Demo problems on new GeForce 4 Ti 4600

Well, Our new GeForce 4600 Ti just came in today, and we can’t get any of the demos (wolfman, tidepool, squid, et. al) from the CD to run. After the resolution change, there’s about a 2 second delay and up comes a good old-fashioned “the instruction at 0x004af786 referenced memory at 0x000000” error.

Typical things : downloaded latest drivers from NVidia (29.4.2) checked our bios settings, etc. We’re on a 1.7 Pentium 4, 512Mb, 34 gig free on the HD. It’s a Dell 8100, that previously had Dell’s in-house GeForce 2MX installed, if that helps.

Interestingly, our in-house apps run fine so far, and I haven’t found any other demos that blow up.

Here’s my suspicion: This is a development machine, and it has lots of SDKs installed. I’m guessing one of them has a .dll in system32 that doesn’t like something the demos are doing. But using Depends, I don’t see any .dlls to call the culprit (except maybe DSound.dll?)

I even played around with the version of Glut32.dll - no change in behavior.

Anyone have similar problems? Or advice? I can live without seeing the demos, but it doesn’t give us warm fuzzies when the demos we typically rely on to make sure everythings working don’t run…

-Chris Bond

I had the same problem with the Radeon 8500 64mb. I ran the tresure chest demo but none of the others. It would load the demos, warm the chaces then the system would hang.

Okay, found our main problem : the machine had no sound card. I’m guessing that the calls into DirectSound aren’t checking for NULL pointers…

Still one problem : Tidepool ASSERTS with the following debug info:


File: C:\depot\demo\Detente\src\NRender\GL\NRenderGL.cpp Line 647

Expression:
0 | | !“NRenderGL::SetVertexPointers: unable to commit vertex buffers”

Nice work adding the extra info to ASSERT, btw.

So, any thoughts anyone? I’m really only pursuing this because the other card we bought is being returned because it locks the system shortly after Windows loads, and I’m trying to make sure there aren’t any hardware problems with this one before we exchange the other…

-Chris Bond