Mass Effect 2 issues

[arges86]

When i play Mass Effect 2 i generally get good frame rates (low 50s - high 40s).
During cut scenes however, the frame rates plummet to 20 fps, or sometimes 0.
Then, it seems like the texture crashes, the screen turns purple and sometimes the game recovers. the sound never lags, but the video seems to stop.
If the game doesn't properly recover, i have so many random polygons covering everything that i have to restart the game.
Twice i've had to restart the PC (once i ended up having to do a system repair after, because windows wouldn't start).
Any Ideas?
Thanx for taking your time reading.

My computer is:
AMD: Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2991 MHz
Mobo: Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 v.2
RAM: 4GB Mushkin DDR2 PC2-6400
OS: Win 7 64bit
VC: EVGA 8800 GTS 320MB

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Make sure your graphic drivers are up to date. Lose the overclock.

 

[Delta6326]

I would say its either the overclock or the proc, its pretty old

 

[arges86]

drivers are all up to date
i've never had stability issues w/ my CPU,
why would it cause problems now

 

[Delta6326]

its a newer game try going to stock if that doesnt work then idk

 

[FordGT90Concept]

The error rate generally climbs the older a processor gets until it fails. Overclocking accelerates the rate that errors occur. Every error is a wasted cycle. If a processor is pushed too far, it ends up wasting more time redoing calculations than it would at stock.

 

[arges86]

but then it should occur throughout the game... not just during cut scenes.
And since the textures go nuts, it seems less likely to be a CPU issue. Does the CPU have that much to do w/ textures and rasterizing polygons

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It pulls the data off the hard drive and puts it in the video card RAM. Maybe try running FurMark for an hour and see if it gets really bad framerates or starts artifacting.

 

[D007]

Sounds like artifacting caused by a hot GPU.
Could also be artifacting caused by a shitty driver.
try an older driver if all else fails.
I still use the 182.50 driver for my 8800gtx.
and that's like 2 years old.
But it's the most stable driver I have found.

Newer drivers mess with my overclock as well.

 

[arges86]

GPU gets to 73C w/ Furmark, which is within the limits of operating temperature.
The GPU's RAM gets to 64.3C which is also fine...

I've never had a driver issue before... new or old. The most recent drivers have fixed some issues preventing OCing.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Was there any artifacting? The temps won't tell you if the GPU or VRAM is going bad.


Return the processor to stock and try the game--see if that fixes it. If not, run the Linpack stress test in OCCT for at least an hour and see if it catches any errrors.

 

[arges86]

no artifacting...
occasionally after the game would freeze and recover, there would be random polygons attached to characters.
I've tried the game w/ my CPU @ stock speeds (surprising low frame rates; makes me think my cpu is bottleneck my system... but thats a separate issue for another day)

i've nvr used Linpack (isn't that written in Fortran?). But i've stress tested my computer using Furmark for the GPU and Prime95 for the CPU w/o any errors

 

[FordGT90Concept]

When you had it at stock, was there any glitches/errors besides being slow?


Linpack is multithreaded and it functions differently than Prime95 (throttles individual cores instead of being a constant workload). Give it a go for an hour and see if it catches any errors.

 

[arges86]

i had the same issues w/ cutscenes as i did before

 

[Polaris573]

By cutscenes do you mean the pre-rendered videos or are you talking about when there is a long conversation/scene. I get substantial frame rate drops when I'm talking to the illusive man and sometimes in other conversations. It was really bad at

Spoiler

Tali's trial

 

[arges86]

scenes where you talk back and forth w/ people through the dialog prompt. I'd assume they're pre-rendered for the most part (accept your characters customized looks).

One example is the part where i'm talking to Captain David Anderson for the first time in the Citadel. That scene became nearly unviewable.

btw,
how did you do that spoiler alert thing

 

[assaulter_99]

By cutscenes do you mean the pre-rendered videos or are you talking about when there is a long conversation/scene. I get substantial frame rate drops when I'm talking to the illusive man and sometimes in other conversations. It was really bad at

Spoiler

Tali's trial

Yeah I don't know if its just me but I get the impression that long conversation scenes, cutscenes etc are heavily cpu intensive. The fan on my xiggy cranks up to max during these, it becomes more than audible. Temps are defo high during those.

 

[Polaris573]

scenes where you talk back and forth w/ people through the dialog prompt. I'd assume they're pre-rendered for the most part (accept your characters customized looks).

One example is the part where i'm talking to Captain David Anderson for the first time in the Citadel. That scene became nearly unviewable.

btw,
how did you do that spoiler alert thing

No those are rendered in real-time on your GPU/CPU. An example of a pre-rendered one would be the scene of the Normandy flying through the asteroid field to dock with Omega space station.

I'm having trouble in similar spots that you are then.

Use the spoiler tags for spoiler alerts

spoiler][b]your text here[/b][/spoiler]

 

[arges86]

thanx for the clarification
and the code