Killing Floor crashes/freezes randomly

[YoDawg753]

I just bought Killing Floor today. I'm pretty impressed by the game but i would like to play it longer than 5 minutes. My problem is that the game crashes randomly pretty much everywhere while playing and in the main menu.

I've already tried the KillingFloor.ini direct3d thing but it still crashes.
I've tried increasing the precache size but it makes it crash way faster.

my gfx drivers are up to date and so is my direct x (february 2010).

My System:

Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 3
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 GHz
2.99 GHz, 3,25 GB RAM

I hope you can find any solutions to this rather weird problem.

Thank You

YoDawg753

EDIT: My graphic card is a geforce 8600GT Super which is fully updated.

 

[Murphy]

The precache size should not exceed a size of 256 so if you set yours bigger, try to set it back to 256.

With your graphics card you don't have to change the renderer in the .ini. Set it back to use the D3D9 renderer.

What kind of crash is it? Does the game just quit or is there an error message? If there is, what does it say? Does the game just freeze but can be shut down with the Task Manager or does it freeze the whole system so you have to hard reset?
Does it only happen in online games or offline too?

Does it happen in other games or just in Killing Floor?

A little more info could help.

 

[YoDawg753]

sorry for the slow reply.

The freeze happens with all games using the unreal engine. America's Army 3 for example. The task manager says it's running but if that's true then at a painfully slow frame rate. It also freezes in the main menu!

 

[Morello]

Could be caused by any number of things. The probable suspects are:

• overheating CPU (check the temperature when playing if possible, check the heatsink isn't clogged with dust)
• faulty RAM (test with a memtest86+ iso http://www.memtest.org )
• overheating graphics card / graphics card RAM (most commonly you'll get a driver error screen or corrupt textures)
• driver issues - try an older driver if you have the newest

You'll have to expand on the "freeze" and crashing if none of those are the problem, ie is the whole computer locking up, just the game but you are able to close it in task manager, etc.

 

[Murphy]

Trying different drivers sounds like a good idea. Also google your driver version. Maybe other people have similar problems. If not, don't rule out driver problems just yet as something might have gone wrong with the download/installation of the drivers.

I don't think it's due to faulty RAM, tbh. If it was faulty RAM I think the whole system would freeze and you wouldn't be able to bring up the Task Manager. I could be wrong.
If the gpu was overheating you would probably see anomalies, like Morello said.



What kind of sound-card do you have? This may be a stab in the dark, but try running the games without sound acceleration. Click Start -> Run, type "dxdiag" and hit ok. Go to the sound tab and turn off Hardware Acceleration for sound with the slider.
The games might run a little slower as the cpu has to take over for the sound-card and sound won't be as good (e.g. no EAX effects) but if it was a problem with the sound-card they won't crash/freeze anymore.
I had similar problems way back in Baldur's Gate and Warcraft 3. The games would just freeze seemingly randomly but the system kept running.

 

[Morello]

I don't think it's due to faulty RAM, tbh. If it was faulty RAM I think the whole system would freeze and you wouldn't be able to bring up the Task Manager. I could be wrong.

Depending on which part of the RAM is faulty, it can produce completely different results, so it's always worth running at least one run through of memtest. I've seen all manner of weird and wonderful things over the years with faulty RAM.