Crysis dx10 native resolution crashes? Solvable?

Hello all. Having found my highest stable OC for my GPU which is 830mhz/985mhz I proceeded to play both crysis and crysis warhead.

I found that at native resolution; 1680x1050 I could max everything in both games except for shaders and shadows which I left at high in crysis and gamer in warhead. Whether I play in dx10 or dx9 modes I find despite the high settings gameplay is very smooth and temp is well below 75C at load and no artifacts appear whatsoever.

However no matter what I do in dx10 mode at these settings the game will crash and the computer crashes at the same time. While in dx9 mode I can play for hours with no problems at all. If I reduce the resolution to say 1024x768 and put all settings to max including shaders and shadows and even stick some AAx2 on in dx10 mode it won't crash.

I am getting a little tired of these crashes at native is there a cure? I have tried several drivers including modded 9.6 and 9.7 with no effect so far.

 

If it crashes, then your OC obviously isn't stable in DX10 mode. DX10 uses different parts of the chip than DX9. Perhaps the DX10 paths aren't as stable as you think.

Does Crysis run fine in DX10 without the overclock?

 

I haven't tried to play a native reso without an OC as the performance is about 25% slower but I could always give it a try. Surely though a 1024x768 in dx10 with everything maxed and with some AA the card is more stressed than at 1680x1050 with no aa and shaders and shadows turned down a notch? If this is the case then I continue to be baffled. Maybe the resolution has a much bigger impact than I thought. Still though if its smooth, artifact free and the card isn't running at high temps then the drivers shouldn't crash the game.

 

Higher resolution significantly impacts the memory bandwidth and other processing. Perhaps you have some dodgy memory at the ends of the address range and it doesn't work when overclocked, so only in DX10 + overclock is it trying to read things out that far and dying. Perhaps it's just overflowing your 512MB GPU RAM or something. Without any way to really test (other than what you're doing), my instinct is that it's a memory issue. Leave the core clocked up, and pull back on the memory by 20MHz or so. Keep repeatedly lowering the memory clocks until Crysis doesn't crash.

 

I'd say that if the issue seems to be the resolution (at low resolution you can play fine with OC), then the instability is due to the memory OC. A higher resolution requires higher memory bandwidth, thus reducing the OC on the memory it the most probable solution you can try.

I hope it helps.

 

Thanks peeps. I will give it a try. I will back it down to 970 odd and play away Funny that a game is better than a bunch of official stress test programs to find highest stable clocks.

 

Nope it doesn't make much difference lowering the memory. I lowered it to 957.5mhz and upped the core to 820mhz from 800mhz the highest stable clock I found and playing for an hour at 1280x1024 with everything on max in dx10 with no crashes or problems. Temps loaded at 71C on core and 68C on memory . Then I switched reso to 1680x1050 and turned the shader and shadow down to high from very high and it crashed within minutes.

Is this a problem with the bandwidth being maxxed out or something? In the meantime I am sticking the memory clock back up to 985.5mhz and am going to game at 1280x1024 with everything fully maxed out. Still it sucks that I can't get around this crashing problem.

 

Try setting it to default clocks and playing, see if Crysis still crashes. Temperatures are not all that matter when overclocking... you may still be approaching physical switching limits without that. The problem is either the bandwidth or just physically accessing higher memory ranges at too high of a speed. Your default clocks are 800MHz on RAM... dropping it to 957 is not even close to enough for you to keep complaining. Try 900MHz. And keep your core at 800MHz.

Overclocking is not a guarantee. If you can run the game at default clocks, then you've just run into the physical limitations of overclocking your hardware. If not, then your machine is defective.