Fatal crashes - possibly GFX card-related

[MartiusTiro]

Hello, forum.

I downloaded Universe Sandbox from Steam a day or two ago, and I'm very impressed with it.

Unfortunately, I only get to play with it for a few minutes at a time, because I'm experiencing a lot of crashes.  Also unfortunately, these aren't crash-to-desktop faults where I can reload the program and start again; instead they're dead stops, requiring a reboot.  I suspect they may be related to my video card, which is an admittedly old ATI Radeon HD4800.  (I should mention at this point that whilst upgrading my card would be nice, it's not financially possible at the moment.)  Since upgrading to Windows 7, I believe the card's running on a generic driver, but I've had similar problems with other programs on XP for some time.

Several fairly recent games runs all right - so far I've had no problems with Shogun 2, for example, but there seems to be something about US that my current setup doesn't like.  Has anyone else experienced any problems with US using ATI cards, and are there any GFX settings I might tweak?  (For that matter, before I download any proprietary drivers, can anyone recommend a version that's generally stable?)

[Dan Dixon]

I'm sorry you're having problems.

At the moment I don't have any thoughts on how to fix this beyond making sure you're running the latest video drivers.

What drivers are you running?

Have you tried updating your video drivers?

[MartiusTiro]

Thanks for replying.  At the time I posted, I was running Microsoft's generic drivers for a Radeon HD4800; I have since installed the latest Catalyst pack, although I'm a little unsure as to the actual version number: the package I downloaded was marked v. 11.5 for Windows 7 32-bit; but my Device Manager reports driver version 8.85.

Still, I strongly suspect it's an incompatibility buried somewhere in my setup - I have had plenty of problems before and I do think it's probably related to my GFX card (I had a persistent 7F STOP error with my previous WinXP installation which some websites suggested was down to this).

If you can't suggest a solution and if no-one else is having this problem then I'll assume it is just my individual setup.  I just wondered if there were any alternative graphics modes, or somesuch, that I could run the software in to see if it made any difference.  One day I hope to be able to afford a new card, but it might be a few months yet...

If it helps a diagnosis, the crash usually occurs within a few minutes.  Last night it was less than one, but it has run for about five minutes or so.  It locks up the whole system, though I'm reasonably sure the hard drive is still doing stuff, and it turns my screen into a sort of checkerboard pattern made out of the last frame it showed, if that makes sense.

Thanks again for your attention.

[LethalByte]

I too am experiencing crashes and BSoD since installing the Steam Version Universe Sandbox.

The issues happen while using US, there is no real pattern. The crash was very odd, cpu dropped to idle, windows/mouse stopped responding but the US window would update every 8-10 secs and the labels would be corrupt and what looked like a memory dump with a red/black check pattern appeared.

I have a NVIDA GeForce GTX 460 the driver version is 270.61 (screen shot of sys info attached) this is the latest version for my card on the NVida website. I was thinking of trying download grading to a old version of the drivers.

I have a quick look and cannot find a log file or such that I could upload.

The next time I will try and take a pic with my mobile phone and upload it.

[Quontex]

Well it may be that GFX card, Because i have a Radeon HD2600 it it runs fine on that

[Dan Dixon]

I'm sorry I don't have any better suggestions for things to try.

I suspect this is configuration issue that's unique to your machine or bad hardware could also caused these crashes.

I develop on nVidia hardware, but many users are running Universe Sandbox successfully on ATI hardware.

If you have any other thoughts or updates, please share.

[MartiusTiro]

I probably shouldn't resurrect an old thread this way, but I hope I'll be forgiven this once.

I just wanted to say that having replaced my video card (actually downgraded it to an extent, but still runs all right), I now haven't had a crash in three days running U.S. on and off.  EVE Online also turned out to have the same problem but it hasn't occurred since the replacement.  I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but it looks as though it might have been a problem specific to my GFX card.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

[Dan Dixon]

I probably shouldn't resurrect an old thread this way, but I hope I'll be forgiven this once.

No worries. Totally appropriate despite the age of the thread.

... but it looks as though it might have been a problem specific to my GFX card.

Cool. So glad it's working for you.