I have a dead Xbox 360 as of yesterday and now I also have some known NVIDIA hardware/software/Windows problem causing an infinite loop and blue screening my PC when I play WoW and other 3D games.
Has anyone else been through this ringer of the NV4_disp.dll problem and found a reliable fix? I searched and it’s one of these problems no one knows the answer to and NVIDIA seems unconcerned about. Awesome.
n4_disp doesnt necessarily mean a driver problem afaik… if the video card (or its slot or something) is busted then all windows can really tell is that its attempt to use n4disp failed. i’m totally making this up btw.
Well, from what I understand you’ve got some “pull” in the “industry”. I’d say it’s time to start “lighting some poo” on some “doorsteps”.
I had a similar problem a while back, and I have no idea what really caused it. What I do know is that the difference between installing updated drivers with a driver cleaner and doing it straight up relying on the installshield wizard was huge, as in that worked flawlessly and the other didn’t.
These guys seem to agree with respect to your problem. I used this to clean my system, after finding out that detonator destroyer is in fact not XP cleared, and only for detonator drivers at that. Of course, I use Guru3d to get close-to-new drivers (I never get the newest ones since my laptop can be a little picky), but I’m sure you have your source already lined up.
Ditto what Lizard_King suggested – whenever I’ve had video weirdness, I’ve fixed it with the following steps:
If that doesn’t do it, either a) windows reinstall or b) new vid card.
Overall, yeah, pain in the neck, but doesn’t really take too long, and it generally gets the job done.
The latest NVIDIA drivers had been causing the same blue screens for me, so I rolled back to v84 and now I’m fine.
I had the nv4_disp.dll crashes for a while, and did a complete cleaning of my
drivers, rollbacks to several different versions of the driver until I finally
figured out it was gremlins/sunspots. Then it disappeared at some point,
feck knows how. I should get a deal with a farm and try sacrificing a chicken
every time something like that happens.
Tried Driver Cleaner and then booted up WoW. Within a few minutes the freezies were back and I was headed for a crash. Didn’t really want to see the blue screen again so I logged out.
Fucking computers.
Could be a heat issue – fan on the vid card working properly? Think you can google up apps to log your card’s temperature, so that you can fire up your game, play until you get the freezies, then go see how hot things were getting.
Edit: Just downloaded RivaTuner, it seems to do a very nice job, although the interface is a little opaque. Click the “customize” button for the target adapter, there’s a monitoring option on the buttonmenu that pops up.
Seriously. I was ready to strangle my PC when I was getting the short circuit problem with my $325 geForce 7800 OC back in April. I was lucky since I was able to return it with about two days to go on the 30 day window.
Anyway, I hate to say it but have you considered doing a clean install of Windows XP and using a driver version from maybe last year or something? I’d probably recommend that you buy a new drive, pull the old drive, and just start from scratch. Then you could simply throw the old drive in at a later point and copy things over. At least that way you wouldn’t have to worry about backing anything up or clobbering your old files.
In RivaTuner you can set custom fan speeds too.
Actually, I had something very close to that happening with my 7800GS and just using DriverCleaner and the newest drivers seemed to work.
Then I maxed out the fan at 100% during ALL 3D duties with Rivatuner.
NVida cards get finicky when they get hot or they don’t get enough power.
They also get hot when they don’t get enough power…
You might try using coolbits or rivatuner and slightly underclock the card and see if it gets more stable.
I miss my 9800 pro. Zero problems ever.
If your video card comes up, and works fine, then you try a 3d game which works for a little while, then crashes, I would do the following.
Run a few more 3d games. I WoW crashes but the others don’t, its some strange incompatibility with WoW. If they all eventually do it, then I would guess its a hardware problem, most likely a thermal issue (or the card/mb is going bad in which case your screwed).
If you think it might be a heat problem, open your computer case and look at your video card fan when its on. Is it spinning? Is it spinning fast? Is it clogged with dust?
If its dusty clean it. If the fan appears to not work or barely work, try and fix it. If everything seems to be working, try and leave your case open and get an external fan to blow on the card’s heat sink. If it then works fine, its definitely a heat problem. If it still is wonky, you really will not be able to tell if it is a heat problem or some other problem.
Lastly, if you can, try and underclock the card significantly. If it works underclocked, then it is most likely a heat problem. An over-hot processor will degrade so it may have been running hot for quite some time and finally has gotten to the point where it can’t run anymore. Now even running at a normal temperature will cause it to mess up and degrade even further.
Gah! You are the rare exception. I have the 9800 pro. It’s a piece of shit. I have 3 other friends with the card. Every single one of us have problems with it. Every single one of us have sworn to never go with ATI ever again. Thier hardware might be fine, but thier drivers are the worst.
Lucky you. My 9800 XT was OK for the most part, but it had problems with the two games I was playing most at the time: CoH and KOTOR. I don’t think it ever quite got along with my MB…
Bullshit. I had a 9800 for over a year and didn’t have a single problem. ATI’s drivers are fine. Ain’t anecdotal evidence fun?
Didn’t ATI have a piss-poor reputation in general RE: its drivers until just a few years ago?
Yes, they were tragically bad, and in fact I was sure that ATI was going to be demolished by NVidia because very, very rarely does a company completely suck for a long time then suddenly get very good. ATI pulled it off somehow.
On laptops, my NVidia drivers have been very “meh”. For example, everytime I unplug my secondary monitor and plug it back in I have to manually re-enable it and then drag it back to its correct virtual location. My 9600 never had to do that.
The color temp settings aren’t very good either, there’s no simple way to set color temp for the laptop, I had to manually adjust curves for each color channel. Far from ideal.
Other than that, the NVidia 84.3x have been pretty stable.
Surprisingly so I’ve really never had any issues with ATI and their drivers.
On the other hand, I’ve had more problems with my EVGA 7800GS CO than any other card.
That’s after using DriverCleaner, the ATI removal utility, etc.
I can’t isolate the problem exactly, but that forward mounted heat sink idea could very well be the problem.
I have 5 Vantec tornadoes for cooling with a home-built custom controller. Two point in from the front of the case: Directly down the “Throat” of the card’s exhaust.
I haven’t seen any add-on coolers that redirect the heat outside the case for these yet so I actually turn down the front fans during gaming and the GPU’s temp goes down.
That would seem to indicate that their design wasn’t such a great idea.
What’s the point of venting all the heat directly at the back of the hard drives?
I’ll file that in the “What were they thinking?” bin.
Same card here, and I have problems too. Guess I won’t go cheap next time, but this was the last model for AGP :(.
Rolled back my driver to the last WHQL certified one. That’s 84.21 I think. Tonight I had no problems playing World of Warcraft. Will try some other stuff later on this week but I think those new drivers are the problem.