there have been no actual crashes. One example occurs during the side quest to win five times in the casino. When you complete it, the camera gets stuck and you can't leave the area.

I had that one. I would actually clip through the wall. I had to do it by going to different machines after each win. I think I was on the first machine to the left when you come in when I got the 5th win. Seemed to me like the trigger for problems was when the dude would say "you seem unusually lucky for a human" or something like that. Every time he said that and I tried to exit the game machine I would be stuck. So I just kept switching out till I got the 5.