quake 3 arena crashing problems

Post by **gazraa** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 7:40 pm

I hope someone can help. I'm pretty new to quake, so please be gentle.

I have installed Q3 Arena on the following machine:

AMD 2400 Barton
Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb
512mb DDR

installed the 1.32 update

and it keeps crashing.

After about a minute or two of single player deathmatch with 3 or 4 bots it would die and leave my desktop color looking like the brightness had been turned way up.

I upgraded my graphics card drivers to the latest Catalyst ones and now I get a slightly different crash where the sound stutters then bombs out with the same brightness effect left for my enjoyment.
The crash isn't at the same point everytime, but the result is the same.

I've read about some AMD dlls for 1.32 but can't find them or much info on what they solve. I haven't even tried network games yet which was the whole point of me getting the game and I really need to take out some aggression on some willing gamers.

Can anyone tell me in simple terms what I need to install/change/uninstall/punch/blow up or do to get the game running properly?

Post by **dzjepp** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 8:07 pm

Well you haven't played it online yet, but I assume you have a network running and punkbuster is enabled?

Check in console for blue letters to see if punkbuster is enabled, it should give you some kind of message, if it says 'client enabled' or something similar it means its enabled.

If it is enabled, you might want to try the \pb_system 1 setting (type in console). This could help in your crashing problem. Try it out.

Post by **signa** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 10:04 pm

A couple things to try:

run q3, and open the console by pressing the tilde key (~), then type /seta logfile 1. the next time q3 crashes look for the logfile in your /q3/baseq3 directory, open that and look for error codes.

also try renaming the pb directory to something else temporarily to see if that is the problem. if it is, goto evenbalance.com and download pbweb to update your pb files. directions are on the site.

Post by **Foo** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:45 am

Do you play other FPS video games on your PC? My thinking is that perhaps it's an overheating or general instability problem (I've seen mismatched RAM sticks do this on Unreal Tournament, last year).

That should establish if it's a Q3-specific thing or perhaps your PC.

Post by **gazraa** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 11:08 am

doom 3 plays fine, so i can't see it being an overheating problem. are there any decent free monitoring progs to monitor temps or am i stuck with the crappy mti ones with my board?

i'll try the console things and see what happens

Post by **Foo** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:14 pm

Nah, if Doom 3 plays fine then I think you're right to assume this is a Quake 3 issue.

Could you try deleting the \quake iii arena\ folder, then reinstalling from CD and playing it without patching?

I know I'm piling work on you, this could determine whether it's something specific to a version of quake or your config.

Post by **gazraa** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:42 pm

right, well after asking a few people who know a bit more techy stuff than me it appears it's a graphic card driver problem. The reason it's crashing is because the graphics card drivers force the program to crash if something goes wrong.

So, it seems like there is a problem with using the ati radeon card. Could this be something to do with the amd chip problems that i've read a bit about causing the graphics card to mess up, as in quake doesn't detect the amd properly and therefore uses the wrong graphics command or something like that??

Does anyone know of this amd problem and know the solution?

Post by **syn0pz** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 9:28 pm

Try uninstalling all your old graphics drivers first, then reinstalling the new ones from ATI official site: http://www.ATI.com/

Post by **dzjepp** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 9:32 pm

When you are using ATI drivers, make sure you disable fast writes and VPU recover, both should be found inside the control panel. These 2 are pretty much useless.

With ATI I would recommend you try the Omega Drivers found at http://www.omegadrivers.net

Loads better than the standard ATI fare.

EDIT: Also before changing drivers use Driver Cleaner to remove old contents from the system: http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/

Post by **gazraa** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 7:54 pm

so if i clean out the current drivers, install the omega drivers, will i still need to change those settings you mentioned?

BTW cheers for all the help

Post by **dzjepp** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 9:00 pm

Omega has fast writes turned off by default, I think ATI has them off as well (havent used their drivers in a good year or so

). VPU recover is on by default on both of them.

Post by **gazraa** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 7:12 pm

one word...... poo

afraid doing all that gives exactly the same problem. I think I'll try and reinstall quake, and try it before patching it to 1.32

the omega drivers do look pretty good though

Post by **gazraa** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 7:35 pm

update: fresh install of quake with no updates and it runs fine... not one crash. So, the next question is, which version should I update to... if any?

second update: i spoke too soon..... but

this time the game played fine then the computer rebooted :icon28:

maybe now i'm geting into graphic card overheating problems? or could it be something else?

although this is very annoying, at least I'm learning something