Out of the Blue

Here's a question for those of you more technically apt than myself, which includes my grandma, but I forgot to bring this up at brunch yesterday.

I've been trying to run Battlefield 2 in piggish 1600x1200 on my bust-out retail super-duper 6800 Ultra-OC video card. The card itself seems perfectly capable of running at such high resolution, but I have been getting unexplainable Blue Screen of Death errors in Windows XP with an infinite loop in the NV_DISP driver. The problem does not seem to occur at lower resolutions, but at 16X12 it is intermittent, but inevitable, often preceded by flashes of texture corruption. After a go-through with tech support I cleaned out the old drivers with driver cleaner, reinstalled the latest 77.72 FORCEWARE drivers, and confirmed that if the card's absurdly high 120 degree centigrade heat alarm was not being set off, the problem was probably not thermal.

I then tried again, with the same result.

The BSoD included a message to the effect that the problem was likely with either the driver or the card, so I called back tech support, and was told that it was possible that this was a problem with the application itself. I was then told that in order to demonstrate that the card itself was defective, I was in for the nightmarish prospect of repeatedly reproducing the problem after, a) reinstalling the game, b) using a different 3D app, and c) repeating (a) and (b) on a second machine altogether. Now if that's the process I really must go through to determine the problem, then fair enough, but a Google search on NV_DISP infinite loop errors seems to indicate that this is a problem that's been mysteriously plaguing NVIDIA users for literally years now, and troubleshooting tips range from the useful, like testing your RAM (seven passes by memtest 86 says this wasn't the problem), to the worthless (almost every time someone asks this on a forum he is inundated with driver rollback suggestions, but this has happened with three different driver revisions now), to the spooky (I don't think the most desperate or reckless of users would implement all the different registry hacks I've seen suggested to address this). The one bit of video card related voodoo I still plan I trying here is backing off the AGP speed from 8X to 4X, which worked for me on a different problem once before.

So anyway, my question is simply this (I bet you had almost forgotten by now that I started off promising a question here). Before I embark on the lengthy path set out for me by Mr. Tech Support: is his assertion that the BSoD could be cause by the game code itself is accurate? I know that misbehaving apps are not supposed to be able to crash the system (which to my recollection was genuinely true for my in several years of running Win2K Professional), but I also know that just because something is not supposed to happen, doesn't mean it is impossible (I remember seeing proof-of-concept BSoD code for WinNT that was all of three lines).

So... no application-triggered BSoDs in WinXP... fact, or fiction?

Blue Links of Death! Thanks Mike Martinez, Ant, and EvilToast.
Links: How To Make Your Own Custom Body Kit.
Stories: Coke tries to can Indian poster.
14-Pound Baby Girl Born in Kentucky.
Internet provides instant Harry Potter reviews.
Science! Small Earthquake Shakes Mount St. Helens.
Oklo: Natural Nuclear Reactors. Thanks Flying Penguin.
Poaching making China elephants evolve tuskless.
Media: JCB Ballet. Thanks Lost Dragon.
Follow-up: Thousands mark first atomic blast.
Shuttles Dogged by Aging Parts.
Teh Funny: FoxTrot.
View : : :
76.
 
Re: Same Issue
Jul 18, 2005, 11:38
76.
Re: Same Issue Jul 18, 2005, 11:38
Jul 18, 2005, 11:38
 
I do, but that makes its clock speed its default speed... seems if being o/c'ed is the problem, BFG should RMA it under their lifetime warranty

if i remember correctly, what carmack said was that DOOM3 was going to use parts of the video card (in order to render the lighting/shadows) that no other game uses (or used, at that time) and that because of all the extra work D3 was going to make the cards do, they would be more prone to overheating or instability if they were overclocked - even if they worked perfectly with other games.

so this statement:

BTW, as for the o/c'ed card, it ran DOOM 3 fine

should derail that train of thought.
- tron -
---
"tron is big and tron is full of action... it's a hell of a ride!"
-from the Tron 2.0 box
Date
Subject
Author
1.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
2.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
3.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
4.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
10.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
5.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
6.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
7.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
8.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
9.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
11.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
14.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
12.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
15.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
16.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
13.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
17.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
40.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
41.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
43.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
   Re: BSoD
44.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
    Google Earth
46.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
48.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
      Re: Google Earth
49.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
    Re: BSoD
50.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
     Re: BSoD
67.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
      Re: BSoD
62.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
   Re: BSoD
70.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
18.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
19.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
22.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
23.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
24.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
45.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
38.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
72.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
80.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
20.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
53.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
21.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
25.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
27.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
28.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
42.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
47.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
26.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
29.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
30.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
31.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
32.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
33.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
35.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
54.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
34.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
55.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
56.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
63.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
64.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
65.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
     Re: No subject
66.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
      Re: No subject
71.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
      Re: No subject
61.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
73.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
82.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
36.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
37.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
51.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
57.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
58.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
52.
Jul 17, 2005Jul 17 2005
59.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
60.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
68.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
69.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
74.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
75.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
 76.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
  Re: Same Issue
77.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
78.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
81.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005
79.
Jul 18, 2005Jul 18 2005