Did GalCivII kill my video card?

Radeon 9800 Pro 128 current catalyst drivers.

That is the exact video board in my computer.

1G Ram

Same. Again.

EDIT: found an old bug report and am copy pasting sys info:
System Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
System Model: Dimension 4600i
BIOS: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A07
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
Physical Memory: 1278MB RAM
Page File: 373MB used, 1493MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS


Display Info
Display device 1:
Device Name: \\.\DISPLAY1
Card Name: RADEON 9800 SERIES
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip Type: RADEON 9800 PRO AGP (0x4E48)
DAC Type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Key Device: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E48&SUBSYS_10021002&REV_00
Display Memory: 128.0 MB
Current Display Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor Name: Plug and Play Monitor
Monitor Max Resolution: 1600,1200
Driver Name: ati2dvag.dll
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6601
Driver Date: 2/21/2006 22:46:46
DirectX Acceleration Enabled: Yes


My system is more than 3 years old and has been running this game (versions 1.0x, all the 1.1 betas and now the 1.1 release) near flawlessly. I've had 4 crashes in 2 months of playing. First crash was because I still was using old drivers. Second and third crashes were from odd gliches I went looking for in the game. Last crash was last night with a page file too small problem (not anymore!).

Outside of the one instance of trying to play with old drivers (even then it lasted 39 hours straight), I can tell you unequivically that the game has not fried my video card. Since they are the same card with similar setup, I can tell you the game did not fry your video card.

Most likely some settings have been changed with regard to your drivers to overide the refresh rate or resolution. It'd be great if you could post your debug.err or at least tell us waht res and refresh rate you were trying at. If your card was fried, you would see issues when just at the windows desktop since it also makes use of video hardware.

It is a coincidence. And its not a big coincidence either, it had to happen sometime, so..
My prev card got busted when clicking the OK button in the driver settings, but it wasnt because of me changing the anti-aliasing settings. It was because it simply was time for that card to die

Video cards die all the time. Installing a game wouldn't have anything to do with it. Sometimes they just fail.

Game BLOWS UP MY MONITOR:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/60.html

-HM

It's a fact of life that hardware can die. Software doesn't normally cause hardware to die though. I say normally because there is software that does things like, overclock hardware, and as SuperGeek mentioned has settings for things such as refresh rates. For instance on a CRT monitor, forcing a refresh rate higher on it than it can handle can blow it out. Unlike SuperGeek though, from you description(tried different monitors, res, resfresh rates) I think your card is probably fried. Cards have various areas of on them for controlling different functions. An area controls 2D(desktop) while another does 3D. I cannot completely rule out that some setting is hosed and all you need to do is change it to a proper setting and you'll be back to normal, but I tend to think your card is most likely dead.

Did GalCiv II kill it? No. It was simply your cards' time to leave this world.

I had an Alienware with a an Asus P4T533-C motherboard, Intel P4 3.06 CPU, and the system used RDRAM. One day it just gave up the ghost. I don't know what was wrong exactly. I tried swapping out the vid card, but nothing. Either the motherboard, cpu, or ram went out. I ended up ordering a new motherboard, cpu and ram and put them together in that pc case(tower) which has the power supply, hard drive, sound card, video card, ect. and it's what I'm using today.

When something in your PC dies you just have to go... out with the dead and in with the new.

Regards

That's a hilarious link. That does actually happen. Activision recently had to pull their Quake 4 beta patch because it was damaging LCD displays.

I have the 9800 PRO with 128 MB and only have had a few problems with GalCiv 2 (With either old or new drivers)

I'm going to be different here and say yes GalCiv2 killed your card...well maybe a better way to say it is to have finished it off. Your card was probably on it's last legs. GalCiv2 asked it to preform a function and that was it.
Any other software could have caused it at that time too.

It was just it's time to go. Give it a proper burial.

I miss the guys of Old Man Murray. Just about everything they wrote was hilarious.

But this sounds like a case where the card was starting to go. But to be sure it's the card and not some screwball Windows or driver remnant problem, try putting the video card in a different system.

-HM

OMG. Now That's A Review!!!!!

...worth almost five hundred dollars? You may be surprised to learn that, in my opinion, no it's not. It's so boring, frustrating, and ugly that when it eventually BLOWS UP YOUR MONITOR you might actually be a little relieved. Until you realize that all your money is gone and Red Storm has ruined Christmas. Seriously, nice job you Scrooge &*%$ - I have eight dollars left to buy presents for people, some of whom are children. Even Blaze and Blade managed to not make my computer explode.

Thanks for the laugh Hollow Man.

Hi all.

I have a Radeon 9600 XT, AMD 2200+, 512 RAM (NEED more I know...)
The blank screen bug happened to my sometime to when I was playing with the version 1.01X. (All driver up to date). And yes the same problem seem to happen in my other game to. Dawn of war to be precise. I don't know if it's related but maybe it's not a coincidence, at least it worth investigating.

Rakasak

If it's not a hardware problem, it would have to be a driver or directX problem to affect multiple games. Did you update your directX when you installed?

I was previously playing on a 9800 pro about a week ago. I've since moved on to my dual SLI'd GeForce 7900 GT's

I didnt have any problems on my 9800 at all.

Man, you guys with the high-end video cards getting video related crashes. I'm running the game on a base model Dell with a 32mb on-board video, 512mb ram, and play gigantic galaxy games with no problems whatsoever. Does it run like greased lightning? Not even close. But I can get about 20 turns done in the one hour of spare time each day that I can play.

Great link to the Old Man Murray site!

No problem, Skelton42. You can go on to read the Blaze and Blade review, which is equally fantastic.

Duma should paraphrase this quote to anyone else who says his video card was going to die anyway:

"At this point, you might be wondering whether my monitor was about to die anyway. All I can say is that why don't you try using that same logic on the surviving family members of people killed in a plane crash and see how it holds up there."

-HM

In my case, I have my directx driver up to date.

It mignt not be an hardware problem, but maybe it at something to do with the configuration or a conflict cause by the installation of GalCiv II.

Rakasak

Duma's problem sounds a little different from yours Rakasak.

Duma, did you check to see if updating to the latest version of DirectX helped? You could also try re-installing your video drivers before pronouncing the card dead.

 

To update or re-install your video drivers:

1) Go to the website for the manufacturer of your video card, usually Intel, NVidia, or ATI and download the latest drivers.
2) Right click on your my computer icon and choose properties
3) Click on the hardware tab
4) Click on the Device Mangaer
5) Select your video card under Display adapters and right click on it. Choose Uninstall.
6) Reboot
7) Cancel the Found New Hardware wizard when you log back into windows
8) Install the drivers you downloaded (you may need to reboot again after installing them)

Duma did say he reinstalled the current drivers, plus a few different older ones.

In addition to trying the card in a different PC, I'd try using some kind of "driver cleaner" program to make sure all old driver parts are erased from the system, then install the newest driver again.

-HM