Graphics card crashing?

smof

My computer has started screwing up in a weird way. I've been playing a lot of Morrowind lately (yeah I know I'm 10 years late). It will run fine for up to an hour or so, then freeze up and the screen goes blank. The game obviously unfreezes, because I can hear normal sound again, but there is no signal getting to the monitor. Only way to get a picture back is to reboot the PC. This only happens when I'm playing the game not when I'm just browsing the web or anything.

Does that sound like my graphics card is crashing? And if so what sort of things could be causing it? The card is only 2 years old (Radeon HD4650) and has never given me any problems up until a few days ago when this started. I've read that it could be a power supply issue, or overheating, but I don't really know how to check for either. All my fans are still working, though it is pretty dusty inside the case. I just tried touching the edge of the graphics card when it happened just now and it felt pretty dang hot, but I never touched it before this started happening so I have nothing to compare it to.

TychoCelchuuu

Blow all the dust out of your case.

Macro9

Are you using Morrowind Graphics Extender?

Morrowind is normally more prone to use CPU resources over that of your GPU.

Either way try turning up the fan speed on you GPU at least. Your drivers may not be automatically adjusting them or it may not be going high enough.

Another thing it could be is your actual display driver isn't responding. I've get those quite often with my 4870. Perhaps update your drivers or rollback to a more stable version.

smof

Yeah I am using MGE. It occurred to me earlier that the crashing only started after I started using it, and when I first ran it I told it to set the graphics to best quality. Turned it back down to the Morrowind default settings and, so far at least, it hasn't crashed. So maybe it was just too much work for it to run highest settings plus the hi-res texture packs I installed. Just weird because I've had too-high graphics cause lag and crashing before but never overheating the card.

Seeks

Yeah, that's exactly what happens to my card when I overtax it. Black screen, still getting sound (for a few seconds, then shit just crashes all over). ATI HD4870. It's had that problem since day one.

I'm strongly considering buying Nvidia in the future.

mts

had that happen to me with my 5770 with Mass Effect and borderlands. eventually got Borderlands working fine when i turned up the fan. since then there have been driver updates and i just turned my fan back down so hopefully it still runs fine

alexholliz

MGE might be the problem here, not the card.
It does a host of things that are normally coded into a newer game, and the ATI/Nvidia software is "aware" of the changes.
(Like application-specific AA support, as an example)
MGE enable AA, Vsync, Antistropic Filtering, and anything that makes a modern game look good, however, ATI Catalyst Control Center specifically treats MGE as a processor heavy Application, not a GPU intensive Game, so it interferes with MGE. The obvious solution is to simply copy the driver software, uninstall CCC, and then manually install the Graphics Card again after a reboot. This has been reported to fix the issue.

If you're a big fan of the CCC, then you probably already have a Profile built for MGE, which may just need to be tweaked.

Of course, the card may still be the problem, so run speedfan while the game is on, and make sure your temps are realistic: 60-75c. If not, there's a problem. (Unless it's lower than 60c, then your case setup is awesome.)