Black Mesa is killing my PC

Black Mesa Archive In-game Issues (Mod)
#1

GAH!!!

When I try to run the game, it is OK for a few minutes, then it kills my PC. Completely dead. No blue screen, nothing. I have to cold-boot my machine, and I get scary warnings from the BIOS that something has changed. Great.

If I go into the Options for the game, that causes the PC to crash within seconds.

So far I have not made it off the train at the very beginning of the game.

My PC specs:

Core i7 Quad-core
16 GB RAM
Quadro FX 3700
Windows 7 Professional X64, Service Pack 1

Now, I run really hardcore programs like Maya all the time. This is a solid machine with a lot of power, but evidently Black Mesa can easily kick my PC’s butt. I know I’m living dangerously trying to play games on a professional video card, but it’s all I have.

Now, I saw that a lot of other people had similar problems on this forum. So I installed the newest NVIDIA driver. No change.

I also disabled the motherboard’s onboard audio driver. I use my M-AUDIO Firewire 410 audio interface instead anyway. Disabling the motherboard audio did not fix the problem.

On some thread I saw some vague reference to some code I might be able to put into a config file, but I don’t know what file or anything. Some help with this would be appreciated.

Thank you

#2

Well, looking at the PC specs you list it seems to be rather a gfx workstation than a gaming rig really. So I suspect that stuff you run on this box don’t crash on you all the time, does it?

What it could be is some kind of a bug in nVIDIA drivers for Quadro-series cards which hadn’t been reported and addressed so far due to not so many people in the world using cards like this one to play D3D games. I’d rather expect various CAD and stuff to be used with it and not the Source SDK game engine :-).

Thus, I’d like to ask you a couple questions:
a) Had you tried running the game in windowed mode with disabled sound? ("-windowed -nosound" command line parameters)
b) What’s about other Source-based games from Orange Box, any problems with them?

#3

The ‘Quadro FX 3700’ is a trash card. I can’t believe you’re running such a bad graphics card with otherwise really good hardware. Stop trying to skimp and either stick to runescape, or soldier up for the money for a new GPU.

#4

I once bought a Quadro card… it was a sad looking card I can tell you. Try goggling for recommended cards and see what you can find.

#5

It should be noted that quadro cards are OK for doing what they are designed to do really, i.e. for working with CAD and other “serious modelling stuff”. And most of the differences from the GeForce cards they share GPU chips with is really in drivers. Drivers for GeForce cards are optimized to be used with games but are not capable of accelerating some things which are accelerated by Quadro drivers. And vise versa. TL;DR: use correct tool for the job - quadro for CAD, geforce for games.

#6

For GPU, use nVidea GeForce for games, Quadro is not for gaming. Or ATI Radeon Cards is fine for gaming too.

#7

I am aware that the Quadro card is a professional card. That’s because I am a professional. Obviously the Quadro card is going to have a slightly different feature set from the consumer cards, and games won’t be optimized to run on pro hardware.

However, it must be noted that Black Mesa is the ONLY Source Engine game that has ever crashed my machine. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that a game will not kill my computer.

There were other posts on this forum describing the same issue. I have a feeling that it’s a Windows 7 x64 issue, not a graphics hardware issue.

In any event, I would love to hear if anyone has any USEFUL constructive suggestions other than, “You’ve got a trash card, so fuck you.”

Thanks

#8

The game per se can’t render your system into complete hang state, it’s either faulty hardware or an error in drivers. BM just happen to be a first application with that exact usage pattern which triggers this bug, nothing more.

BTW I’ve got similar “complete system hangs” with three last releases of the nVIDIA drivers in case I try to use “Frame Rate Target” nVIDIA drivers feature using nVIDIA Inspector tool to have the FPS limiter to a certain amount I found useful. I only have these problems on the workstation with GeForce 550 Ti cards installed, while two other systems I’ve got on hands - one with 560 Ti and another with 250 GTS - do not suffer from this crash. As there are no other stability-related problems on the 550 Ti equipped workstation I tend to think it’s a bug in drivers and simply do not use Frame Rate Limiter in nVIDIA Inspector on this PC.

As for suggestions for your case - there’s not much you could do really.
Try downgrading drivers all the way you could. Your Quaddro card is approx the same as GeForce 8800 GT and there were reports on forums that 7xxx series of nVIDIA cards suffer from driver bug in BM. For that cards problem had been fixed by downgrading drivers all the way to 1xx.xx forceware series, so you could trying doing the same and hope it would help.

There’s nothing more to advice I could thing of from top of my head. :frowning:

#9

You could ask a friend with a more powerfull card to bring it over - installing a new gfx and testing it shouldn´t take more than 20 minutes and you will have an answer :slight_smile:

#10

What power supply do you have? Sometimes a PC that goes completely dead like that has a power supply issue so you might want to check that too.

#11

Oh God stop, why did you use that word in that context, my brain is melting.

#12
#13

I have a GTX 690 and it runs this game like nothing
but then again it was expensive as fuck
i recommend for something cheap maybe a 460
their around 200-300
cheap for a gfx card from nvidia

#14

Don’t forget that a lot of people on these forums are not using their native language, me included. What’s wrong with “per se”? AFAIK its meaning is something like “on its own” or “itself”, so “the game per se” meant to mean “the game as it is …” or “the game is implenented in a way so …”. If “per se” is a phrase from the language that is native for you - it’d be great if you provide me with a more correct meaning and usage pattern for it. It’s always good to continue on learning when dealing with foreign languages :-).

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.