Game freezes after starting

[kenoxite]

It seems I'm out of luck with this game.

I finally was able to play it (avoided tinkering with the options, which seems to trigger the mouse bug) but after walking around a bit the game froze. It exactly happened when that door is suddenly opened by the wind(?), right at the start of the game.

Not only the game froze, but the whole computer. After a couple minutes of staring at the same frozen frame and hearing the same sound loop the screen turned black, forcing me to reboot the computer manually. While all this happened I wasn't able to alt+tab. I think the game simply crashed my video card.

Here's my dxdiag, in case you need it.

I'd really love to be able to finally play this game. I never had any problem running the Penumbras in this same machine.

[kenoxite]

More on this.

I decided to give it another try, this time playing in windowed mode. Doing so I was able to get past the opened door area and make it to the area beyond the second loading screen. I thought maybe I was just unlucky the first time, so I saved, restarted the game and continued playing it in full screen.

After following the blood(?) trails and being subject of a couple of uneasy events (lights off, etc) I ended in a kind of studio, where a desk in front of a more than welcomed window was waiting for me. And it kept waiting because the game froze again.

I guess that my only option is to keep playing in windowed mode until a fix for all this is found (if ever). But I think there's a hint in where those frozen screens happened: both happened just when some kind of trigger was activated in the game.

EDIT: The freeze happens _even_ in windowed mode. I decided to give it a final go and restarted in that mode. Once I got to the desk area (the one where the lamp is found) the computer froze again. Graphic card crash, to be precise. Fortunately this time ATI's VPU Recover utility kicked in and restarted the graphic card, so I was able to keep playing.

Anyway, being forced to play in windowed mode with a 848x480 resolution plus the rest of problems is killing the game for me. It's absolutely mood breaking, as you can guess. So I better put it aside until a fix for all this is found. Which I hope is soon.

[jens]

It sounds very much as though your graphics card is over-heating. Do you have any means to check it's temperature while playing the game?

[kenoxite]

Yes, I always have Notebook Hardware Control on, and I always notch the CPU clock down to 75% while playing games. It would overheat beyond playability otherwise.

This machine (ASUS M6V) has been my main for a couple years now, and I use it extensively both for work and pleasure (yep, gaming). This is the first game that makes my graphic card collapse in pain, so while overheating might be the problem is a problem only caused by Amnesia. I haven't had this kind of problems with any game so far. Being an avid gamer you can guess that the amount of games played with this notebook can be counted in the hundreds, from low resource hungry indies to major AAA games (any game below shader 3.0).

And BTW, the game runs at a stable 80-85ºC for the most part, which is the usual temperature I reach when gaming. The CPU uses to be at around 70-75ºC when idling. There hasn't been any particular heat spike when the freezes happened. Not that I noticed.

[jens]

But how about the GPU?

[kenoxite]

Ah, my bad. I'm afraid that little neat tool doesn't monitor that. I haven't searched for any tool to specifically monitor the GPU temperature as I never had this problem until now.

After Googling and trying ATI Tray Tools, HWMonitor and SIW it seems that it's not even possible. All the options to monitor my GPU are greyed out or simply don't appear in any of those hardware monitoring tools.

[jens]

Hmm, what happens if you just stand still and let the game run?

Can you take the hpl.log in My Documents/Amnesia/ and post here?

Have you looked for any updated drivers for the graphics card?