VPU Recoverer - EH ?

[Talim]

Guys,

I recently keep getting a message that says -

'VPU recoverer has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands'.

When this happens my screen is usually minimises - sometimes I lose DAOC connection completely, and sometimes it simply freezes for a few seconds.

I have an ATI Radeon 9800 card thats been in the PC ages.

Any ideas please

 

[Ballard]

I had a similar thing happen to my radeon 9800 awhile back that had been working fine for along time aswell. Unfortunately it is very common in 9800's and also unfortunately there are alot of different causes.

Here are some of the things you can do;
- Turn VPU recover off. Its a waste of time and generally makes things worse. This is done in your catalyst drivers.
- Turn fast writes off (offers next to no performance improvement anyway, omega drivers even have this feature turn off by default They can be turned off either in your bios or through the catalyst drivers
- Increase the AGP voltage. By default alot of older motherboards (and some new one) supply 1.5v to the agp port, the 9800 can run fine on that sometimes but if you have stability issues you can try increasing it to 1.6v or 1.7v. This was what actually fixed my 9800. This can be done in the BIOS for most mobos.
- Try decreasing the AGP speed (probably wont help but if nothing else fixes it, it is worth trying).
- update your drivers. personally i dont use the normally catalyst drivers but rather the omega drivers from http://www.omegadrivers.net/
- If all this fails it could possibly be a PSU problem, if your 12v rail is not stable it can cause problems for your GPU. Try all the other things before even remotely thinking about a different PSU though.


Good luck

 

[Ballard]

Also in very rare circumstances it can be a RAM issue, When the video card borrows ram it can stuff up if the ram is faulty. Lowering the AGP apeture size as low as possible can help diagnose/fix that. It almost certainly wont be that tho

 

[RS|Phil]

How's this going?

 

[eugeneg]

Tried all the above suggestions, for which, thank you. Also tried the following extracted from the ATI website - all to no avail.

"For Radeon 9500/9700/9800/X800 series of cards, you should assess whether your power supply meets the additional power demand for these products. For a single hard drive configuration, a 300-Watt power supply is recommended. In systems that have 2 or more hard drives installed, you may require something more robust. "

"Try checking System Properties->Hardware Tab->Device Manager. When in the Device Manager click on ‘View’ in the menu options and select view "Resources by type". The main display will change, look for and expand the Interrupt Request (IRQ). Look within the list for the ATI graphics product and check whether it is sharing a number with any of the other devices. Integrated devices such as USB or Firewire (1394) controllers and Network or Audio adapters that are sharing would be considered normal. In addition to this, you may see a device listed as “ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI steering” which is normal as well. Any other device that is sharing the same PCI number should be moved to another PCI slot in your computer if possible."

"Disabling Fastwrites may increase stability within a game. You may find this feature within the system BIOS or in the ATI Control Panel or ATI Catalyst Control Center.
For ATI Control Panel, navigate to your Windows Control Panel and open Display Properties, click on the Settings tab and then the Advanced button. Click on the SMARTGART tab, turn off the Fastwrites and then click Apply, and restart the system.

For the ATI Catalyst Control Center, right click on an empty area of your desktop and click “ATI Catalyst(tm) Control Center. Switch the view to ‘Advanced’ by clicking on the view button and click on the SMARTGART category in the menu. Turn Fastwrites off and click Apply and restart the system. "

"BIOS settings may also have an affect on performance and/or stability of a game. CAUTION: We do not recommend end-users who are unfamiliar with BIOS settings to perform such actions, and should instead contact their system provider for help on these settings. The BIOS settings listed here may not be available for all motherboards/systems.

AGP Aperture or Graphics Windows Size should be set to 128 or 256
Disable any “Shadowing” or “Memory Hole”
Disable "Cache Video BIOS"
AGP Driving mode should be set to “Auto”
Adjust AGP voltage to 1.6v in Bios "

 

[MadsKaizer]

Last time I had that error, was with radeon 9800 pro too, it was my fan that was broken, so the card overheated. and in the end it burned off, and i got a new one from retailer.

 

[Talim]

Thanks- Still no joy

Guys,

Thanks for the posts. I tried everything in Ballards post ( except where I didn't have the function to effect the change because PC is fairly old ). Have also done the stuff stated in eugeneg's post, and also my fan seems to be ok but still no joy.

Completely run out of ideas now so it seems a new rig is needed.

Ah well - life is like that I guess.

 

[LordjOX]

Everyone else just keep you jumping around the porridge, downgrade your ati drivers. works.

 

[Cynix]

5.2 work best.

 

[RS|Phil]

You've tried reinstalling the drivers I know but have you tried cleaning the old ones out very, very thoroughly?

Go into Control Panel > add/remove programs > "ATI uninstall program"

Don't reboot yet!

Go to this site http://www.drivercleaner.net/ and download driver cleaner pro.

Install it, and reboot into safe mode.

To get into safe mode, restart Windows then after you see the initial mainboard splash screen where it beeps, tap F8 repeatedly - you should get a menu. Select safe mode and let it run. Click Yes when it opens up (assuming you're on winxp).

Run Driver Cleaner Pro , and clean all the items that mention ATI (ATI, ATI uninstaller, ATI WDM etc etc)
Once you've done reboot and reinstall the Catalyst drivers again. I recommend the 6.3 drivers for now. I can send you them if you cannot find an online source.


If that fails, have you reinstalled Windows? I can't remember if that was posted.
Best do that before you spend money really.


Also did we say download ATI tool and underclock your card a bit?

http://www.techpowerup.com/atitool/

Download the stable version and install it - then underclock your card's core and memory 10 points at a time and see if it helps.

To do this, install and let it detect your card. Then run it. You'll see two sliders - one for memory and one for core speed. Don't worry - we're not overclocking we want to underclock so you really cant' do any harm here. Slide the bars down or enter some new numbers. Take note of what they are at the moment too tho you can always restore detaults its nice to know where you started.

Slide the bars down on both by 10 points, then set the clock. Try running your system. If it fails, try another 10 on each up to a max of around 100 - this'll drop the performance a little but tbh you won't notice that in DAoC anyway.

 

[MaCaBr3]

Is ur card still connect directy to the PSU, since it need to be powerd from the PSU too.

 

[Litmus]

i used to have that problem with my old 9800pro, i read all the forums but never realy found anything that helped. Then i changed my RAM timeings in the bios and never realy had any problems ever again.

 

[eugeneg]

Thanks for the further suggestions. Away for a week, but perhaps then we can try downgrading the drivers.... if I can find them. Were are older versions of the Catalyst ATI drivers to be found please ? Should we use the latest V5 set ? Is that 5.2 as suggested by Cynix ?

Also to try: underclocking and driver cleaning as suggested by RS|Phil

MaCaBr3, Card is connected to PSU directly (warning message on screen if not).

 

[RS|Phil]

I'd personally not go back as far as 5.2 I like the 6.3s. I have copies of them lying around somewhere but its a bit big for me to upload.

 

[LordjOX]

I'd personally not go back as far as 5.2 I like the 6.3s. I have copies of them lying around somewhere but its a bit big for me to upload.

It's even recommended by GOA/Mythic that catalyst 5.2 drivers are most stable for daoc, lols.

 

[RS|Phil]

Theyre about three years old !

 

[eugeneg]

Any pointers to where old versions of Catalyst can be downloaded from would be welcomed.

 

[eugeneg]

http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/ati.htm

 

[Yeke]

Just have to chime in on the 5.2's they might be stable for daoc but they are also absolute shit for practically every new game you may wish to play.

And too be fair why should we have too use such an old driver for a problem that is quite widespread surly something should have been sorted? :/

 

[Konah]

running 9800pro, latest omega drivers and zero problems whatsoever, even overclocked to the nuts. turn off vpu recover, its not like its gonna save any of your work or whatever, if the problem is bad enuf you'll crash, if it isn't you'll carry on!

99% of problems at this time of year is heat. the ambient temerature goes up = your cpu/gfx/mobo/ram doesnt get the quality of cooling it does the rest of the year and bingo!

add another fan (or 2) to the case if theres a slot for one, or use faster/louder fans in summer.

if your overclocked on gfx or cpu: back it off some, 5% or so, then ramp it back up in september.

stable in december != stable in july