whats with UT03 & ATi lockups?

[jonn]

I seem to see a lot of this going on on different msg boards. Something about a "stuck in loop"?
I have a rad 9000 pro, Asus A7V8X, 512 Kingston mem, AMD 1800 and i cant run UT at all, lockups, reboots, etc soon after starting game, sometimes as soon as i start it, but strange thing is, when i first built this computer (all same parts as now) UT ran fine. I have upgraded bios, tweeked all bios settings, reinstalled XP pro (and win 98) does it on both os's. Have patched UT, tweeked all its settings, tried all different control panel settings for the video card, and still cant get it to run right. Have tried about all the ATI and hacked drivers out there. tried from DX8 to last 9.0b.
Now Quake 3 and team Arena run great, no problems at all. I have done no cpu/mem overclocking at all either.
I have reinstalled UT , no better.
I just cant figure if its video or motherboard or memory. Anyone have any ideas how to try to pin point whats happening?

 

[Mem]

You tried it with fastwrites disabled in ATI Smargart tab?

 

[jonn]

yeah, i tried everything i could think of, so many times i cant kep track of what changes i make each time now. Just doesnt make sence that it would work fine on bios defaults, ATI panel defaults for a month or so and then get so weird it wont run UT at all. as i said team Arena,Q3, all apps, are all fine too.

 

[Mavrick007]

Are you overclocking your vid card alot? I have found that UT2k3 is a very finicky game and doesn't like a heavily overclocked machine.

I had my machine overclocked as much as I could get it to go and everything worked fine
(3dmark2k1 would loop perfectly as well as all my games would work except UT2k3, which would reboot usually after 1 map was finished playing).

I clocked my cpu back and it didn't help, and then I clocked back my vid card and now I don't have any problems running UT2k3.
Heh I didn't need to overclock my card cause everything works well, but I always like to see how much I can get out of it so I clock back for UT2k3 now.

It might not be this, but it could be part of the problem.

 

[FacelessNobody]

Yeah I'd say it's finicky. It's one of only two games that doesn't run flawlessly for me. Both it and Freelancer are smooth except for some minor herky-jerky stuttering here and there. The games are still playable, but the quick stuttering is just enough to piss you off.

 

[jonn]

No, video card is not overclocked at all, nor is cpu, i am running stock (default) settings on video, cpu, and memory.
Strange thing is UT ran fine, no problems at all for awhile on this machine, and i ran it a lot. I changed nothing at all.
Just rebooted one day for the first time, then got progressivley worse tillyou cant play it at all.
That is when i started changing settings, still no oc on anything though. I dunno if it will ever work again, so tired of messing with it..