I keep getting this crash randomly in campaign missions and skirmish.
I'm forced to restart my computer when this happens. Has never happened with other games.

There's no pattern of any sort.

My graphics settings are:
-All set to high except for water which is medium.
-No anistropic filtering
-Vsync on.
-2 monitors. Main 1680x1050, secondary 1280x1024

PC specs:
-ATI radeon HD 3850
-Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400
-4GB RAM
-ASUS p5k-e
-Latest official video drivers.


This may be related, I'm not sure, but my graphics card may be slightly damaged due to Ostagar Crash in Dragon Age: Origins.

Operating System?

Ah yes, Vista. Fully updated.

DirectX 9 updated to the latest version? The SupCom2 install script should install the August 2009 version, but it's best to be sure.


However, it could be a hardware error with your GPU, yes.

Yes, the steam launcher updated the directX too.

So I can shout at bioware's shitty QA more now?

No, because it's not their fault if your GPU is really defective.

Ask Steam Square enix can help u anything but as spooky said it possible your GPU is dieing

Actually it is. The Ostagar crash bug occurs when a PC has a multicore processor and a HD 3800 series GPU. After talking to the king in Ostagar, the GPU's temperature spikes, causing a no signal crash. The ridiculous overheat damages the card permanently.
I know people whose card has been destroyed because of this.

Well. I'll have to get a new card anyway.

Sure, but the game can only indirectly cause a GPU overheat. The GPU itself or its environment is at fault here, not the game.

Apparently not with this issue, although I don't know the specifics of how it works.

This issue won't be any different. Only the driver itself or an application to overclock the GPU can directly damage the GPU.

well, if the game over-uses a particular circuit that is a long way away from any thermal diodes, you could damage a non-overclocked chip and not have thermal throttling kick-in.

A game can't overuse any part of the GPU. It can just use it 100% and the GPU is designed to work with a 100% load. If the GPU fails under 100% load it was either broken in the first place or the venting in its environment was insufficient.

the GPU is very very pipelined, if you're doing one type of operation over and over again, you'll leave 99% of the silicon idle, and just hammer upon that tiny bit left.

That wouldn't even be 100% load on the GPU, just 100% load on one shader unit for example. This does not put more strain on that part than when all the other shader units are used too.

Spooky's right. Overheating damage means a major driver or hardware failure. If ATi had built the card right, it would be impossible for any card to overheat damage as a result. BioWare may have written a program with a bug, but drivers are supposed to catch the works.

Updated drivers to the newest ones, turned off second monitor in control center and plugged it off. Problem still persists.

I need to buy a new graphics card -_-

Now that's 2 games I want to play but can't.

Bit of an update concerning this.

I usually manage to play trough one mission per game launch before the crash occurs, but I need to save the game pretty much all the time.
However, I just went trough another crash on Illuminate mission 6. I started up my computer again and loaded up the save, just to wait... wait... and wait some more. The screen popped up a "Loading save" but nothing happened even after 15 minutes, so I just alt-tabbed and closed the game.

So now my "just in case" saves are corrupted. I'm interested to how this happens if you save then 4 minutes later the game crashes.

Was it saving at the time your pc crashed by any chance?

It seemed to be a two time occurrence actually. It was not saving when the crash happened, but saves that I've done now haven't gotten corrupted.

looks like your gpu bios settings are all over the place cause it damaged it self with over heat and that will cause major damage over a period of time.

What? How can you know this for sure?

BIOS is a basic input output system this system controls, voltage, cpu/gpu speed, ram speed and temperature control. If 1 of them settings are out of sync with the others settings this can cause ESD or even Temperature Spark and badly burn the connectors in the card which will start giving you problems.

As I've said before, this is mostly due to the incompatibility between Dragon Age Origins, ATI HD3800 series card and a multicore processor. Some folks have lost their 3800 completely trying to fix it.

And as we have said before, it's absolutely impossible for a game to trash a GPU directly .