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).

[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.