By now I just don’t know why games don’t run for me. A typical experience will go like this:
Install game.
Update game to latest version with whatever patches are available.
Run game.
Play for several minutes, up to a few hours.
Horrible Crash which requires a full system shutdown to recover from, as ctrl-alt-delete doesn’t work and the reset button on the machine seems to reset but the video doesn’t come back.
The only hardware in common between the new system I’m testing this on and the old one is the video card and external peripherals. I had tentatively ruled that card out as the cause of the crashes because it’s new as of 6 months ago, and I had experienced similar crashes with the previous card (only with one game, though, as opposed to every 3d game). Now, I’m starting to think that it may actually be the cause.
Games I have demonstrated the crashing with:
The Sims 2
Max Payne
Max Payne 2
No One Lives Forever 2
Games which have been demonstrated to run for hours without crashing:
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Master of Orion II
There are more games I could test with, but I don’t particularly feel like playing any of them right now. The implication is that 3d games don’t work, and non-3d games do.
It doesn’t seem to be the fault of the game, as the experience is similar for each of them. In some games (Max Payne, NOLF2), the system will crash as the character approaches a particular area in-game, or when there is a large amount of graphical processing happening (multiple concurrent explosions). In others (The Sims 2), the system will crash apparantly at random.
I’m starting to think that I won’t be able to play any 3d games until I build a new system from scratch and dedicate it to that purpose. This is a disappointing realization, because I don’t really have the time or money to do that now, and won’t anytime soon.
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