Graphics Crash?

[pretzdothack]

Yeah. So I've been dealing with this for a while, and I can't seem to figure it out. Occasionally (at least once when playing) the game will crash. It seems to happen when I'm loading or exiting a menu of some sort. I'm noticing that the menu it happens most often with is a loot menu of some sort. The crash is odd.

 

Upon exiting/loading the menu the screen gets these little dots that are green (I'm using the green HUD. Color is probably not related) and they cover the screen relatively evenly spaced. The sound begins to loop rapidly and after a few seconds my monitor resets to black. Then the sound fixes itself for a minute, and then loops again. This just repeats. I'm forced to do a hard reset of my system. No ctrl+alt+del, no alt+tab. Nothing. Occasionally I can get a mouse icon of some sort to appear, but it doesn't move. Then it just fades when the monitor flashes again.

 

I had asked once before but nothing really came out of it. Someone suggested I change video drivers; So I did. I had been using Catalyst 10.7. Then went to 10.4 as per the suggestion. It happened less it seems, but still happened. Steam then suggested the "latest" ATI drivers. 10.9. So I once again did a clean wipe of the drivers and installed that. Still crashing. It does seem to be a driver failure, or at least appear to be one, but when I've had them in the past windows let me know that it was trying to recover.

 

Someone said it could be my video card "dying". Yet i've only had it for just a year this month. I used GPUZ to check the temperature and all other stats and everything appears to be normal. I don't believe this is mod related because it happened in FO3 as well. (I only started FO3 for my pc for modding two days before NV came out so I didn't experiment with the problem in that aspect). I run the game on High settings, and when running the game in low-mid settings still crashed.

 

I would really like a solution or some advice or at least somewhere to begin looking. Thanks for any and all info!

 

System Specs:

Win 7x64 Ultimate

8GB DDR3 RAM

i5 3.6GHZ

ATI HD4850 10.9 Driver set

46"Samsung LCD tv/monitor :D

[MythWisper]

Ive had the same problem with the same video card and ive looked for help for it everywhere, and all i got was "its an overheating problem", which i dont know if thats true but ATI gave Little to no support saying "we will try to fix it in our next driver release". ...Sorry, thought id share my findings(it does it on other high-end games at really high resolutions.)

[Fumofumo]

It sounds like you are experiencing a case of artifacting, as in the odd pixelation and color changes. It is either caused by your GPU's ram being overloaded and unable to handle the workload, or outrageous temperatures. Are you actually using GPU-Z to check temps under a serious load? As in while currently playing? If you don't want to do it while trying to play New Vegas and having to alt-tab all day, you can download MSI Afterburner which should include Kombuster. After installing that, open up Afterburner and it will display temperatures. Hit the K and Kombuster will load over it. Hitting the T key will load the temperature overlay in Kombuster. If you start seeing anything odd, check if your temperature reached a ludicrous number. Most ATI Cards are a little hot, especially the one you have, but due to the variation of parts, anything above 85c may or may not cause artifacting, anything above 100c is definite in causing problems. If it is truly a case of an overheating graphics card, you might have to look into some after-market cooling devices.

[pretzdothack]

@MythWisper- Intriguing. Thanks for the information!

 

 

@Fumofumo- I've only had two real artifactings while playing. To which my computer replied with a BSOD, lol. Otherwise there hasn't been any color changes or pilxelation on the normal crashes I'm speaking of. Next time it happens I'll try to get a screen shot if it'll let me.

 

Usually I just check GPU-z before the game starts and sometimes in the middle of it. Mostly though it's after the crash and as soon as it boots up I'll check it. I've even run in windowed mode a few times and positioned GPU-z where I could see the temperature. I'll look into MSI Afterburner and check that out.

 

As for the after-market cooling devices I already have an extra fan that plugs into the PCI port underneath it and cools the card down even more. I've never seen the temperature read higher than maybe 70c.