Silician Sketchbook

Update! ForceWare 169.06 works fine.

Executive Summary

Create an autoexec.cfg in your .../team fortress 2/tf/cfg/ directory, if you haven’t done so already. Force your frame rate to something reasonable. I used fps_max “70″ which is in line with my external monitor’s refresh rate.

Why does this work? I’m not sure (yet), but I suspect that the video card is locking up due to overheating. Reducing the frame rate, as well as graphics quality, may keep it at a sustainable temperature.

Argh

I think the third thing I installed on my pretty midnight blue laptop, after Firefox and video card drivers, was Steam and the Orange Box.

I first noticed odd behaviour while playing Portal. For no apparent reason, my system would simply hang with sound effects playing in a stuttering loop. I could sometimes regain control of the game if I opened Task Manager and then tabbed back in.

Portal lock ups, while irritating, were tolerable because it’s just single-player and I wasn’t completing timed challenges at that point. TF2 is a different story. When you’re a medic about to give invincibility and you lock up, you may eventually get back into the game only to discover that your team lost the round. Playing matches, as opposed to random public servers, makes it worse. People may want to hit you (more) and you feel like hitting something yourself.

I updated the drivers for my GeForce 8600M GT (Dell released a new official driver set yesterday), and generally tried to do things that may fix the stuttering problem.

Downgrading to DirectX 8.1 lessened the severity of the lock up when it occurred, but it didn’t eliminate it. Reducing quality settings gave me a higher frame rate but that was it.

What I found to work, at least for the duration of a match and a couple hours of public server play afterwards, was to force my frame rate to 70 frames per second. The card is capable of delivering in excess of 150 fps with the quality settings turned down, but letting it run unconstrained might be causing it to overheat.

Why do I think it’s overheating? I find that I when I tab out, I need to wait around a bit before being able to maximize the game again. Otherwise, it’ll go to a black screen and may or may not have stuttering sound. Not all is lost, as I can force the Task Manager window to get me out. What might the system be doing during that time? Cooling down, for one.

The game also tends to lock up when there’s a lot of activity in my immediate vicinity. That’s also an inopportune time to take a forced break. I’m usually engaged in a fight and will be greeted by the familiar respawn room upon my return.

This Inspiron 1520 is a fine laptop otherwise, and I would be happy if NVIDIA released a driver that reduced the clock frequency or somehow reduced the load in order to regulate the core GPU temperature. Until then, anything above 60 fps is Good Enough and 70 fps happens to be line with my external monitor’s refresh rate.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 2:49 am and is filed under software.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.