Team fortress 2 crashing + steam games EDIT: Now with video

mooshoepork

In the beta of TF2, and it keeps crashing every 5 minutes. Hl2 did the same thing, but not as often. The screen just freezes and the sound stutters, until I reset the PC. I am running a 9800 pro, AMD 64 bit athlon 3000+ and 1 gig of ram. It should run on lowish settings but it crashes. My pc is open, has 2 120 mm fans, and it really cool inside. The core of the 9800 is only warm. I am running the latest ati drivers.

edit:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MXX34UO1

Video of what I'm talking about.

LiveWire

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=80

Your problem is being experienced by many, many people. It's a beta and it has problems, its nothing specifically wrong with you or your hardware.

mooshoepork

Thank you for the reply. Hope they fix it soon.

HalberdBlue

Another fix for TF2 crashes from the valve forums:

Run regedit and navigate to
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\
Memory Management]

Find the "PagedPoolSize" entry, right click modify, and enter
314572800 in DECIMAL as the new value (300MB, nearly double the
windows default)

Reboot and you're set! 300MB is just what most people are using but
some people have reported dramatic success with as little as 190MB.

Scosglen

To be very clear, the issue talked about in that thread and the issue that is fixed by the instructions I wrote which Halberd posted are not for fixing CRASHES. Crashing is when the game process spontaneously ends itself with or without an error.

Valve is hedging out CRASH bugs at breakneck pace because steam automatically compiles a crash report every time TF2 crashes.

The 'stutterbug' or 'looping audio hang' do not trigger a crash report so it has been around for a long time.

This fix is only meant to address the specific kind of lockup where the game freezes and typically the audio loops until hl2.exe is ended. D3D crashes and such are unrelated.

mooshoepork

The audio does loop. Sorry if I was unclear. I will try it! Thanks

I also found if I play it windowed it works for about 30 minutes! Before crashing

jasonlester

On brothers account, it's mooshoe. So far using that regedit trick it hasn't froze!

Saeris

This happens to me too, but only when I run with texture detail set to medium or high. I have a system very similar to yours: P4 3.0, 9800 Pro with Catalyst 7.9, 2x1GB PC3200 at 2-2-2-5, Windows XP. I'll try the regedit too.

TehSpectre

So, should this just become an entire "Help, my TF2 isn't working right!" thread? I don't want to go make another one for a crash problem.

I can get the game running until the moment it tries to load the actual game. Up through connecting to the server and such.

At this point it goes back for a second then crashes.

I can't even make it into the game at all.

My system is low-end for running the game, but it does pass all the minimum reqs.

Help!

mooshoepork

BTW- thank you, my problem has been fixed by regedit.

KungFu

For another fix that works reportedly for many is lowering their directx version from 9 to 8 for TF2, as Directx 9 uses more video memory (which apparently is related to the stutterbug).

Right click the steam game (TF2), choose Properties.
Then click Launch Options.
Now add -dxlevel 81 (or whatever dx version you wish, this is 8.1)

Run the game. Now close the game and take -dxlevel 81 out of the launch options. If you leave the -dxlevel 81 in the launch, it will never remember your video preferences like resolution and such. However you can see it changed your dxlevel by going to the Video options page in the game and see what it says at directx version.

To go back to dx9, change your launch options to -dxlevel 9 or whatever it is now and repeat the process.

This fix has worked for me.