- May 9, 2003
- 277
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Hey everyone. Here's my issue: I recently upgraded my rig to A64 and I got a free edition of Half-Life 2 with it, thanks to Monarch's package deal. Here are the specs:
A64 3000+ OC'd to 4000+ speeds
1 GB OCZ PC3700 Gold rev. 2 at 200MHz, 2.5-3-3-7 (I can probably push this up a little more, but my board is very picky with memory timings and speed.)
DFI Ultra-D
Audigy 2
Connect3D Radeon X800XL
Now, when I first tried to play about three days ago, I could play for five minutes before getting a looping sound/stuttering video crash to desktop. This occured with all settings maxed out at 1280x1024. (6x AA, 16x AI) I always got the same error message when this happened, too, and it also occured prematurely if I tried to load a new area (i.e. not necessarily 5 minutes--whichever came first, 5 min or new area). The message was:
"Failed to lock index buffer in CMeshDX8::LockIndexBuffer"
Then a few seconds afterwards, the game crashed completely with the error: "Instruction at 0x24189487 referenced memory at 0x00c20cc0, memory could not be read." I tried looking this up on the steam forums, and very few people were experiencing a similar problem. No one had a real fix for it at all--most people just said: "it's because of the new patch." However, one page suggested any looping crash may have to do with sound card drivers, so I did a search and it turned out Creative released new drivers two days ago. I upgraded, but it didn't help.
Figuring it might be a video issue, I went to ATI's website yesterday and found out that new drivers had also just been released. I downloaded them and started up Half-Life 2, and was able to play for 15 minutes. However, once things started getting a bit more hectic in-game, I went straight to a BSOD with the following error:
"ati2dvag: Device driver stuck in an infinite loop."
Frustrated, I gave up for the night, and came back to it this afternoon. I dropped all of my settings down to the "recommended" levels, and the game worked all right until I picked up the handgun, at which point I noticed that my ammunition was not displaying correctly. You can't really play effectively if you don't know how much ammo you have left, so this caused me no small amount of consternation. Thinking I might just need to change the resolution, I tried to switch in-game, and got the "lock index buffer" error again.
I'm really at my wits end here. I'm thinking of trying Omega Drivers but I just don't know how I feel about 3rd party drivers for my video card. I don't think it's a heat issue, because my computer is rock-stable under prime95, and I'm cooling my chip with a Zalman CNPS-7000AlCu. I can't tell if I just have a bad video card, or if something else is causing the issues--it's worth noting that I play World of Warcraft on all the highest settings for hours on end without any problems whatsoever, and I haven't experienced any other stability problems, so I'm inclined to believe it's software related. On the other hand, WoW, while being a demanding game, doesn't stress the video card in the way that Half-Life 2 does, so I may just not have pushed it hard enough. I can always install Doom 3 and see how that goes; in fact I may do that later today, just as a reference. Still, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Fixed a few grammatical errors.
A64 3000+ OC'd to 4000+ speeds
1 GB OCZ PC3700 Gold rev. 2 at 200MHz, 2.5-3-3-7 (I can probably push this up a little more, but my board is very picky with memory timings and speed.)
DFI Ultra-D
Audigy 2
Connect3D Radeon X800XL
Now, when I first tried to play about three days ago, I could play for five minutes before getting a looping sound/stuttering video crash to desktop. This occured with all settings maxed out at 1280x1024. (6x AA, 16x AI) I always got the same error message when this happened, too, and it also occured prematurely if I tried to load a new area (i.e. not necessarily 5 minutes--whichever came first, 5 min or new area). The message was:
"Failed to lock index buffer in CMeshDX8::LockIndexBuffer"
Then a few seconds afterwards, the game crashed completely with the error: "Instruction at 0x24189487 referenced memory at 0x00c20cc0, memory could not be read." I tried looking this up on the steam forums, and very few people were experiencing a similar problem. No one had a real fix for it at all--most people just said: "it's because of the new patch." However, one page suggested any looping crash may have to do with sound card drivers, so I did a search and it turned out Creative released new drivers two days ago. I upgraded, but it didn't help.
Figuring it might be a video issue, I went to ATI's website yesterday and found out that new drivers had also just been released. I downloaded them and started up Half-Life 2, and was able to play for 15 minutes. However, once things started getting a bit more hectic in-game, I went straight to a BSOD with the following error:
"ati2dvag: Device driver stuck in an infinite loop."
Frustrated, I gave up for the night, and came back to it this afternoon. I dropped all of my settings down to the "recommended" levels, and the game worked all right until I picked up the handgun, at which point I noticed that my ammunition was not displaying correctly. You can't really play effectively if you don't know how much ammo you have left, so this caused me no small amount of consternation. Thinking I might just need to change the resolution, I tried to switch in-game, and got the "lock index buffer" error again.
I'm really at my wits end here. I'm thinking of trying Omega Drivers but I just don't know how I feel about 3rd party drivers for my video card. I don't think it's a heat issue, because my computer is rock-stable under prime95, and I'm cooling my chip with a Zalman CNPS-7000AlCu. I can't tell if I just have a bad video card, or if something else is causing the issues--it's worth noting that I play World of Warcraft on all the highest settings for hours on end without any problems whatsoever, and I haven't experienced any other stability problems, so I'm inclined to believe it's software related. On the other hand, WoW, while being a demanding game, doesn't stress the video card in the way that Half-Life 2 does, so I may just not have pushed it hard enough. I can always install Doom 3 and see how that goes; in fact I may do that later today, just as a reference. Still, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Fixed a few grammatical errors.