VPU Crashing

[bjornserkr]

I have tried playing Everquest 2, Eve Online, and Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, and all have crashed after a few minutes of playing! The screen will go black, the sound will sometime persist, and I have to completely shut down the macbook pro. One game, Rise of Nations, will actually stay up after a VPU reset by the ATI card, but crashes will continue.

Does anyone know what I can do to fix this? I've reinstalled bootcamp and XP twice, and the problem continues. I got the same results after trying the Omega drivers.

I have a 17" Macbook Pro, 2ghz RAM, 256mb ATI x1600.

Thanks in advance!!
-bjornserkr

[bjornserkr]

Is anyone else having this issue?

[bdj21ya]

Sorry, I don't have any of those games. I know BF 1942 would crash things whenever I tried overclocking my GPU--so I decided that factory setting were good enough for me.

[bjornserkr]

Well it appears that every 3d game I try to run, crashes after a few minutes. I had trying running ATI Tools, and during one of the tests it locked up and reset the VPU as well.

I have read through so many posts about omega drivers, catalyst downloads, etc. Can someone who is successfully playing a 3d game tell me what drivers you are using if they're not the default Mac video drivers?

Thanks!

[bdj21ya]

Just to check, you've tried without anything running in the background (including any tool tray/background services you've installed?). I assume you have. Maybe this is a hardware issue? It seems like more 17" BMP users would be reporting problems if this were widespread.

[Vlaanderen]

I didn't have time to play games in windows yet, but sometimes I get the VPU recovery message. (This is while I’m working in XP without heavy VPU load)

I think it's still a firmware issue. (Still Beta ;))

I’ve got a MBP 17”, 2Gb RAM, 7200rpm HD

[bjornserkr]

Hey bdj21ya, there are no other services running at all when this happens. I did a clean boot camp install, installed the OS X drivers, downloaded the game clients, and each one fails. I haven't modified the OS in any way.

Vlaanderen - I agree, it seems that there are still some firmware issues still there. It's frustrating b/c it sounds like other people are getting games to work on the MBP 17" and I'm wondering why I'm unable to!

Thx for messages so far..

[TheBug]

Hi, just wanted to ask, when you are playing games, are you running on batteries or on external power? The only time I crashed was when I was playing a game on batteries, then switched to external power. I've been playing DirectX 7 3D FPS and DirectX 8 3D online games only. I haven't tried the games you mentioned.
I've been using the stock bootcamp ATI drivers, but I did use the Intel Chipset drivers from the Intel site instead of the bootcamp ones.
Recently upgrade to the Catalyst 6.6 ATI Radeon Mobility drivers. File name is 6-6-mobile_xp_dd_ccc_enu_33680.exe. Installed without any modifications. Seems to be working fine too.

[bjornserkr]

Thanks TheBug, I'll try those out. I'm always plugged in.