Intermittent Freezes? *UDPATE 8: Solution: Use Nvidia Beta Driver 169.28*

[KentaroKaos]

UPDATE 8: NVIDIA BETA DRIVERS 169.28
These seem to eliminate the problem.

UPDATE 7: THE TEMPORARY SOLUTION (THAT STILL DOESN'T WORK FOR EVERYONE)
Well, I know that my "switch to XP" solution wasn't very popular. So I continued working on finding a fix that worked for me in Vista. Here's what made my game free of any freezes.

I uninstalled my NVidia driver completely. This means going into the control panel, into programs and features, and selecting NVIDIA DRIVERS. Then I clicked on Uninstall/Change. Once those files were uninstalled. I ran Driver Cleaner to clean out the remaining NVidia files (I selected every "NVidia" option in that program). I rebooted. I ran in safe mode, and ran Driver Cleaner once more to clean the files again, just to make sure. Then I rebooted again, normally, and proceeded with a fresh install of NVidia driver 163.75. After it finished installing, I rebooted again, and ran UT3. Played on Gateway and Torlan with no freezes, twice each.

So there you have it. If you are having freezing issues, uninstall your current NVidia drivers COMPLETELY, using Driver Cleaner, and reinstall them from scratch. I'm not sure if the newer beta drivers will work as well, but I'm about to try it. I'll update on that as soon as I get results.

TRY IT OUT. LEAVE FEEDBACK.

ADDED: Just followed my procedure and installed the 169.12 Beta driver. IT CAUSES FREEZING. Followed my procedure for clean install of older 163.75 drivers, and game runs smooth as glass once again.

UPDATE 6:
Kithylin has found a solution that works for him. Start UT3 in windowed mode, then just alt-enter into fullscreen mode. I've tried it myself, and I still get freezes in Vista. Feel free to try this yourselves, and update here if it worked or not. Or, try starting in fullscreen, and running in windowed mode.

UPDATE 5:
Running UT3 (without patch), NVidia 169.09 drivers, and a non-up-to-date X-Fi driver in WINDOWS XP solved my problem. I will attempt to install the UT patch as well as update my X-Fi driver, just to make sure none of those 2 factors causes any problems. Stay tuned.

Added: Well, I was already on the most recent X-Fi drivers for XP, so all I did was install the beta update. Game still runs 100% smooth with no freezing.

UPDATE 4:
Updating OpenAL from http://www.openal.org/downloads.html did not help.

UPDATE 3:
After further discussion on the forum, some of us believe that the intermittent freezes may be related to the CPU usage of the game. For many dual core users, the game uses 100% of the CPU, while those who have quad-core systems report that the game uses only around 60-80% of each core.

UPDATE 2:
Please read my post on this:
http://forums.epicgames.com/showpost...&postcount=186

Is anyone else getting intermittent freezes while playing instant action? I haven't been experiencing them in campaign (although I may be finishing levels too quickly).

I get the freezes every 5 minutes or so, and they last anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds. Ambient and some sound effects continue to play normally, and then gameplay resumes as normal.

Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB
4 Gigs of RAM
X-Fi XtremeMusic
Windows Vista 32 bit

So here's what I've tried:
1. Various in-game graphics and audio tweaks (enabling/disabling OpenAL, different post-processing settings)
2. Various UTEngine.ini tweaks
3. Updating PhysX driver and software (even though I do not have a PhysX card installed)
4. Using onboard Realtek Audio instead of Creative X-Fi
5. Installing the 1.01 Beta Patch for UT3
6. Various tweaks and workarounds found here: http://www.gamingnewslink.com/2007/1...s-and-crashes/
7. Deleting the UnrealTournament 3 folder in Username/My Games folder (the one that would be under My Documents/My Games for people using Windows XP). The game creates a new one after running it again.
8. Running on lowest possible sound and graphics settings.
9. Setting bUseSound to FALSE for all three instances in UTEngine.ini.
10. Playing in offline mode.
11. Updating OpenAL, and making sure the OpenAL32.dll file in the UT3 install directory is up-to-date.
12. Running it in Windows XP (on my other hard drive)--fixed the problem.
13. READ UPDATE 7
14. NVidia Beta Driver 169.28 solve the issue.

[NovaKitFox]

i acutly get somthing the same.. but even more often and worse. Mine will load up the game just fine. but once i start playing after sec no mater where it is once the stuff loads. it will freeze, and what ever was the last set of sounds would repeat the last sec. of it.

what sucks is i thought this game would run cause i could run the DEMO MAXED OUT...

Specs here are
AMD 64 2.0 (yeah i know it's old)
2 gigs of ram
7950 Gt 512 MB (latest drivers)
Windows XP fully updated

[kray28]

Sounds like the issues that GoW was having....maybe it's a UE3 issue.

[KentaroKaos]

Sounds like the issues that GoW was having....maybe it's a UE3 issue.

I don't have this problem in GOW. I do have occasional load-stuttering in GOW, but not to this extent.

[KentaroKaos]

Upon further playing, I've realized it happens in all game matches. In smaller maps, like Deathmatch, it'll only freeze for half a second or so, but in bigger maps, there is the long freeze (the aforementioned 5-10 second pause).

Any idea what may be causing this? Any INI tweaks?

[Phayder]

I have this problem as well. I notice it the most in Torlan and Gateway. Pretty game-breaking, in all honestly, if it happens during critical moments.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2400 MHz
2 gigs Corsair DDR2-SDRAM PC2-6400 (399 MHz) - [DDR2-800]
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640mb
Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard
Windows Vista 32 bit

The game runs flawlessly, otherwise.

[KentaroKaos]

I have this problem as well. I notice it the most in Torlan and Gateway. Pretty game-breaking, in all honestly, if it happens during critical moments.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2400 MHz
2 gigs Corsair DDR2-SDRAM PC2-6400 (399 MHz) - [DDR2-800]
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640mb
Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard
Windows Vista 32 bit

The game runs flawlessly, otherwise.

I've been playing around.. try setting AllowD3D10 to false in your UTEngine ini file. Let me know if it works for you.

[Phayder]

Negative, no noticeable improvement. However, I think that it occurs more often immediately after I spawn.

I've been trying to think of what might cause this. It doesn't seem like it would be a performance issue, just some bug or something. My very first thought was that I didn't have enough memory, but 640mb is plenty enough video memory and I see that you have 4gb of ram. Plus the hard drive doesn't seem to be working when it's frozen.

Quite the puzzle :-\ Is there some game log we can look at to maybe figure this out?

[DirkBelig]

I'm having the problem of the game simply freezing up solid after perhaps 10-20 minutes of play, though it's been as short as 5 minutes and as long as 30. I'll be cruising along without a hint of trouble when WHAM!!! The screen freezes, the sound sticks and the Windows Error Report submission dialog pops up. Alt-tabbing to get the Taskbar to appear will allow me to right-click and close UT3; that brings up the End Task box.

I haven't had to reboot the system (yet), so it's recoverable, but it's getting darn annoying as I bombed out of a good online match and have had campaign games go for naught, forcing me to replay 20 minutes of boring CTF.

* DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR Expert -- BIOS Date: 11/2/2005
* Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester @ 2100MHz w/stock cooler & voltage
* Corsair XMS 2 x 1GB TWINX2048-3200C2 - 2-3-3-6 @ 2.74V
* BFG 8800GT OC 512MB (169.09 driver; stock clocks)
* Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card (latest drivers)
* Thermaltake Soprano VB1430BWS Black Chassis
* Xion 600W Power Supply
* Dell 2405 monitor
* WinXP Pro SP2

I can play Crysis for a couple of hours without freezing and Gears of Windows runs fine, though I'm getting that stuttering others complain of. I'm running at 1920x1200 with everything full on and it's fine except for these darn freezes. What a drag. Any ideas? TIA.

[Phayder]

Not that I don't sympathize with your problem, but it's not really related to the one being discussed here. You might have more luck starting a new thread. I don't really want our issue to be lost in a sea of others

[DirkBelig]

Phayder: If you're talking to me, what's your problem? I'm experiencing intermittent freezes. Why shouldn't I post in a thread about intermittent freezes?

[Phayder]

Phayder: If you're talking to me, what's your problem? I'm experiencing intermittent freezes. Why shouldn't I post in a thread about intermittent freezes?

Your game locks up permanently, and you have to alt-tab to desktop to close UT3. The problem Kentaro and I are experiences simply causes the game to pause for several seconds, then it resumes play as normal. This happens several times per game. I understand that your issue is perhaps more serious, but it just doesn't really fit here. I'm no moderator though, so unless they have a problem with it, post wherever you want to, I suppose.


Anyways, I did a bit of testing... and came up with basically nothing. The log files don't show very much of what actually goes on during the game, so they don't help a whole lot. At first I thought there might be some sort of connection to "accessed none"s (one pause per), but my third and fourth game busted that theory.

Oh, and I forgot to include my sound card in my system specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2400 MHz
2 gigs Corsair DDR2-SDRAM PC2-6400 (399 MHz) - [DDR2-800]
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640mb
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi
Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard
Windows Vista 32 bit

I noticed that everyone who has included a sound card in their specs has a Creative.

[KentaroKaos]

Yeah, Phayder.. I don't know how to effectively analyze those logs to pinpoint any source of trouble, either. And I'm not really sure with which settings to play with in the INI file either, even with the slight help of tweakguides.com's UT3 Demo tweaks.

I'm at a loss for what to do at this point, since I'm not sure how I should test :\

If you have any recommendations on how to test or want me to check something with your findings, let me know! And who knows, DirkBelig's problems may be directly related to ours.

[slinky3761]

Hello

I have no stuttering or freezing at all. I know this doesn't help, but just showing there is somebody not having problems.
Windows xp
amd 4800x2 65nm
8800gts 320
2 gig geil ram ddr2 800
chaintech710 sound card
ocz gamextreme 700w
EVGA 122-M2-NF59-TR AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard

[KentaroKaos]

I have no stuttering or freezing at all. I know this doesn't help, but just showing there is somebody not having problems.
Windows xp
amd 4800x2 65nm
8800gts 320
2 gig geil ram ddr2 800
chaintech710 sound card
ocz gamextreme 700w
EVGA 122-M2-NF59-TR AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard

Hmm.. So this one doesn't have a Creative sound card. Thanks for the information, slinky! Anyone else with/without intermittent freezes? Post your specs!