I recently purchased World in Conflict hoping that it would live up to the 9.3 rating that IGN gave it in the review. I recently had to go back and re-read the review hoping there was some nugget of information in there that would perhaps shed some light on how to run this game for more than 5 minutes without it crashing!!

First off, for those of you coming in from a search engine or wherever else, I am highly competent with computers. I’ve been a programmer for over 10 years and I do electrical engineering and small circuit projects as a hobby. My system specs are:

• Dell Dimension 9200
• Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 (2.13Ghz, 2MB L2)
• 4GB DDR2-800 Memory (Crucial)
• nVidia GeForce8 8800GTX 768MB
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

So let’s just go ahead and throw out the “zomg, noob” and “your system is teh suck, upgrade” comments right now.

I’m currently running the latest WHQL nVidia Graphics Driver (163.69) and have updated World in Conflict with the latest 1.001 patch.

When launching World of Conflict, there aren’t any issues with the opening videos. Those all play through to completion without issue. As soon as a rendered screen comes up (Main Menu, Campaign, Multi-Player, etc., etc.), that’s when the proverbial stability dice are rolled. Sometimes I get a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s really random when World of Conflict decides to crash.

I find that when I have DirectX10 rendering mode enabled, windows is able to recover from the error with “Your video drivers have stopped responding and the device has recovered.” message which pops up in the system tray. World in Conflict then says it’s “Reloading Resources” which takes usually 10 seconds when in the Main Menu but takes -for ever- while in game.

However, when DirectX9 rendering is enabled, the game just crashes out and generates a standard Windows application crash report. So it seems the issue is clearly a driver issue.

I’m currently in the process of downloading the latest beta Graphics Driver from nVidia (163.75), but I don’t hold up much hope for them. I read the release notes for this version and nowhere in the documentation is World in Conflict mentioned as a ‘fixed game’.

I’ll report back with my findings here. Please, if you’ve experienced the issue, let me know what’s happening to you and we can compare notes. Try and figure out perhaps if it’s a settings issue.

UPDATE: So, I upgraded to the latest nVidia Graphics Drivers (163.75) and rebooted my PC. I started up World in Conflict in DirectX9 mode and it seemed to run fine. I started the first campaign and it played for about 5 minutes. I then received a “Out of Memory” error. A window then informed me that I was out of memory and would need to close some programs in order to run World of Conflict. What the crap?!

I don’t have the display settings in the game cranked through the roof, or beyond a reasonable point for my hardware. 4xAA, 8xAF at 1680×1050. You’d think an 8800GTX could handle it??

I’m going to fiddle with the settings some more and figure out what’s causing World in Conflict to gobble up memory and system resources.

UPDATE 2: It seems I’ve found the right mix of updates, fixes and whatnot to finally get World in Conflict running stable. I now have the following installed and the game seems stable after playing through the first mission in campaign in DirectX10 mode:

• World in Conflict 1.001 Patch
• nVidia Graphics Driver v163.75 Beta
• Microsoft Vista Patch KB940105

I was actually lead to the KB940105 patch while researching the “Out of Memory” error. To sum up the issue, here’s a blurb from the Knowledge Base article:

“A modern graphics processing unit (GPU) can have 512 MB or more of video memory. Applications that try to take advantage of such large amounts of video memory can use a large proportion of their virtual address space for an in-memory copy of their video resources. On 32-bit systems, such applications may consume all the available virtual address space.”

and also:

“To address this problem, Microsoft is changing the way that the video memory manager maintains the content of video memory resources. This change is being made so that a permanent virtual address range does not have to be used for each virtualized allocation. With the new approach, only allocations that are created as “lockable” consume space in the virtual address space of the application. Allocations that are not created as “lockable” do not consume space. This approach significantly reduces the virtual address space that is used. Therefore, the application can run on large video memory configurations without reaching the limits.”

So basically the issue was a combination of Video Driver issues and then the way Windows Vista handles memory addressing for Video Cards with large amounts of Video Memory in 32-bit mode. Although the issue could show itself in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, it seems more likely to show itself on the 32-bit versions due to the limitations in addressable memory.

I hope this is able to help anyone else running World of Conflict in Windows Vista resolve their issues!

Cheers!