Important nVidia crash Update!

[The Star Hermit]

This update from Maxis contains some important information for those who experience the dreaded crashing problems if using nVidia cards:

Originally Posted by MaxidShannon

For those who get either the random DOS "blue screen of death" crash, the "nv4_disp" infinite loop message, or unexplainable crashes to an in-game blue screen lockup with skipping audio, this is for you.

This latest news on the "nVidia crash" has a short version and a long version.

The short version: Make sure your anti-virus program(s) are disabled/turned off before playing The Sims 2. Especially those who have any Norton product installed. Games and Anti-Virus programs both like using a large amount of your system's paged memory. Even if your game did not crash you would probably see a reduction in your performance. For some reason when The Sims 2 is running with Norton Internet Security, the Anti-Virus is not releasing some of the memory which eventually leads to the system running out of memory.

The long version: Those of you who have been following this story will know that after weeks of research and testing, we could not reproduce this crash internally, even using some of the exact same models of video cards that were being reported as failing by our customers.

After consulting with a customer who had experienced the crash with a brand new system purchased from Dell, we bought ourselves the exact same system from Dell and immediately saw the crash for the first time.

We named this PC "Crashy".

As the error messages from the crash indicated the crash was occurring in the nVidia driver, we sent Crashy to nVidia for them to research the problem. After researching the problem for several months, nVidia concluded that the fault lay with our game, that the game was "leaking kernel memory" and that memory leak would eventually cause the PC to crash. How long the crash took to occur would be different for each individual gamer, as it is dependent on the specs of their PC. More RAM or more video card memory would delay the crash, or perhaps prevent it entirely.

When we got Crashy back from nVidia recently, we reformatted the PC's hard drive to start fresh in an attempt to isolate where and how kernel memory would be leaking from the game when we had not detected such a leak in any pre-release game testing.

Once we installed The Sims 2 and all the EP's back onto Crashy after the reformat, once playing the game, the crashing stopped occurring entirely!

This was very discouraging, as we can not fix a crash that we can not reproduce, and now it seemed we were back to Square One.

But upon further review, we realized that Crashy had come from Dell pre-installed with Norton AntiVirus, and when we first tried Crashy we had not been following our own Customer Support instructions about shutting off the AntiVirus before playing the game. The re-format had uninstalled the Norton from the machine, so now it was not running at all while playing.

Looking into Norton a bit on the Internet and with consultations with both nVidia and Microsoft, we learned that Norton has been suspected of leaking kernel memory while running, and this in combination with a program like The Sims 2 that utilizes kernel memory could be a fatal combination for a PC.

While we do not want to throw the Norton product under the bus, we have not been able to reproduce the crash since removing it. The Norton product is commonly bundled for free and pre-installed with off-the-rack PC's that many of our players purchase, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this could be the cause of this crash for these players.

So for those of you who are experiencing a crash, we ask that you turn off/disable/shut down your anti-virus program, Norton or otherwise, before starting the game. Report back to us what happens in the Technical Help Forum with an easily identifiable subject to your post so we will see it. Thank you, and we hope this works for you!

~MaxoidShannon

There you go, proof that the basic troubleshooting techniques are worth trying.

[LadysimPlayer8]

Thank you for the information re crashes.

Until recently, my game had been working fine then the crashing started and I literally tried everything to resolve the problem.

I have Norton Security and would urge simplayers to check that automatic "Live Update" is not turned on because even if your disable Norton Internet Security and Anti-Virus Auto-Protect, it is still running in the background.

I hope I can Freetime now!

[Brd709]

My Dell had McAfee pre-installed and my game was crashing while that was on my machine. Since then my McAfee trial had expired and i now have AVG. I do not know if AVG could cause crashing as i have been using the shaders cheat for a few weeks now and that has helped me a lot.

[Arsenalfan334]

Thing is this all helps. But looking at these ive seen recent weeks

Originally Posted by the postman

• turn off firewall completely
• turn all security components off

Ands things like that, i now have concerns

The amount of people doing this for there sims games, that leaves a really high risk. All 3* security background operations (firewall, antivirus and auto updates). disabling them all and playing this, during that you could be piling up loads of viruses. I had no antivirus on my old computer, and i still cant admit saying there was several viruses on that computer that appeared during my gaming.

I would recomend that you do this with HIGH RISK that viruses could attack all sims gamers.

How does virus protectors effect the game though? Its probibly in the text but ya know me.

I know im boring. but how would you like to tell your parents there loosing loads of money because when you were gaming a trojan got accsess to your computer?

[KateTheSuperKat]

Yes, if you're shutting down your AntiVirus you should at least make sure your computer isn't connected to the Internet or you could pick up all kinds of nasty virusses.

Me, I'm glad my mom doesn't like Norton and we therefore have McAfee. XD

[Rohannnn]

If you have all of the Windows updates, there's no reason for viruses to just appear on your computer while you play a game with your virus scanner turned off. If you're paranoid though, disconnecting your PC from the internet should be enough to stop any viruses.

As for this crashing update... it looks promising, but I still don't think it's the whole story. If this is a Norton problem, why do these Nvidia crashes only occur with The Sims 2 and not any other games, or any other programs at all? Why would a memory leak in Norton, a program that has absolutely nothing to do with 3D graphics, cause the graphics driver to crash anyway? And why isn't it affecting any other brand of card?

If this does solve the problem though, I guess a fix is a good thing, even if the real cause of the problem is still a bit of a mystery

[flid1976]

I get blue screen of death...I dont have norton...however turning the usershaders off works

[Arsenalfan334]

Originally Posted by KateTheSuperKat

Yes, if you're shutting down your AntiVirus you should at least make sure your computer isn't connected to the Internet or you could pick up all kinds of nasty virusses.

Me, I'm glad my mom doesn't like Norton and we therefore have McAfee. XD

I think Norton is too protective. It disabled my WIN98SE log off script so i got rid of it XD

[Lauren]

I never got the BSOD but my game has been crashing recently...

I just thought I dowloaded something fodgey, turns out everytime I exited my game from a crash Avira AntiVirus was scanning my pc, didn't notice until now.

The internet thing, I have a wireless router so I'll just turn the program off, or get my mam to turn of the router entirely.

No matter how annoying my Anti Virus is, I have another program I use to get rid of Hackers/Spyware/Virus/Wasted Space in emergencies. Advanced Windows Care V2. Gets rid of everything, even if you allready have it. That program saved me of 2 virus', 19 spyware and more than a GB wasted space. It's awesome.

[Megsimadic]

Well im glad Norton has been brought up. I mentioned this a long while ago but I was experiencing crashing with my game even when I completely turned off Norton and the only way to solve it was to remove Norton completely. Only after I did that my game didnt cralalalalaoo was using a nvidea card, the 7800, and up until Norton I had no problems with any of the expansions right up to Bon Voyage.

[Bluejedina]

I had the same problem - Nvidia card, BSOD infinite loop with sims 2 - solved by disabling shaders (boolprop useshaders false).

Why does it only crash with the shaders turned on??

Also, have just bought sims 3 only to find that crashes too with the same error message!

[Rohannnn]

Originally Posted by Bluejedina

I had the same problem - Nvidia card, BSOD infinite loop with sims 2 - solved by disabling shaders (boolprop useshaders false).

Why does it only crash with the shaders turned on??

Also, have just bought sims 3 only to find that crashes too with the same error message!

As far as I know, there is still no official explanation. There is clearly some kind of conflict between the game's use of shaders and nVidia graphics drivers though, as switching shaders off fixes the problem for almost everybody.

You can't disable shaders completely in Sims 3, but you might be able to fix the problem by setting the following 3D options in nVidia control panel:

conformant texture clamp -> use openGL spec
force mipmaps -> trilinear
texture filtering - trilinear optimisation -> on
vertical sync -> force on