PC About GTA & BSODs

[phoenixv5]

Don't blame me if it's a stupid question, but is there any relation between GTA games and BSODs? All of my computers and my friend's computers which ran GTA suffered BSOD errors (a lot of BSOD for some)! So the questions are:
1) Are they related?
2) Anyone who played GTA and suffered NO BSODs (both during and not)?
3) Also is GTA IV playable on Windows 7 with ATI graphics card?

 

[slicer4ever]

well, i'll start by asking the obvious question, are all your copy's legal, out of the box copy's?

edit: i did quick google on GTA IV BSOD, and found quite a bit of people with similar problems, i'd recommend looking for other people's solution's, but from what i gathered by reading around a little bit, sounds like GTA IV has memory leak problems?, but i didn't really delve into it too far.

 

[phoenixv5]

well, i'll start by asking the obvious question, are all your copy's legal, out of the box copy's?

For starters, the BSODs I noticed were mainly for SA (MAINLY, also noticed in gta3 and vice city) and question 3 was because I'm considering if I should buy it!
And all the SAs (around 7 different copies me and my friends had) were all copies and cracked!
I never saw an original GTA till this year (in flipkart), so it's pretty obvious no one in my locality had it.
In my town the only original games we see are by EA, we don't even get Ubisoft!

That is why the question! To GTA SA and IV, original users: ever had any BSODs after playing the (original) game!
Because for copied versions I can almost confirm BSODs!

 

[MenaceInc]

I've never had BSOD's playing any GTA games.
GTA4 used to run really sluggishly near release but it's been patched a few times and it runs pretty well now.
GTA3 I played through and the only issue I had was that the mouse pointer was not locked to my left screen which meant that sometimes I could click on the right screen and be thrown out of the game.

Both legit copies on Steam as well as original retail of GTA3 patched to 1.1


Also, I have an ATI HD4890 card in my setup and GTA4 is smooth at medium settings with draw distance set to 40 and detail distance set to 75. Over 30fps the vast majority of the time. GTA4 from my experience is more so CPU bottlenecked than GPU (although it really does stress both).

 

[Artayu]

I also have never experienced BSODs as of yet but again mine is a legal copy so that may very well be the issue, as far as IV maybe ur hardware isn't up to par, the game really doesn't even like the minimum requirements...

 

[phoenixv5]

I see, so there ARE people with no problems after running GTA games.
As a side note: most BSODs were noticed (after you play the game a few times) while not playing the game.
The game itself caused/BSOD occured while playing only around 2/10 times.

Anyway moving on, some questions:
I have a Dell Studio 14 laptop with Corei5-540M + ATI Radeon 5450 (1GB) + 4GB RAM + Win7 Home Premium 64bit.
1) Will it run GTA IV?
2) Does GTA IV or GTA SA require to insert the game disc to start playing? (Because I really hate that!)
3) Is it possible to backup gta iv or sa (any protection on the disc?) and play from that?

 

[spitfireuk]

Can you not get it off Steam?

 

[x3sphere]

I've played through all the GTA titles on my setup, no issues. In this day and age, BSODs are usually an indicator of a hardware or driver culprit, programs rarely cause them. Have you updated to the latest Catalyst?

 

[phoenixv5]

I've played through all the GTA titles on my setup, no issues. In this day and age, BSODs are usually an indicator of a hardware or driver culprit, programs rarely cause them. Have you updated to the latest Catalyst?

Well, it occurred in an old Acer PC of mine and that had a fully updated nVidia driver.
As for ATI, I try to update mine a lot (I think it's updated now, not sure).
The laptop does have BSOD but not very often. I only played GTA SA for less than a day in this!!!

 

[El Diablo]

I have played it on both of my computers without a problem, a cracked version. Have you actually read the BSOD? It would help a lot if you gave us the error code.

 

[phoenixv5]

I might have a picture somewhere....
Gimme a minute!

Edit: Found one.
But this is not GTA related. This is from elsewhere.
Can anyone tell me what caused this?

 

[x3sphere]

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is usually driver related. I would check Device Manager to see if there are any conflicts.

 

[El Diablo]

That's a driver issue. Make sure your graphics driver and all of your drivers are up to date. Check your device manager and make sure none of them are malfunctioning.

 

[phoenixv5]

Mmmmm.
If I remember right, that laptop had all drivers installed correctly!
Anyway, as a wierd sidenote, why doesn't Win7 BSODs appear as a Bluescreen ?

 

[El Diablo]

They do?

 

[phoenixv5]

They do?

Oddly enough!
Sometimes my Windows 7 crashes and displays pixels/grains like in an old nes video game.
When I restart Win7 displays an error log stating a BSOD occurred!
Why the heck the call it bluescreen error when the screen is not blue, is beyond me!

 

[Zero]

They do, but they reset automatically after 5 seconds, so you probably missed it. You can flip a registry value to get it to stay on the screen; useful to record the stop code.

As for the topic, bluescreens are almost always a driver issue, namely with games.