Frequent display driver recoveries

[:1]I have never seen a game recover from display driver crashes as well as Space Siege on Vista (Ultimate x64, as it happens). However, I have also never seen a game crash my driver (Catalyst 8.8 on an HD3850 because my HD4870X2 is faulty, even though OCUK won't admit it) quite so much.



9 out of 10 times it just lags up for a second, goes black, has a change of cursor colour and then comes back again. This mainly happens with tooltips I find, such as holding over skills in the skill tree to see the descriptions. But who wants a game to keep doing that, and even if it recovers brilliantly 9 out of 10 times, 10 times is far too much and it can ruin a shoot out completely and that 1 time out of 10, it needs the process to be killed.



I don't really know who is at fault here so I don't want to point fingers but I have no problems in any other games with the HD3850 on Catalyst 8.8 for Vista x64 (including Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 and SupCom [+FA])



Do others with similar configurations get similar problems or is it just me?|||With the newer generation video cards, you may have some success with the "forceflushbeforepresent" argument you can find in the readme. That might help until the card manufacturers get their drivers updated. See the stickied post for more details.



- Servo|||Thanks but I have already tried that from the "mouse lag" topic. It made no difference.



Is there any debug switch I can use to send the devs crash dumps?|||Not to force it in the retail version, but it may have created logs automatically. Check your \My Documents\My Games\Space Siege\Logs folder to see if there is anything there.



- Servo|||There's nothing in there (not even any hidden/system files)



I expect Space Siege probably just sees a display driver crash similar to pressing alt+tab and just re-initialises the Direct3D device without logging any error.



Edit: I found the source of the problem and, unsurprisingly, it wasn't space siege. As I mentioned in the first post, I had recently switched from a HD3850 to a faulty HD4870X2 back to a HD3850. Unfortunately, even after reinstalling the driver and catalyst control center, it was still using the clocks from the HD4870X2. ATI doesn't really handle this well, it turns out. The sliders don't even have the correct minimum/maximum values. Anyway, manually editing a custom profile sorted it all out (as I knew the real values anyway).



What is surprising is that space siege was the only game that picked up on this. Most games are far more stressful on the graphics (space siege runs on max at 1920x1200 on a HD3850, which is rare for a modern title) but they do not trip up the drivers. Likewise, windows media player and VLC didn't cause any problems but flash (youtube) did crash a couple of times.



Sorry for wasting your time.|||Not a waste of time, maybe this helps someone else. Glad you got it sorted out. I am proud that we have always built in unlimited scaling for the games we make in house, and although the UI gets a little messed up when you run some of our older titles on an IMAX projector, it still works pretty well. :)



With a sufficiently powerful display you can play the original Dungeon Siege in 2560x1600 by using the command line argument "height=1600 width=2560", which definitely makes for a very interesting play experience. Practically a whole new game.



- Servo|||I tend to find that UIs very rarely scale well to higher resolutions. I know that Dungeon Siege's UI seemed to get smaller and smaller as the years went by and even Spore, which came out today, is almost impossible to actually read at 1920x1200 (the minimap becomes about 1" high).