nv4_disp.dll driver stuck in infinite loop.

[caravel]

It's one of those rare occasions where I start a thread...

I've just spent half of last night and half of today trying to get MTW, RTW (and anything else for that matter) working on a 7300GT and WinXP with various drivers, setting and tweaks with no luck:...

Hello all,

I am having the same nv4_disp "driver stuck in infinite loop" BSoD problem. I have registered here to see if anyone has any idea at all how to solve this problem.

I've tried the service pack from VIA Technologies (link in the first part of this thread) to close off the register and though I have a VIA chipset that fix didn't work for me. The card I have is an AGP 7300GT 512MB which I got yesterday, running under Windows XP SP2. The nv4_disp "driver stuck in infinite loop" BSoD was occurring in all games including Medieval Total War, Rome Total War, Quake 4 and Doom3 among others. I have tried every kind of fix and tried several drivers including the latest and the 93.71 drivers which are supposed to be the best for 7xxx series and still the problem is there. I've tried a 256MB AGP aperture and this has made no difference either. I'd even considered going to back to Windows 98SE but the 7xxx series appears to have no drivers for this. I've also completely uninstalled AVG as I've seen that mentioned as a possible cause also, but that made no difference either.

The only thing that has partially worked for me is enabling fast writes. This get's Quake 4 and Doom3 working again perfectly (well not perfectly, the textures are still blurry low res rubbish - regardless of any of the settings I try, and my old Radeon 9800 had way superior image quality overall) but not Rome TW or Medieval TW, these still crash with the same old BSoD after a few seconds of starting a new game.

I'm pretty much at a loss now. I bought this card in the hope that it would at least work with the TW games (which is all I really want 3D acceleration for). I also bought it for Linux because I was sick of the ATI driver problems under that OS. Despite this, if there is no way to get this card working properly under WinXP without this error then I will have to go back to ATI.

It is the apparently infamous driver stuck in infinite loop problem. This appears to be a bug in Nvidia's drivers that they're not really interested in fixing. The fix from VIA to close the RX55 registerdoesn't work for me either. I wish now I'd stuck with ATI despite the problems I've had with their cards at least they actually work! I wasn't expecting amazing performance and visuals out of this card, I just expected it to work, and as I said over there, to work better under Linux (because the Nvidia Linux driver support is way better than ATI's).

So I'm wondering if anyone has encountered this here, or found a solution even?



-Edit: I'm about so see if this card will work in Ubuntu.

[Blodrast]

Sorry to hear about your troubles... You have my sympathy. Can't help much, though, I'm afraid, since I'm running really old hw, and I wasn't even aware of the bug you mentioned.

I agree with your statement that Nvidia has much better Linux support than ATI.
Can you run *TW on Linux though ? I thought the main reason for buying the card was so you can play the TW games in a reasonable manner - do they all run under Linux ?

I'm sure you've spent a lot of your time looking online, are there no card settings that you can further tweak (similar to the fast writes) ?
Silly question perhaps, but what about much older drivers ?

I'll look around online, although I'm sure you've already done a much thorough job with that, if you've spent so much time on it already.

[caravel]

Sorry to hear about your troubles... You have my sympathy. Can't help much, though, I'm afraid, since I'm running really old hw, and I wasn't even aware of the bug you mentioned.

Neither was I until I first saw the BSoD. The next thing I was following a paper trail all over the web with this problem all over the place but no real solutions. There is even a petition for this problem.

I agree with your statement that Nvidia has much better Linux support than ATI.
Can you run *TW on Linux though ? I thought the main reason for buying the card was so you can play the TW games in a reasonable manner - do they all run under Linux ?

You can't run TW under Linux natively. I think you can barely get RTW and M2TW running under Cedega but don't quote me on that one. The reason I bought this card was to kill three birds with one stone a) because my old card was overheating and dying b) because I couldn't get the fglrx ATI driver up and running under Ubuntu no matter what I tried and c) to play RTW and MTW on WinXP. MTW crashes on the loading screen for both battles and campaign. Instead of the loading bar moving across it hangs at that screen with an empty load bar and that's it. If I leave it long enough XP will throw up the BSoD error. RTW locks up after about 20 seconds in a battle regardless of settings and about 1 or 2 seconds after loading a campaign.

I'm sure you've spent a lot of your time looking online, are there no card settings that you can further tweak (similar to the fast writes) ?
Silly question perhaps, but what about much older drivers ?

I had to enable the fast writes again for Linux. Because basically it would crash at the login prompt otherwise. Working fine now, and I have compiz/beryl running also with the highest quality settings.

I'll look around online, although I'm sure you've already done a much thorough job with that, if you've spent so much time on it already.

I'd appreciate if you (or anyone else) can come up with anything but it looks like I won't be able to play TW again for quite a while. I've tried older drivers but with no difference. As I understand it, newer drivers are the way to go. There are reports of users "upgrading" to Vista and the Vista drivers eradicating the problem entirely. (I will not be going to Vista!)

[Motep]

I'd appreciate if you (or anyone else) can come up with anything but it looks like I won't be able to play TW again for quite a while. I've tried older drivers but with no difference. As I understand it, newer drivers are the way to go. There are reports of users "upgrading" to Vista and the Vista drivers eradicating the problem entirely. (I will not be going to Vista!)

Hmmm, is that so? i suppose you could try "upgrading" to vista and then "downgrading" back to the one you prefer. It might even work for a while, but Im not sure. My gaming computer did the same thing, so we took it to the shop, and even he didn't know what the hell to do with it. Anyways, i dont feel like hooking the other computer up right now (the problem with having only one monitor) so Ill be forced to leave it as is.

[Blodrast]

So far all the advice/suggestions I've been able to find online is to up/down-grade drivers, which you've already tried...

Damn. I know I'm grasping at straws here, but, since I don't think it's clear what exactly is causing the bug, do you think it might be worth trying to use different DirectX versions ? I don't know about RTW, but MTW is old enough that you should be able to have a bit of leeway varying the DirectX version... As I said, grapsing at straws, I admit it... but I don't have any better ideas.

I've looked at the VIA fix... in what way does it not work for you, is there just no effect ? I guess you tried it in combo with different drivers, as well ?
I realize I might be grating your nerves, if that's what you've been going through the whole night before, but I'm afraid I don't have anything better...

If there are any combinations of drivers with the VIA patch and maybe DirectX, as well as BIOS settings, that you haven't tried yet, maybe it's worth a try...
Also, I saw one guy said you shouldn't allocate too much PCI texture memory ? Did you try to fiddle with that, decreasing it as much as you can ?

[caravel]

So far all the advice/suggestions I've been able to find online is to up/down-grade drivers, which you've already tried...

I have, with no difference at all.

Damn. I know I'm grasping at straws here, but, since I don't think it's clear what exactly is causing the bug, do you think it might be worth trying to use different DirectX versions ? I don't know about RTW, but MTW is old enough that you should be able to have a bit of leeway varying the DirectX version... As I said, grapsing at straws, I admit it... but I don't have any better ideas.

I hadn't tried that, it might be worth a try but DirectX is not really the issue, the Nvidia drivers coupled with the motherboard that I have is. I can try an older DirectX though such as 8.1 I suppose or whatever is on the MTW disc. -Edit: Tried DirectX downgrade to 8.1, RTW crashes sooner than ever with weird loading bar glitches and MTW no difference.

I've looked at the VIA fix... in what way does it not work for you, is there just no effect ? I guess you tried it in combo with different drivers, as well ?
I realize I might be grating your nerves, if that's what you've been going through the whole night before, but I'm afraid I don't have anything better...

The VIA fix just doesn't seem to work. It runs through the install and requests a reboot but that's it. I can't see where it has installed. I've checked the hidden devices in device manager and can't see it in there either - so I can't be sure it's running. I've reinstalled it several times, even in safe mode and no difference either. The whole idea of the fix is that it closes the RX55 register. To stop Nvidia's drivers from writing to it. Newer motherboards already have the register closed off in the BIOS, for older motherboards the fix is available but, as it says in the readme, not guaranteed to work. I already have the latest BIOS for this board so that's not something I can look at either.

If there are any combinations of drivers with the VIA patch and maybe DirectX, as well as BIOS settings, that you haven't tried yet, maybe it's worth a try...
Also, I saw one guy said you shouldn't allocate too much PCI texture memory ? Did you try to fiddle with that, decreasing it as much as you can ?

I suppose I can try reducing the AGP aperture, I haven't tried that yet. Most advice I've found pointed to increasing it. -Edit2: Also tried reduced aperture (as low as 4MB) and disabled texture acceleration altogether with no difference, RTW crashes as ever but the loading screens are black with just the bar visible and still no difference with MTW.

-Edit3: I've also tested a free Linux FPS game called "Tremulous" on the highest settings possible and it was pretty much rock solid stable. This still points to the XP Nvidia drivers causing the problem.

-Edit4: I've just installed Doom3 running natively in Ubuntu and it runs flawlessly on the highest settings for OpenGL. I've been playing for two hours and seen no issues. So now I'm entirely convinced it's not BIOS settings as such, neither is it power, hardware failures or temps (checked those and they're normal).

[Blodrast]

Damn. Suckier and suckier.
No, I'm convinced it's the driver & mb combo, I'm not doubting that at all, I was just hoping that by changing DirectX (or other things), it might not be _triggered_, that is all. Obviously I was wrong.

Guess I'm totally out of ideas for now :(, but I'll keep looking around, and if I come up with something, or an idea, I'll naturally let you know...

[caravel]

Damn. Suckier and suckier.
No, I'm convinced it's the driver & mb combo, I'm not doubting that at all, I was just hoping that by changing DirectX (or other things), it might not be _triggered_, that is all. Obviously I was wrong.

Guess I'm totally out of ideas for now :(, but I'll keep looking around, and if I come up with something, or an idea, I'll naturally let you know...

Thanks for the input, and concern, Blodrast, it is appreciated. I'm totally out of ideas myself. I'll probably have to wait until I can afford a new system before I'll be able to play TW again. I'm not about to go and stick the down-clocked Radeon 9800 back in again, now that I've got Ubuntu running so well.

@Motep: There is not a chance in hell that I'm paying for Vista and I don't want to go to the hassle of acquiring it by "other means" and messing around trying to circumvent M$'s WGA, so that's not even an option. Also spending good money on an OS simply to "upgrade and downgrade" is out of the question.

[Motep]

Thanks for the input, and concern, Blodrast, it is appreciated. I'm totally out of ideas myself. I'll probably have to wait until I can afford a new system before I'll be able to play TW again. I'm not about to go and stick the down-clocked Radeon 9800 back in again, now that I've got Ubuntu running so well.

@Motep: There is not a chance in hell that I'm paying for Vista and I don't want to go to the hassle of acquiring it by "other means" and messing around trying to circumvent M$'s WGA, so that's not even an option. Also spending good money on an OS simply to "upgrade and downgrade" is out of the question.

I did not consider the cost, I am sorry. I got vista and xp disks free with this computer so I did not give it much thought.

[caravel]

I did not consider the cost, I am sorry. I got vista and xp disks free with this computer so I did not give it much thought.

No problem, sorry if my response seemed a bit snappy, I didn't intend it that way.



An update on "the issue". Still no luck. I've been playing a few missions of Quake4 under Linux (natively as with Doom3), the textures are now hi res and the performance is much better than in Windows. I suppose this is pretty much my lot until I can find some kind of solution or workaround...

There is one more thing I can try, that I know of anyway, and that is to try Win98SE and hack the last Win9x driver version to force install for a 7xxx series card. The Win9x installation, updating, configuration, driver installs, tweaking, etc etc etc, will be an enormous task and at the end of it, it still may not work and as such would all have been for nothing. I'll probably have to do it on a separate HDD also to avoid having to format and reinstall XP again and mess up grub (Linux bootloader) in the process. I have seen some mention of this as having worked which is why I'm at least thinking about it. I won't be attempting it though until next weekend, if I even attempt it at all.

[Blodrast]

I thought Windoze versions from 2k or XP upwards no longer messed up lilo/grub...
Also, IIRC, you can relatively easy re-write grub even if it gets messed up, as long as you either have some installation disk (you could make a floppy, but floppies (drives and/or disks) have kinda disappeared...). I don't know if Ubuntu actually explicitly offers the option to re-write/reinstall grub in its installation menu, but even if it doesn't, you can just run grub-install. It's not _too_ inconvenient.

I like the idea about trying win98
How do you plan to force the install for your card, though ?

[Mikeus Caesar]

You can't run TW under Linux natively. I think you can barely get RTW and M2TW running under Cedega but don't quote me on that one. The reason I bought this card was to kill three birds with one stone a) because my old card was overheating and dying b) because I couldn't get the fglrx ATI driver up and running under Ubuntu no matter what I tried and c) to play RTW and MTW on WinXP. MTW crashes on the loading screen for both battles and campaign. Instead of the loading bar moving across it hangs at that screen with an empty load bar and that's it. If I leave it long enough XP will throw up the BSoD error. RTW locks up after about 20 seconds in a battle regardless of settings and about 1 or 2 seconds after loading a campaign.

I can't help with your general issues, but iirc the problem with MTW is a problem quite a few people, including myself, get. It's some issue related to drivers being too new for the game or some such rubbish, which can't be cured without reverting to older drivers.

[caravel]

I thought Windoze versions from 2k or XP upwards no longer messed up lilo/grub...

Unfortunately XP still seems to overwrite grub as far as I can tell. Vista probably does the same. The problem is that if XP installs and doesn't overwrite the bootloader then it cannot boot, nor can it manipulate the grub loader to add an entry for it self, so the boot loader is lost (equivalent of doing a fdisk /mbr from win9x or a fixboot or fixmbr from Win32. Simple as that really. The only way to get it working if it did install without overwriting would be to go into /boot/grub/menu.lst and edit it manually, adding a line for XP, but that's a moot point.

Also, IIRC, you can relatively easy re-write grub even if it gets messed up, as long as you either have some installation disk (you could make a floppy, but floppies (drives and/or disks) have kinda disappeared...). I don't know if Ubuntu actually explicitly offers the option to re-write/reinstall grub in its installation menu, but even if it doesn't, you can just run grub-install. It's not _too_ inconvenient.

Yep, this is why I still have a floppy drive - just in case. Rather than rewrite grub I'll probably install 9x to another HDD then add it to grub afterwards. This way I can keep everything on my other HDD as is. My TW games are on FAT32 partitions anyway, I took the liberty of moving stuff around, resizing partitions and doing that so that I could access them from Win9x if I did decide to install it.

I like the idea about trying win98
How do you plan to force the install for your card, though ?

I will probably give it a go. The installation can be forced by adding a line to the .inf file to represent the card and it's device ID. This will cause the old driver to be recognised by plug and play as the driver for the card. It will probably install, though whether it will actually work is another matter.

I can't help with your general issues, but iirc the problem with MTW is a problem quite a few people, including myself, get. It's some issue related to drivers being too new for the game or some such rubbish, which can't be cured without reverting to older drivers.

That's what I thought, but exactly the same crash occurs with RTW. I may have a go with even older drivers later, who knows. I now think there may be a few version I haven't tried.

[Blodrast]

Unfortunately XP still seems to overwrite grub as far as I can tell. Vista probably does the same. The problem is that if XP installs and doesn't overwrite the bootloader then it cannot boot, nor can it manipulate the grub loader to add an entry for it self, so the boot loader is lost (equivalent of doing a fdisk /mbr from win9x or a fixboot or fixmbr from Win32. Simple as that really. The only way to get it working if it did install without overwriting would be to go into /boot/grub/menu.lst and edit it manually, adding a line for XP, but that's a moot point.

Ok, I thought I remembered that it was able to chain the bootloaders - its own, plus whatever existing one(s) - which implied detecting their presence, naturally. I seem to recall that was working (from personal experience, not second-hand) - but perhaps it was only for some specific combo of windows and linux bootloader, or perhaps my memory is foggier than I am aware of.

I will probably give it a go. The installation can be forced by adding a line to the .inf file to represent the card and it's device ID. This will cause the old driver to be recognised by plug and play as the driver for the card. It will probably install, though whether it will actually work is another matter.

Cool, you learn something new every day - thanks for the hint.

[caravel]

Ok, I thought I remembered that it was able to chain the bootloaders - its own, plus whatever existing one(s) - which implied detecting their presence, naturally. I seem to recall that was working (from personal experience, not second-hand) - but perhaps it was only for some specific combo of windows and linux bootloader, or perhaps my memory is foggier than I am aware of.

Well the Ubuntu forums are always full of threads where the user reinstalled XP and wiped out grub in the process. I've never seen any option to keep the bootloader but I may be wrong of course. I don't think repair install touches it but a format and reinstall always does AFAIK.

Cool, you learn something new every day - thanks for the hint.

As I said I'll hopefully have a go at this next weekend and keep you posted, if it does work it may be an idea for those that want to get MTW running on a new machine. Dual booting of course.

[Blodrast]

It wasn't with Ubuntu - at that point in time, I don't know if it even existed, and if it was, nobody'd heard of it. I think my experience was with some RH (no Fedora back then, either), and Win2k, and I think it was lilo, not grub (which might make a difference).
Believe me, I'm aware that windows overwrites the bootloader, because I've been through that myself several times, but I'm just not sure how to reconcile that memory I have where it didn't - just that one time. Oh well, maybe it's just a sign that Alzheimer's is kicking in early.

[caravel]

It wasn't with Ubuntu - at that point in time, I don't know if it even existed, and if it was, nobody'd heard of it. I think my experience was with some RH (no Fedora back then, either), and Win2k, and I think it was lilo, not grub (which might make a difference).
Believe me, I'm aware that windows overwrites the bootloader, because I've been through that myself several times, but I'm just not sure how to reconcile that memory I have where it didn't - just that one time. Oh well, maybe it's just a sign that Alzheimer's is kicking in early.

lilo like grub resides in the mbr, and this what windows OSes rewrite on installation, so there should be no difference in this regard. grub is better in that the stage1 of the boot process is located in the mbr but the rest is on your ext2/ext3 or whatever partition usually in /boot/grub, so if it get's nuked by windows you can restore it more easily without having to rewrite the whole thing again, though with lilo you just kept a copy of you lilo.conf file and just did "lilo" and that would rewrite the mbr again.

Hmmm... It's so simple actually now that I think about it that I might find a bit of space for a Win9x partition on my existing drive and just write it into menu.lst, it's not as if a 9x install takes up much space either.

-Edit: I've been looking through the driver archive and can't find anything much older than the ones I had downloaded. Tried messing with hardware acceleration slider. MTW now seems to respond to CTRL+ALT+DEL now and again instead of BSoD. RTW exactly the same problem.

I have a feeling that whatever I do with this in XP it will always be the same due to my motherboard and the fact that all the Nvidia XP/2K drivers cause this issue old and new. Win98SE using the last drivers for the 6 series cards (81.98 w9x)seems to be the only possible solution left.

[caravel]

Well last night I tried the following:

1) Uninstall of VIA Hyperion drivers
2) Uninstall of Nvidia Drivers
3) Driver cleaner pro cleanup of Nvidia drivers
4) Driver cleaner Pro cab cleaner cleanup - reboot
5) Installation of Forceware 93.71 - reboot
6) Forced 2x AA
7) Moved hardware acceleration slider to the left about 2 or 3 notches, the option before Direct3D is totally disabled.
8) Test of MTW, crash to desktop.
9) Test of RTW... and this had me going for a while. Working for about 5 minutes. I was at the campaign map and even ended a turn. Then started moving around and next tried opening and closing the ESC options scroll menu a few times. On about the fifth time the options scroll stayed about 2 thirds open and the same BSoD.

I need to to test this again, as I'm not sure if my actions excacerbated the problem or if it simply waited longer before crashing. I haven't tested battles yet either.

Fastwrites are still on, so I will test with those off as well. AGP Aperture is still at 256MB and write combining is still unchecked. I may also update again to the latest drivers before trying anything else.

-Edit: -

1) Updated driver to latest version - worse than ever.
2) Fast writes on again - worse than ever.
3) Googled for hours to see if there's anything I've missed.
4) Given up - The Win98SE method is the last hope.

[caravel]

Absolutely no luck whatsoever with Win98SE. The second reboot and a file was missing "vnetbios.vxd" trying to do anything else caused more errors of missing files. I was installing on an old HDD purely for testing and so as not to have to mess with my main Ubuntu/XP dual boot setup. I finally managed to install the driver but after that it crashed every time I tried to go to display properties and wouldn't let me use and resolution apart from 640*480 16 colour.

I'm also having major problems with my internet connection which isn't helping matters one bit, this is one of the rare occasions I've been able to get online all weekend. I will probably have to call it a day as far as this approach is concerned. I doubt I'll be able to play MTW/RTW for quite some time to come.

Well who knows maybe it's for the best and will give me a chance to concentrate on other things.

-Edit: I've sort of worked out why some games work, of course it's because they're OpenGL! Doom3 and Quake4 worked and indeed Linux works with Fast Writes turned on (???). Anything Direct3D crashes after a few seconds or doesn't start at all. This proves that it's mainly the Direct3D components of the Nvidia driver that cause this.

[caravel]

Finally fixed, for RTW anyway - now running stable with all of the quality settings maxed out. The setting that fixed it was reducing the AGP rate down to 1x, setting the AGP aperture to 128MB, AGP Read Synchronisation enabled and Fast Writes enabled. I still need to test MTW.



-Edit: MTW still crashes with the same infinite loop error.

-Edit2: RTW has been running for hours all weekend and no crashes. I changed as many video settings as possible within the game to see if I could make it fall over and it held firm. I have a feeling that it was the AGP rate and not the other settings that really made the difference but I'm afraid to change anything again now - just in case. I hope the above info is of use to anyone.

[Caius]

Hmm, the same driver, the same loop error. I had it once, and it seems my NVidia card is starting to die. I have some weird issues, like my monitor went black, and I had to reset, or I had to reload M&B because I entered the town of Zendar and I got all bad textures, like little squares of different colours in every place that there should have been a wall.

Strange. I had the BSoD once, but I'm not sure if it was C&C:R who made it or the card or the OS.

[caravel]

Finally managed to get MTW running on this card and have restored the AGP rate to 4x also. I've added some MTW specific info on this to the CTD thread in the apothecary.

The trick is to go to Device Manager, expand system devices, find "CPU to AGP Bridge", open up properties, click update driver and tell it you want to choose the driver and then install the "PCI Standard PCI-to-PCI Bridge" driver to replace it, then reboot when asked. It may slow performance, in fact I'm pretty sure it does, but at least it actually works now.



p.s. Before I did all of this I removed the graphics card driver first and then reinstalled it afterwards, just to be sure.

[LeftEyeNine]

My question may be a candidate for the dumbest post evar but did you ever try one of the modified drivers from Omega or Dhzer0point or Z-Tweaked (the one I'm currently using) ?

[caravel]

My question may be a candidate for the dumbest post evar but did you ever try one of the modified drivers from Omega or Dhzer0point or Z-Tweaked (the one I'm currently using) ?

That's a valid point, I'll be sure to look those up. Do you know if any of those drivers have been proven to fix the infinite loop bug?

[LeftEyeNine]

Well, I can't say I was aware of that. I'm using these drivers 'cause I have a 6600GT and I need performance.

My current set is a modified 91.47.

Since the general concern about the modified drivers is their stability, I don't go for anything on the market. After having to dispose of my problemous Dhzer0point set, I decided on Z-Tweaked 91.47 reading that it's flawless and good at performance scales. And it really is so far.

Here it is. Checked. Clean.

You may search for options though. DriverHeaven hosts both Omega and Dhzer0point drivers.

Hope that helps.