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Would most CDT be related to RAM?

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warp_kez

warp_kez

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Mar 5, 2003
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I am curious about this.

I have tried the game using limited number of divisions and it ran fine, but when I started using about 1000, 2000 and 3000 divisions stability started to go down the sink faster than a cocaroach in hot water!

I do have 512MB of RAM in the system, but I am wondering if 1GB or more may be required especially if the unit linked-lists are stored on the stack rather than the heap.

I do know that the programmers are not talking, but this could be an issue for them.
 
No one else has reported a problem, and 512 meg should be more than suffcient for this game.
 
I have been playing some more, I cannot actually tie it down to a certain event.

It can occur just by clicking a button, trying to group a formation, move units, during a fire-fight etc.

This is both mod'ed and un-mod'ed.
 
Do you have all the latest drivers for your video card?
 
Let us know.
 
Bugger - it still occurs.

I have even tried uninstalling, and reinstalling.

I ran nortons clean sweep over it to make sure it was gone.

I might run some diags on my system just incase there is a fault wih the hardware - the random crashing does resemble a problem I had years ago where the Windows installer would drop out due to a fault RAM chip.

If I get my other system set up today, I will also try the game on it.
 
Did you clear out your registry entries?
 
I tried again, totally wiping the game from off the system, again removing every trace.

It still occurs, but at least now I can build 4000 divisions before it starts to act strange and crashing.

One thing I did log before each crash was a RAM spike, where all of a sudden RAM usage shot up - not sure if that was related to the game, or another background process.
 
Originally posted by N!ghtY
.
i bet all i have on bad ram or too high ram timings
Click to expand...

Care to explain?
 
Well I can explain the RAM timings... I agree with N!ghty that it is a big contributor to CTDs. It is very much dependent on the MOTHERBOARD that you have, as it varies from board to board.

I run EU2 with 128MB on my laptop and I don't have stability probs, I have HoI on it but haven't tried since 1.02 ;) Game stability is not proportional to the amount of available memory, it might run smoother as you add memory but that's it. Microsoft virtual memory management isn't *that* unstable. Slow, yes, but not unstable usually...

When troubleshooting this (to whom is having problems), make sure you specify the memory brand, quantity, and the motherboard brand & model you have. And video card I guess heh

In my main box I have an Athlon 2100+ and I have Samsung DDR memory. PC2700 modules, 512MB each for a total of a gig. And the A7N8X Deluxe Asus motherboard. Sweet board, but it is a real PITA without the exact settings for memory that you have.

I first installed it in my mobo with conservative, non-aggressive RAM timings (supposedly the safe and default settings, I'll overclock later). I ran HoI first and I got a CTD as soon as I started a game (got through the intro movies ok). Same with EU2. Wondering if it was some freaky conflict with some DX setup that Paradox uses, I tried to run a few other games on my system like Neverwinter and Civ3. No dice it would crash almost straight away.

I also verified that I had the latest version of drivers for my PNY Ti4400 GeForce 4 card (still did, and I am *still* running DX8.1) which I did have.

Flustered I went on the net (IE and Nutscrape ran just fine...) and investigated further. I saw nothing that would cause these stability problems. It had to be the RAM... but how much more conservative can you get when I already was using the slowest most stable settings?

Anyway the next day at work I was speaking with a fellow EE that I work with (he bought the same board I did with similar RAM at the same time) and I asked him about his settings.

Apparently that board required high performance DDR memory to have overclocking aggressive settings. I changed this and proceeded to play a one hour session of HoI with no problems, CTDs or anything. I couldn't believe it. Never seen that before...

Ironic that the memory only worked for me in overclock mode and not factory defaults ;)
 
Why not set the memory to Auto?
 
I have a GB of RAM, I haven't encountered any CTD's that would lead me to believe its a memory problem.
 
If you are having problems please start a new thread.
 
That's what I did... auto is supposed to be the stable non-aggressive setting.

My only guess is that when the memory bus is saturated, there is a bug or something with the bios/mobo that causes memory failure in the executable that is using all of the resources. I only got the crashes when the board was starting up a program.

Maybe when the program/OS tries to allocate memory to a stack or heap or something (e.g. in C++ you would use new), the memory fails to do it even when there is more than enough memory to succeed. Windows is *supposed* to wrap a call to new with a nice failure message and programs should be written to handle it.

But if the failure is under even windows... that's my guess, the bios doesn't handle a certain type of memory allocation failure and craps out, causing Windows to kill off the executable and return to desktop.

Or maybe it is something else ;) But I know it is unrelated to my video card, as it would crap out in 640x480 and 8bit color on a few of my older programs.
 
Be thankful for your friend. :)

I have 800 Mhz rambus memory modules so I would not have had a clue.
 
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