Brink crashes my computer

(DjIceman) #1

EDIT: This is a repost from http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1897911 (people report the same problem there)

Title pretty much says it.

So, seemingly randomly, Brink freezes up my computer. Completely locks it up. I can’t do anything. No CTRL+ALT+DEL, nothing. It just locks up entirely. The only thing I can do then is just manually reboot my computer via the reboot button.

Drivers are up to date, OS is up to date, I have an nVidia card, no other game or applications does this, etc., etc. This is strictly a problem caused by Brink.

Sometimes it happens after I’ve been playing for a minute or so, other times I can play for an hour or two. Just completely randomly, really.

I’m trying to play this game, even despite all of the problems, but dear God this game really doesn’t want me to. If it started throwing knives at me, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Now, I have been monitoring my computer when this happens. GPU temperatures are fine, GPU load is usually around 70-80%, only ~500MB of the graphics memory is in use, RAM usage is hovering above 1.9GB, CPU isn’t being used much (doesn’t go above 70% for any of the cores) and temperatures are fine there as well.

Everything is working fine as far as the system is concerned, but then, BAM it just locks up and that’s it.

What the hell am I even supposed to do? Event viewer doesn’t show any errors. Neither do I get any error logs. There’s nothing I can do.

Any suggestions? Anyone else having similar issues? Anybody?

System info:
Intel Q9400 stock speeds
GTX 460 1GB stock speeds
4GB DDR2 RAM
Windows 7 SP1 x64
GPU Driver version 275.27 (though, 270.61 has the same issues)

(Moonlighter) #2

I’d wager you’re having this issue:
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24899

But the video driver isn’t recovering and so it’s remaining locked up rather than reporting the OpenGL error.

(DjIceman) #3

Hey, thanks for that.

(Moonlighter) #4

I just wish I could have given you better news, like “Hey, here’s the fix for that.”

(DjIceman) #5

Honestly, with this game I wasn’t expecting any good answer to begin with.

I would rather get the actual OpenGL error than get a hard lockup, though. How come I’m not getting the error? Anything you can suggest for that?

(Moonlighter) #6

Unless somehow the TDR setting got disabled, I wouldn’t know why Windows wasn’t recovering correctly. You can find some info on the TDR in this post:

Note that the “Solution” offered in that post probably won’t work.

(DjIceman) #7

Well, I navigated to the registry entry and there is a TdrLevel entry with a hex value of 0. Should I add the delay entry? If so, what value should I use?

(Moonlighter) #8

TDRLevel set to 3 might prevent the complete lockup.

Making any changes to the registry though is a “Do so at your own risk” thing. I have heard reports from people that adding in a delay value doesn’t solve the issue. Your mileage may vary.

(DjIceman) #9

Well, I’ve reverted back to 266.58 and so far, it seems to have had a positive effect. Hopefully it sticks. I just played for ~2 hours and didn’t get a lockup. Though, there was an occasion where it almost as if came really, really close to doing so (5-10 fps for 10 or so seconds). Fortunately, nothing notable happened afterwards.

So if anyone else is experiencing a hard lockup, going back to 266.58 might help. Don’t get your hopes up though, as I’ve seen people report having the issue even after reverting back to 266.58.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure if it helped my case at all. I might of been lucky for this session. Anyhow, waiting for the Monday patch for now. Not sure if I’m going to update the drivers once the update is rolled out. The news post had no mention of this particular problem.

We’ll just have to wait and see.