[longbaugh01]

EDIT: Sigh, I tried one more thing after posting this and "fixed" the issue. Fixed is in quotes because my video card is probably dying, but using a program called ATITool, I underclocked the graphics core from it's standard 560 to 460, and the game is now playable.

Problem description: San Andreas had worked fine for me for more than a month, though it would crash about once every 2 or 3 hours of playtime, and by crash I mean it would exit out to a windows exception error. In speaking with other people playing it though, this was rather routine, especially when playing on sa:mp servers.

Three days ago it crashed like this, and ever since I can not play it. It will start fine, both when trying to connect to an sa:mp server, and when starting a single player game. Once I get into the game though, it will start this cycle: It will start and load the game world, but then once there it will freeze with the sound continuing, then the sound will start to stutter or skip faster and faster and it will then unfreeze. It does this repeatedly.

Attempted fixes: Some of these are no-brainers, some of them are gtaa specific fix ideas I have found by searching. I've been working on this pretty constantly for 3 days now.

These are in no particular order:

- Deleting the .set file for gtaa in it's folder in My Documents.
- Deleting userdata.dat file in the game directory, which is only applicable to
sa:mp.
- Uninstalling/Reinstalling multiple times. I have un-installed the Steam version,
re downloaded it. For sa:mp with the Steam version you have to copy the directory
to another location and then downgrade the game. When the problem first started
it happened with both this copy of the game which had worked fine, and also the
Steam version. I have also installed off of a disc image. So two different
sources of the game exhibit the same issue. Ended up getting the Steam version to
see if it does the same thing, it does.
- Cleaned out old video and sound drivers, installed newest video, sound drivers,
and nforce chipset drivers.
- Re-installed latest DirectX 9.
- Cleaned physical interior of computer.
- Installed windows updates.
- Put sound acceleration to none in both dxdiag and sound properties in windows.
- Have tried various combinations of settings within San Andreas.
- Disabled my dual monitors in dualview mode, and tried using just one.
- Ran scan disk and defragmented my hard drive.
- Ran seatools hard drive tests, which came up clean.
- Closed any other application open when trying San Andreas. Made no difference.
- Tried changing 5.1 speaker setting to just stereo.
- Tried adding UseEAX=False to stream.ini
- Tried adding Use3DSound=False to stream.ini.
- Tried adding both at same time to stream.ini
- Tried changing memory and devkit memory in stream.ini to 51200 from 13500
- Tried changing memory and devkit memory in stream.ini to 256000 from 13500
Did this which I found by searching: "search for 'device presence' in the
registry, each entry has 3 things: Emulated, VxD, and WDM. If they're all set to
1 change VxD and WDM to 0, if emulated is set to 1 and VxD and WDM to 0 set
emulated to 0 and VxD and WDM to 1" Mine were all set to 1, so I changed VxD and
WDM to 0 for each entry.
- Tried totally disabling virtual drives (i.e. daemon tools).
- Tried all windows compatibility modes.
- Tried checking the text services box under compatibility.
- Tried checking everything under compatibility.
- Un-installed Nero.
- Tried starting game, waiting for freezing to start, tabbing out to windows, then
tabbing back in.
- Tried setting affinity to one core (tried both cores).
- Tried setting priority to "above normal" in task manager.
- Tried running it on my secondary monitor in dualview.
- Saw Quicktime elements being used by the gta_sa.exe process, so un-installed
Quicktime, restarted gta_sa.exe.
- Set Nvidia control panel application specific settings for gtaa all to off or
basic.
- Checked to make sure hdd was set to dma and not pio.
- Tried setting desktop color to 16 and running game at 16 colors.
- Tried reinstalling game without installing game audio.
- Tried disabling sound card, but then game would not start without a sound card
present
- Did a system restore to before the problem existed.

A few things I have noticed while working on this:

Using performance monitors, I've noticed that when one of the freezes happens the cpu use for both cores goes to zero. Also when one of the freezes happens it appears to freeze the entire computer for the duration of the freeze.

I have also noticed something odd when messing with gtaa settings. If I set all the settings to the highest the freezes become more infrequent by a large margin, but the frame rate is of course terrible, and there are weird glitches where object models with become spiky and polygonal. The freezes still happen often enough to be unplayable though. It also seemed that the linchpin of the freezes happening less was having anti-aliasing set to 3 (gtaa has 1, 2, and 3). This makes no sense to me.

Recent changes: None that I have been able to think of.

Operating system: Windows XP Pro OEM w/ Service Pack 3

System specs: Home built.

- ASUS M2N-E Motherboard
- AMD 64 X2 3800+ (Windsor) Processor
- EVGA GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB GDDR3 PCI Express Graphics Card
- Enermax FMA II 460-Watt Power Supply
- Seagate 250GB 7200 SATA-300 Hard Drive
- 2 x Corsair Value Select 1024 MB PC5400 DDR2 667MHz Memory

Voltages/Temps from CPUID:



The voltages seem off, but ASUS PC Probe II reports them as being:

Vcore = 1.41
+3.3 = 3.45
+5.0 = 5.16
+12.0 = 12.31

I'd like to mention is that all other applications and games are working fine. Also, I realize this could maybe be solved by reformatting/reinstalling, but I really can not afford to right now for various reasons.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

[SilentVic18]

We anticipate that the San Andreas had formed accomplished for me for added than a month, admitting it would blast about already every 2 or 3 hours of playtime.




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