Darkfall Online: Troubleshooting My Video Crashes

Darkfall Online is fun, really fun – more on that later – but it’s not without it’s flaws.  The different problems people have been having has been varying pretty wildly but I know I’m not alone in having problems with my video.  I spent the past week or so trying to get my game to stay open for more than 30 seconds or so but gave up for awhile because experimenting with different settings between long queue times was nearly impossible to do while keeping my sanity.  The queue times are better and I’ve, for the most part, resolved my major problems.  Here’s the scoop.

First, I should give my system specs as not all of you having problems are going to have the same systems obviously – but you may have something in common with me.  The major culprit here is Nvidia graphics cards having problems with Darkfall Online.  My specs:

EVGA Nforce 680i Motherboard with Intel 8400 Dual Core CPU

4 Gigs of RAM

Windows XP 64 Bit Edition

Nvidia 9800 GTX video card with 512 MB RAM

As stated above, the video card seemed to be the culprit.  The first thing I did was try to upgrade to the newest video drivers but that had zero effect – so I downgraded and got some more stable results.  I went with Nvidia version 178.24 and was finally able to get in the game, but only in windowed low res mode and still not for long.  I took this to my advantage however and took my brief amount of time to get in and change the default video settings.

First thing you should do if you experience frequent crashing due to video problems is turning everything on low or off if possible – especially shadows.  There are three different shadow check boxes you can turn off, make sure you hit them all!  Afterward I was able to stay in the game (in windowed mode) for prolonged amounts of time but my graphics would frequently flake out.  I’d get artifacts sometimes but most of the time my textures were going haywire.  While it was playable this way, for the most part, it was ugly.  To fix this problem I checked the box that says to wait for the monitor to update before drawing vertical lines (I think that’s what it said).  I’ll update that option when I get a chance to get back in game to give you the exact verbage.  At any rate, that made the game beautiful!  I was in the game now and able to play steady for hours.

Once the game was stable and playing I adjusted the resolution to the max and set the game to fullscreen and everything went perfectly.  There are still some small hitches I have to deal with however when logging back into the game.  First, I must always start in windowed mode and switch to higher res – full screen once I’m in.  Annoying but not game breaking by any means.  Second, I still get artifacts on occasion (not from any heat issues) and to correct it I usually will just minimize and maximize the game and they go away.  On the rare occassion they don’t I have to do a full reboot as not even logging in and out fixes the problem.  Again, annoying but not enough to make me quit playing – I’m having to much damn fun!

If you’ve had similar problems and have found fixes to these or other issues please post them up in the comments to help out your fellow gamers!