by Karl G. » Sat Jan 24, 2009 7:10 pm
So I've done extensive research on the BSOD error, and it seems to be pretty common across the web, but there is no consensus as to a solution. For some people, distributor-overclocked hardware matched with incompatible memory causes the issue; for others, entering 3d acceleration mode on the chipset with a weak power supply is the culprit. In all cases, however, nv4_disp.dll is the source of the problem and the bug reported is the dreaded 0xC0000005, with parameters indicating that an invalid part of memory was accessed or an infinite tight hardware loop was encountered.
As far as I can tell, there is no fix once this bug is encountered; however, the fact that it occurs frequently at a certain map location (the western entrance to the mountain pass) of Evidyon is peculiar, and leads me to believe that this region has something special about it. One possibility might be that the rendering buffers there are larger than in other areas--but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, because there is more scenery in places like the forest and those ares don't have this error at all. Less likely, it could be that people have happened to arrive at that location after playing the game for a significant amount of time, and setting up the rendering buffers there causes the card to temporarily draw excess power and either overheat or cause some other glitch in the card.
Needless to say, this is giving me a huge headache. Those of you who encounter the BSOD, if you could try logging in using different display resolutions, fullscreen/windowed mode, etc. I would be very grateful for any kind of insight. At this point it could be anything from a memory allocation issue to a buffer overrun.