Another DX9 & GeForce4 issue (mystery?)

[RCMC]

Graphics Freeze-Up problem, Dx9 related?

I posted this message earlier, and first off I want to say "many thanks" to glc and morriswindgate for their replies. We greatly appreciate your help. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

My son and I just built a new pc – a good gaming pc, we think, but we are experiencing video freeze-ups running a game (Unreal Tournament 2004) using DirectX 9.0b on the new build pc – specs below.

Here’s the rub… this game works perfectly on our 2 year old Dell Dimension 8200 (P4, 2.0 GHz, 512 MBRAM, WinXP Pro, DirectX9.0b – same GeForce4 Ti4600 with same NVIDIA drivers). Works perfectly with older NVIDIA 53.03 drivers, too

Any idea why it’s OK on an older pc but not the new????

The new build pc:
- ASUS P4C800E Deluxe Motherboard, Intel 875 chipset, AGP8X Pro slot
- 2 X 512 MB Kingston DDR pc3200 Dimms configured Dual channel
- Intel P4 3.2GHz HT
- Windows XP Pro
- NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 video card (everything else in the pc is new, but this video card is a few years old)
- Latest GeForce4 driver from NVIDIA (v 56.72). Same results with version 53.03 drivers
- DirectX 9.0b (4.09.0000.0902)

Everthying assembled very smoothly and system seems normal except for one thing -- when playing a high end game like Unreal Tourney 2004 using Direct 3D 3D acceleration, the video freezes after a few minutes, locks the system, and I have to reboot. No such problem when 3D acceleration is disabled and software rendering selected.

BTW, after reading glc and morriswindgate’s replies, we decided to shell out for a new video card, the new ATI or NVIDIA, for the new pc – but I’m wondering if I’ll have same problem even after that…

[glc]

ATI cards, 9500 and higher, have true DX9 hardware support. All Nvidia FX cards have it too, but the implementation is not the greatest, especially on the lower end ones.