[Vista] Menu freeze

[MHaggag]

Greetings,

So far, the game consistently freezes every time I press Escape to access the menu while a game is active. I've seen this reported in the thread about the messed-up walls in the ship (first scene), but I thought it warranted a separate thread.

Thanks.

[Thomas]

Please tell me your system specs (gfx card, vista version, etc)
and I will see what I can do.

I would advice you updating graphics card and sound drivers first and see if that helps.

[MHaggag]

Athlon64 3 GHz, ATi Radeon X300 SE, Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit edition.

I tested with Catalyst 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 (latest). Same issue. The sound drivers are up to date as well, although that doesn't mean they don't suck--Realtek AC 97 drivers suck regardless of version and OS.

I'll try to disable the sound and see if that solves it. I can create a minidump of the penumbra process when it freezes and upload it somewhere.

Finally, I tried attaching the VS debugger to the frozen process, and since I have Microsoft symbol server configured, I got semi-understandable callstack traces. There were several audio threads that appear to be working, a thread with SDL was Sleep'ing, and a rendering thread was stuck somewhere inside atioglxx.dll, which is obviously ATi's OpenGL driver. Pity I don't have symbols for that one

It seems like a dead-lock, although I can't tell the details. Again, a minidump would probably be helpful to you if you generate pdb's for release builds (which VS8 does by default, IIRC).

[MHaggag]

Alright, I did some more experimentation. Setting shader quality to very low seems to have solved it. So then I tried low, medium and then high again, and now the menu works! Yes, I did restart the game after each change of these

It seems to be a problem with the ATi driver, because the catalyst control center crashed on me one time after the game had crashed.

[Thomas]

Seems like Vista ATI drivers do not work very well with OpenGL.

[MHaggag]

Seems like Vista ATI drivers do not work very well with OpenGL.

Not only ATi, but Intel too--I was testing an OpenGL application we use at work on my laptop, and found out that it freezes the DWM somehow, which in turn freezes explorer itself. Had to disable DWM manually at application startup to make it work.

Disabling the DWM didn't help with Penumbra, though. I'll just live with it as it currently is.

[thejoedoe]

Had the same problem, but checking the "Triple buffering" and the "Force 24 bit Z buffer depth" in the "Catalyst Control Center" it stopped freezing.

I have a ATI X1600

The graphical bugs remains.

PS: Sorry the bad English.

[Emon]

I too am having this issue and have yet to solve it. I set my shader settings to very low, and that fixed the ship wall visibility bug, but nothing has fixed the deadlock issue. I've tried all the suggestions in this thread and played around with all the OpenGL options I can find and nothing helps.

Specs:
Athlon XP 3000+ (400 MHz FSB)
2 GB PC3200
Radeon X1650XT 256MB
Catalyst 7.5
Latest Audigy 2 drivers for Vista

I suspect it's ATI's shoddy OpenGL drivers. For the time being I'm actually going to install Ubuntu with Wubi and try running it under that. It will be really sad if the Linux drivers work better than the Vista ones.

[Emon]

Okay, I turned all options to their lowest settings, and that fixed it. Then I turned them all back up, and it works okay now.

[Emon]

Ugh, now it's happening again. Turning off all the options fixed it, but after I turned them on again, it didn't work. It really seems like an ATI driver bug at this point. We should all report it to them and link to these various threads. They do actually read driver feedback.