hi all

its really disappointing to know that this game is causing trouble on such a good machine. But there is one thing I would like to mention here.

As said by "caswallawn_2k7" 58c is a suspicious temp for a custom cooled graphics card, Mine on factory cooler remains on 52c under full load with some additional fans for ventilating the case plus mine is also a low end gfx card 8600 GT 256 MB DDR III unlike yours which is a power full gfx card (8800 GT) so mine should heat more. There is some sort overheating problem with your card, specially that green screen only appears when there is some overheating going on.

You should do one thing, Its not a high tech solution but it works sometimes, open up the case of your rig and put a big fan infront of it, big fan means a pedestal fan should do the trick, place it in such a way that the air directly strikes your machine's components and place it really close to it. Then run the game if it still crashes then most probable there is some other problem and not overheating, but if it does not crash then it means some of your hardware is overheating, as i mentioned earlier it is a weird solution but sometimes it can be used to identify a problem related to overheating besides whats wrong in trying that.

And best of luck.

No one is mentioning power.

It's quite possible that your video card is not overheating, but rather running short on power.

Artificial test liks Geoforms aren't a perfect measure. They stress the video card only. Meanwhile, your CPU, system memory, sound card and drives are sitting idle and not consuming much power. Not to mention that all those things also give off heat when in use - increasing general case temp. In short, Geoforms is almost worthless as a stress test.

I've seen artifacing like that dozens of times and it's always hardware failure. It's either overheating or power shortage, or a result of running into errors due to previous damage.

The fact that you don't get it in other games similarly means nothing. Every game stresses hardware in different ways.

Assassin's Creed in particular, make much greater use of dual-cores than previous games - even Crysis to an extent. Your CPU is going to be sucking up a lot more power when maxxed out - not to mention you've got 2 drives and 4 sticks of ram in there. Even with a 620W, I'm definitely thinking it could be a power issue, especially because a lot of powersupplies - even good ones - don't always live up to their rating.

Going with what steve said it is very likely the power to your card. Did you by any chance neglect the supplementary power cord that comes with most (if not all) 8800gt's? Make sure its plugged into the right type of power supply extension too.

the power conector has been on all high end cards since about the geforce 6 as it threw me when I went from a FX to a 7900 as I had never needed it before and the instruction card didnt actualy say to do it.

but the problem he is having is most likly heat. if anything it is more likly that he got a new cooler but didnt put a fan on the heat sink as the larger ones dont come with fans as standard.

Hi again,

1st of all ty all for such great effort and for your time to solve my problem. You helped a lot.

Now, i must apologize to UBI because this was not their fault this time ( they still owe me for R6V but that's some other story ) , and i must apologize to any of you, if i offended anyone it was not my intention (i think i did not, but english is not my 1st spoken language, so i could happened to misunderstood me easy).

Let me explain what was the problem, maybe it would be helpful to someone with similar ones.
After i read your posts over and over i rechecked all. I have vent on my heat sink, the power supply is good and additional power cord is plugged (my comp can not boot without it and start to beep very loud). Everything was good.
Then i run 3DMark, 13k+ and stable, Crysis benchmark test all on max still stable, i do not need to tell you i was desperate.
I went back to this thread and read it all over again, then 2 things catch my eyes.

1.

quote:

The game is very graphic memory intensive. Downclocking the videomemory a little could do wonders.

By BlindNero

2.

quote:

why do you think the nvidia stability test built into their over clocking programs runs a 3D animation the card has to render

By caswallawn

Bingo, what full i am, i tried all stress tests on the market but not NV stability test.
After 3 minutes my comp crashed on NV stability test

Then i downclocked my graphic memory from 950 (factory OC) to 900 and there it is. 58 loops no errors. Tried AC on those clocks and 3 hrs without any problems, all on max

I know i read some review for MSI 8800 and they said there are no room for further OC, so i guess they OC it to the edge, and it was working fine until AC (now i know for sure AC is the best stress test on the market, i am not kidding it will be my reference for the future).
I lost about 100 3Dmarks, thats all.

And for the end i must explain why i was so frustrated with this game in particular (as i said before i know what is PC gaming and problems going with it, and it is not my u usual reaction to post angry posts on forums).

I was expecting this game for long time, and when i came out i could not find copy here where i live (Croatia) except pirated copy. I am not using pirates, as a matter of fact i hate pirates, because i know how it is when someone stole your intellectual property.
Then on my birthday last week the postman came on my door with copy of AC ordered from USA by my girlfriend without me knowing it, with some super fast delivery option it came in 2 days from USA to Croatia (game was 49.99$ and handling was 59.99$, but thats is not the problem). So you can imagine my disappointment when game starting to crash, and even bigger disappointment of my girlfriend. After all efforts she put to surprise me the bloody game is not working. She was sad, that make me angry and other you know.

So, ty all once again and no hard feelings. If someone felt offended by any of my words, like i said before, it was not my intention.

Take care,
and wish you happy gaming.

Edit:

I forgot to say, on all that the game came to stores in Croatia same day i got it

To Itsme1972: I am following this thread for couple of days now. I am also having simillar crashing problem with AC.

As u have successfully run it now, I have couple of questions for u.

1. What verstion of AC u are using, Normal or DC?
2. Did Downclocking ur card solved ur issue with the game?

Mine are I think Core: 600Mhz, Memory: 900Mhz, Shader: 1500Mhz. (Specs are listed Below)

3. What are ur current settings?

Thank you in advance. Although I am pretty much sure this Game has severe issues with 8800GT as I have seen numerous ppl wtih 8800GT are on the receiving end of this. So it needs to be patched to run Ok. But then again lets try this for now.

Itsme1972 all well that ends well! In silence i knew you would find this out sooner or later, you just had to. Like i in the past experienced exactly the same, that PC overclocked gaming and 3dm06 stable does not mean that a new game must automatically run stably on that setup, "or else".
Thanks for coming back posting making this thread valuable to others in the situation.

Have a great time enjoying the game!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BlindNero,

quote:

Originally posted by silent_surfer:

As u have successfully run it now, I have couple of questions for u.

1. What verstion of AC u are using, Normal or DC?
2. Did Downclocking ur card solved ur issue with the game?

Mine are I think Core: 600Mhz, Memory: 900Mhz, Shader: 1500Mhz. (Specs are listed Below)

3. What are ur current settings?

Hi,

1. I have Director's Cut Edition

2. Yes, at least for now everything is OK, 3 hrs yesterday and about 3 hrs today without any crashes, glitches...
I must admit, this is my 1st time that i have to downclock hardware for playing the game. Absurd sitaution and that is why i love PC gaming .

3. Core 660/ shader 1650 / memory 900
Driver 175.16 Forceware beta

Btw i've noticed two version of XFX 8800GT 600M AD Edition

Alpha Dog 600M

and

Alpha Dog 600M XT

1st one is core 600/ mem 900
2nd one is XT version core 640/ mem 950


Since you said "I think" for your specs, i hope you have XT and downclock will work for you too. But no harm to try if you have mem@900 already.
What simptoms do you have? What kind of crash, green screen like me, or some other kind of problems? I would recommend last beta Forceware drivers, they don't have WHQL but in my opinion they are better. You have last WHQL version i think.
Also, can you pass NV Stability test? That was reference to me, the only one which crashed my comp. when i passed it the game crashing is gone too.

I've noticed one other thing too, not related to this problem, but again, maybe it would be helpful to someone. Some people are complaining about bad speech sync in game. Today happened to me too, but since i was trying to solve problem my HD was fragmented over 20%. After defragmentation bad sync is gone.

The above solved my problems, i hope it will be of some help to you too.

Take care.

Thats great to hear ! finally you got the culprit

Graphic card vendors should focus on stability while over clocking their products, and I think that over clocking to edge is not a good choice at all because it reduce the life of gfx card components, they should leave some room for over clocking in order to maintain stability.

Anyway congratulations on your success, i am very happy for you. Enjoy Assassins Creed

Hey Itsme, glad you got it solved and now you can enjoy the game that travelled half the way around the world to get to you - and was pretty darn expensive to boot.

But that really sucks that MSI sold you a card with the VRAM clocked right to the edge. That's unacceptable - and totally nuts.

Also good to know that many of us guessed right. The green screen definitely looked like a hardware problem and often, weird patterns on the screen point to video card RAM.

I knew it wasn't GPU heat because 58C under load is no problem at all. Most video cards can function correctly even with temps up to 90C. But then again, that's not measuring VRAM temps.

Enjoy AC!

That's why a lot of add on cooling kits for video cards contain heat sinks for the ram chips to prevent overheating, it's not just the GPU that needs to be cooled.

quote:

Originally posted by Itsme1972:
The above solved my problems, i hope it will be of some help to you too.

First, Thank you for quick reply.

Noticed the Sound Accleration set to basic thing. Tried that yesterday and that seemed to solve the problem temporarily as I had few freezes but the thing didn't crash to desktop (1 hour of gameply). Also I have set the AA(Multisampling) to 1x and the res to 1280x1024. That may have also helped.

But then I tried to increase multisampling to 2x but then It happened again. I have the Normal AC version and the problem is game crashes to desktop or computer hangs with wired sound on speaker (Kinda like ring-2 ). Had installed the beta version of driver on XP x64 but then I got the Blue Screen that u were having (I reckon there is some stablity issue with that beta) but going back to WHQL solved that issue for me.

I don't have XT version and the core is 600Mhz with Memory @ 900Mhz. I noticed at idle (bootup) the temp on GPU is 58C (GPUZ) and during ATI Geoforms (5 min) it goes to 71C Max CPU 37C at Idle and 54C at Load. The room temperature is around 35C as its summer time here. Could it be any heat issue? If I downclock what values do u suggest?

Has anyone tried the patch, did it solve any issues with 8800GT? As always they (UBISOFT) are saying nothing.

Thank you again.

quote:

Originally posted by silent_surfer:


First, Thank you for quick reply.

Noticed the Sound Accleration set to basic thing. Tried that yesterday and that seemed to solve the problem temporarily as I had few freezes but the thing didn't crash to desktop (1 hour of gameply). Also I have set the AA(Multisampling) to 1x and the res to 1280x1024. That may have also helped.

But then I tried to increase multisampling to 2x but then It happened again. I have the Normal AC version and the problem is game crashes to desktop or computer hangs with wired sound on speaker (Kinda like ring-2 ).
I don't have XT version and the core is 600Mhz with Memory @ 900Mhz. I noticed at idle (bootup) the temp on GPU is 58C (GPUZ) and during ATI Geoforms (5 min) it goes to 71C Max CPU 37C at Idle and 54C at Load. The room temperature is around 35C as its summer time here. Could it be any heat issue? If I downclock what values do u suggest?

Has anyone tried the patch, did it solve any issues with 8800GT? As always they (UBISOFT) are saying nothing.

Thank you again.

What kind of Soundcard do you have? If you have onboard, i would suggest some standalone, and if you already have one did you shut off the one onboard in BIOS. That's 1st what come on my mind for that.

Temps are good, i had the similar with stock cooler, but your room temp is quite high, and as pepole said here before those temps are core temps. With 35 C in room with 71 GPU it must be hot like in Hell around your Vram.
For that try Tahir-Munirs cheap solution from above just for testing. I was doing that with my old comp during summer.

quote:

You should do one thing, Its not a high tech solution but it works sometimes, open up the case of your rig and put a big fan infront of it, big fan means a pedestal fan should do the trick, place it in such a way that the air directly strikes your machine's components and place it really close to it. Then run the game if it still crashes then most probable there is some other problem and not overheating, but if it does not crash then it means some of your hardware is overheating, as i mentioned earlier it is a weird solution but sometimes it can be used to identify a problem related to overheating besides whats wrong in trying that.

Even just taking off one side of your case will give some air to, but with fan is better.

If you gonna downclock (but i would try Tahirs cooling 1st) try on 850, if it is stable then go up by 5 or 10 until crashes again. When you find that crashing spot then go down by 10, it should be your stable sweet spot, but test it again of course. You can try any values you want, no need to worry, you are going down, so the card will just "breath" easier.

I did not test the patch yet, when i do i'll post here if i can go on factory values again or not.

Edit:

I tried on 950, it crashed after 3 minutes. But in my case is definitely too high factory OC which cause Vram to choke or overheat or whatever.

You should go with patch for sure.
Because of that:
* Added support for x64 versions of Windows

I did not know that AC is not supporting x64 Win, maybe that was your problem.

quote:

First, Thank you for quick reply.

Noticed the Sound Accleration set to basic thing. Tried that yesterday and that seemed to solve the problem temporarily as I had few freezes but the thing didn't crash to desktop (1 hour of gameply). Also I have set the AA(Multisampling) to 1x and the res to 1280x1024. That may have also helped.

But then I tried to increase multisampling to 2x but then It happened again. I have the Normal AC version and the problem is game crashes to desktop or computer hangs with wired sound on speaker (Kinda like ring-2 Smile). Had installed the beta version of driver on XP x64 but then I got the Blue Screen that u were having (I reckon there is some stablity issue with that beta) but going back to WHQL solved that issue for me.

I don't have XT version and the core is 600Mhz with Memory @ 900Mhz. I noticed at idle (bootup) the temp on GPU is 58C (GPUZ) and during ATI Geoforms (5 min) it goes to 71C Max CPU 37C at Idle and 54C at Load. The room temperature is around 35C as its summer time here. Could it be any heat issue? If I downclock what values do u suggest?

Has anyone tried the patch, did it solve any issues with 8800GT? As always they (UBISOFT) are saying nothing.

Thank you again.


Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2GHz 2MB
Abit IP35P Overspeed Edition
4G Transcend DDR2-800 5-5-5-18
XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog 600M
PSU: Fast 700Watt
Windows XP x64 Service Pack 1
Forceware: 169.21 WHQL

GPUs are designed to sustain much higher temperatures, for example today's Nvidia GPUs are designed to handle even 90 degrees C obviously it is not wise to keep a GPU around 90 all the time but it can take that, the temperature after which GPU shuts itself down to prevent damage is 110 degrees C. So its not GPU temperature which is causing you trouble

It may be vram because usually vrams are not covered by heat sinks so they tend to heat up more then GPU.

However there are a few things which you can try for sure before downclocking your vram.

1) Try the cooling solution I have posted, it might point out the culprit of overheating.

2)As said by "Itsme1972" you should also try patch 1.02 for AC, because 64 bit windows also rings a bell in my mind.

3) Try different configurations of AC and monitor the temperature history, use riva tuner for this purpose, log the history to a file in case your system crashes and you need to view the log later on. You said that multisampling 2x crashed the game while using multisampling 1x did not crashed the game. Try both configurations and log the temp history then compare them, see GPU temp, vram usage etc... and see which area is taking a hit on high configuration.

And yes did you tried lowering the in game resolution, because high resolution increase the stress on vram as well as GPU, again monitor the temperatures and vram usage on different resolutions.

900 Mhz for vram looks stable try the above things and if none of them works then downclock your vram.

I wish you best of luck

Thank you for the reply especially Tahir_Munir. Here I will try to post as much info about my system, since guys don't seem to believe humans anymore I will post screen shots.

First : Here's my complete DxDiag Report.
DXDIAG

Here's my CPU & GPU Info:


Here's Everything @ Normal/Idle


Thanks for mentioning the NV Stability Test software. Truly a must have for everyone, so is HMonitor. Please mention if there are anything else like this and also comment about the reported temps (Please remember I have Stock Cooling).

I tried the 3 min benchmarking test as u suggested and it didn't crashed not even went close.

3 Min Benchmarking Test @ Midpoint


3 Min Benchmarking Test @ Results


But I don't understand the scoring system. Although it scored 480 but I scored also 519 @ same test. Why so ?? Then I went to the nonstop test to see if continuous load does lead to any crash. But after 10.10 min of no sign of PC Crashing. Screen shots below:

Non Stop Test after 9.15 Min


Non Stop Test after 10.10 Min (then Electricity Failure )


Now Back to AC.

quote:

You should go with patch for sure.
Because of that:
* Added support for x64 versions of Windows

I did not know that AC is not supporting x64 Win, maybe that was your problem.

2. Support for x64: No dude. It crashed on Win XP 32, Vista Ultimate 32 and not to mention Win XP x64. So not my problem, guess who's?

1. Patch: About time, In Less than one month they have managed to throw a Patch. My question is, Is it ethical or intelligent to force ppl to spend a lot of money to beta test their product.

I really doubt if any of the paid reviews of AC actually tested the game. But I guess Ubisoft has a large number of Testers, their Consumers who will randomly test a software and continuously suspect their system and report problems that they will be fixed by patching. I was under the impression that Its the Game that will adapt to systems rather than Systems adapting with Games (Like Downclocking). Yeah Right Guess. I am not gonna downclock unless necessary. I have to play other games too @ good FPS.

My advice: Please release a Final Product, We don't want patches.

Sorry if I lost my temper there. Anyway Fixed issues so far in Patch 101:

1. Random Crashing: No crashing so far (1 and 1/2 Hour of Gameplay). Before this I could only get to 20 to 30 Minutes with low settings. Current Settings: Res @ 1024x768 and Multisampling @ 2x and Sound set to Basic Acc.

* I do have a Standalone Sound Card: Creative Live Value but that does not work with AC So I had to use Realtek. But personally I don't like built in sound.

2. Freezing During Gameplay: This has definitely happened to me before patching.

There u Go. I am beginning to think that the original heading of this post was dead on target. Sorry I know I am a newbie compared to Guys like BlindNero and Itsme1972 and please don' take this the wrong way, But this is what I feel.

I don't remember who exactly told that AC will push ur card to Limit. Ok I have news for u. NV Test (1.5 MB) in 8 minutes took my GPU to 77C. AC (6+ GB) with 1 and 1/2 hour of gameplay could only manage (Edit) 68C (Maybe Not pushing Hard Enough).

Edit: Bewoulf Managed to push upto 78C @ res: 1280x1024 with 4x AA. Good Work

Thanks again.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: silent_surfer,

1.

quote:

Windows XP x64 Service Pack 1

Install SP2 and SP3.

2. Install the latest DirectX9.0c (March 2008), yours is from 2005.
Take the Softpedia Secure Download (RO), the "(US)" download link is corrupted.
Right-click on the downloaded file > see if at the bottom of "General" tab there is a security blockade. If so, hit button 'unblock'. Extract the directX9.0c package into a "New folder" you create. Then open that folder and doubleclick the dxsetup.exe.

3.

quote:

Abit IP35P Overspeed Edition

try reducing the "overspeed".

4.

quote:

I am not gonna downclock unless necessary. I have to play other games too @ good FPS.

It may be necessary that you 'downclock', reduce your overclock to have your system stable to play your games.

Btw: about "x64 support" (as the patch says): i played the game successfully without the patch on Vista Ultimate x64.

quote:

Install SP2 and SP3

I would when I get them. Its not so easy to download some 350MB files over my super slow Internet connection, I guess thats my fault. Its the same reason I hate patches . But somehow I feel that was not source or remedy of the problem.

quote:

install the latest DirectX9.0c (March 2008), yours is from 2005.

Already Have it and running. Installed it again Just to be sure.

quote:

try reducing the "overspeed".

Please Its just a Name. There is no overclocking in my system. Thats because I am either too coward or ignorant to deal with it .

quote:

It may be necessary that you 'downclock', reduce your overclock to have your system stable to play your games.

Thats the whole point I am talking about. Maybe someone would suggest I get back my Old FX5200 to Play AC as well . Sorry Sir, I think my system is stable right now. If the VRAM is overheating then it would overheat for other games too, won't it ???

Unfortunately I can bring long list of games that needed to be patched to work correctly. I clearly don't think its a good strategy. I am a Com Science Graduate and MBA Student (Not much of a Hardware Guy. Barely passed Electronics ) and work as a .NET programmer. So I know difference between a finished product and beta releases.

But according to Universal Company Policy: You Don't Say theres some Problem With ur Product. Rather they say You may Experience some problems running this software (Basically ur Fault. Nor Ours) Microsoft does this and so does UBISOFT.

Without updated Windows you may NOT expect stability. You fail.
According to your dxdiag, your DirectX is from 2005.
"Overspeed" is the name of the board for a reason. If you know how to handle the board, you try it at default settings.

quote:

Originally posted by silent_surfer:
Sorry Sir, I think my system is stable right now.

So, i have wasted enough time trying to help you. Bye.

quote:

So, i have wasted enough time trying to help you. Bye.

And I am sorry that I thought u could keep an open mind. Thank you.