Occasional "freeze" but not really...

OneJibmoNation

Hey hey hey

Love the game! And thanks for the gorgeous update! Awesome stuff

My problem happens every so often after playing a while - I'll get a lag spike (during heated battle with tons of stuff going on) and my screen will freeze.. But I can still hear everything, i can hear when I shoot and everything else - just a frozen screen. The only thing that fixes it is to alt+tab out of the game and to go back in. The game runs very smooth on my system on highest settings and only ever get big fps drops when there's a lot going on in the area (like 3 exo's attacking alien main base with EVERYONE in the same area). It seems the screen freezing thing only happens in these instances. I have no freezing or issues in any other games atm.

asus gtx680 directcu ii oc
i7 2600k
16gb ddr3
game installed on 250gb ssd

HeatSurge

LOL it sounds exactly like the exosuit firing bug that I was having before they reduced the animation sizes. I think that happens when the game runs out of video memory?... Luckily, exos don't make my game crash randomly anymore, but I'm having hitching problems outlined elsewhere :-/ ...

It's weird because I have a GTX 480 and this bug you're decribing disappeared since they reduced animation sizes, yet you have a GTX 680 (better/more mem?) and it still happens. That's weird.

IronHorse

Check your logs, it sounds like your display driver stopped working/crashed.

DC_Darkling

If the device driver actually did crash, then there is a very big chance that it wrote a error in windows' event viewer aswell.

HeatSurge

The way it used to "crash" for me did not generate a windows event viewer report. The driver itself didn't "crash" for me previously (like, I didn't get the windows popup etc.), just the game's rendering process "crashed" - I believe there was a "device lost" written to the log sometimes. The thing is, the "device lost" stopped happening for me eventually, and then reducing animation size made the problem disappear for me completely.

WonderWaffles

Old drivers or beta drivers?
(WHQL) - http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/57096

(Link is assuming you've got Windows 7 64-bit)

Adambean

Not sure if the freezing I get is the same as OneJibmoNation's. My game loses focus for a few seconds as it freezes, as if I had ALT-TAB'd to my desktop. The game then regains focus after a second showing just a black screen for a few seconds (though sounds/voice can be heard), then resumes to normal display.

Mine doesn't appear to be related to what is happening around me. It happens as often when I'm just skulking around running across the map to somewhere as it does in the critical moment of the battle. I find that if I was moving forward as it starts to freeze then I still move forward until it recovers, and other players just see me with 999 ping until I return. If it were during a heated battle though I often find myself dead, though my client doesn't notice that for a couple of seconds as it catches up with the event queue.

I'm getting this more frequent than ever today. It appears to happen on Mineshaft more than any other map, but it has never happened to me while I'm commanding -- even on Mineshaft. It has also never happened in explore mode or as a spectator in a busy game. Not verified this with myself but I could also guess it happens more often playing as alien, but I'd need to play as marines more often to find out. (I use the special alien sight constantly)

In my case I found that switching from full-screen (border-less window) with V-sync on (triple buffer) to full-screen (regular) without v-sync helped the problem quite a bit. I also use maxfps 60 to not overload graphics and get a smooth frame rate. The issue still occurs as frequently, but recovers much faster. (recovers in 3 seconds instead of around 20) I've also found that turning texture streaming off usually eases the issue frequency, though Mineshaft is an exception.



Some system info in case related:

CPU: Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield running at 3.8 GHz (instead of 2.67 GHz)
Memory: 12 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 (8-8-8-24)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 socket 1366 motherboard
Graphics: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560Ti, factory over-clocked -- running driver 314.something (checked today, most recent)
Power: OCZ ZX-Series 850W
Storage: 2x Western Digital 500 GB 7200 RPM hard disks (RAID 1 using Intel Rapid Storage)
OS: Windows 7 Professional x64

Also logged temperatures using CoreTemp: CPU never exceeded 82*C (99*C limit).

IronHorse

Updating this, adambeam explained in another post his issue was running dual monitors, selecting just one fixed his issue

Adambean

^ Yep, or at least that was the bulk of the problem. 2 days ago the issue came back again mid-game with just 1 monitor active. I thought "oh ffffssssssss" at first, but it recovered itself completely back to normal literally within 1 second. Didn't get time to see the desktop.

1st display is my TV via HDMI, 2nd display is my monitor via DVI (primary) -- usually I use extend displays to plonk Media Player Classic on my TV. Only using 1 monitor stopped (nearly) all freezing for me.

WIN+P shortcut then allows me to switch between single monitor and extend displays quickly.