Crashing during map switch

[Jaymz]

I'm dual booting Win7 64 and XP 32. Running PR on XP specifically because the HRTF Surround sound emulation for BF2 is not compatible with Win7/Vista audio.

However, running under XP 32, I am ctd'ing at pretty much every map switch. I am also having the odd ctd during a round. On Win7 64, there were no crashes at all. So it seems I'm stuck with these two choices....

1. Play PR on Win7 but only have 2 channel stereo sound.

2. Play PR on WinXP with full surround sound. But crash every time the map changes.

Obviously, I want to try get option 2 without the crashes. Ideas anyone?

[space]

Presume you already played around with the pagefile? That can often fix the problem.

[Mr.Hyde]

Can't see any system specs, but I'm assuming your HRTF surround sound is onboard sound...?

If so, easiest, and most practical, solution would be to purchase an add-on sound card. Preferably one not using the HRTF 3D surround sound emulator.

[bad_nade]

Presume you already played around with the pagefile? That can often fix the problem.

I'd go with this page file option, added with some boot.ini tweaks to give apps more than 2 gigabytes of memory.

[Jaymz]

Can't see any system specs, but I'm assuming your HRTF surround sound is onboard sound...?

If so, easiest, and most practical, solution would be to purchase an add-on sound card. Preferably one not using the HRTF 3D surround sound emulator.

No, the HRTF emulation is done by OpenAL when using the "hardware" option in BF2. It's not an actual feature of the sound card like that horrible sounding "CMSS" ****.

I've played BF2 with an Audigy 2, an X-Fi Noteboox, a USB 5.1 X-fi Surround and now on a Supreme X-fi 2. All of them had no HRTF surround in Windows 7, but had/have it in XP.

I'd go with this page file option, added with some boot.ini tweaks to give apps more than 2 gigabytes of memory.

This sounds worth a try. Anyone got any ideas on how to go about it? I currently have my XP pagefile set to a different partition at the max value (4069 or something).

[Mr.Hyde]

Jaymz;1278104']No, the HRTF emulation is done by OpenAL when using the "hardware" option in BF2. It's not an actual feature of the sound card like that horrible sounding "CMSS" ****.

I've played BF2 with an Audigy 2, an X-Fi Noteboox, a USB 5.1 X-fi Surround and now on a Supreme X-fi 2. All of them had no HRTF surround in Windows 7, but had/have it in XP.

Can't say that I'm disappointed with CMSS. I'm assuming the differences between CMSS and OpenAL are more profound that the advantages gained from W7 over XP?

I would check myself, but I'm just too tired to install XP right now to check.

[Robbi]

with regards to the crashes you should get AM to recompile a new 1.5 compatible patched bf2.exe, iirc when EA updated I needed to use one for a while?

[space]

This sounds worth a try. Anyone got any ideas on how to go about it? I currently have my XP pagefile set to a different partition at the max value (4069 or something).

Set it much higher. First of all de-fragment your drives. Its hard to say what the perfect settings are, and there's much debate on the internet about weather it even does anything or not - it my experience it does. I run xp64 with 4gb of RAM, and my settings are :



Also don't set the page file to a different partition - Ive tried that before and it made things worse.

Interestingly I had the same problem as you for a long time when I was using xp32 with Vista set up as a dual boot. Its only when I switched to xp64 that the problem went away.

[Jaymz]

Set it much higher. First of all de-fragment your drives. Its hard to say what the perfect settings are, and there's much debate on the internet about weather it even does anything or not - it my experience it does. I run xp64 with 4gb of RAM, and my settings are :



Also don't set the page file to a different partition - Ive tried that before and it made things worse.

Interestingly I had the same problem as you for a long time when I was using xp32 with Vista set up as a dual boot. Its only when I switched to xp64 that the problem went away.

That can all be explained by one fact. 64-bit OS's allow more memory. This is one of the big issues with 0.9 we are working to fix. That is, the fact that 32-bit OS users ctd every time the map switches unless they lower textures to medium.

So em....goes without saying I found out the problem. Hopefully we will fix this for 0.91. Until then, 32-bit users should be setting their textures to medium.

[space]

Yeah I realise that 64bit allows more ram, but when I had dual boot, Vista32 didn't crash. Also you still should increase your pagefile - I helped someone with a self build recently which was pretty high end and running Win7 64 - he was getting lag and all kind of problems with 0.9, until he changed the pagefile to the same settings as mine.

[Jaymz]

Yeah I realise that 64bit allows more ram, but when I had dual boot, Vista32 didn't crash. Also you still should increase your pagefile - I helped someone with a self build recently which was pretty high end and running Win7 64 - he was getting lag and all kind of problems with 0.9, until he changed the pagefile to the same settings as mine.

I can't increase it any further, 4096 is the max allowed on a 32-bit OS.

[bad_nade]

4096 MB should be enough (just like 640 kB should have been back in the days ) But if you want bigger page file space, you can create more of them. Windws let you create one page file per drive letter.

Next step would be tweaking your boot.ini by adding /3gb switch into it. Google gives lots of good results for this. Here is one of them:
FAQ/3GB Switch - VFXpedia

Your dual-boot can make things more hairy, but we'll see.