Punkbuster, ATI and Nvidia: Freezing In your online FPS favorites?

KingFish

Neoseeker explores a possible conflict between punkbuster servers, ati graphics cards, and an nvidia chipset.

Cheating in online games has become a problem of epidemic proportions spawning a whole industry of anti-cheating A/V like tools. Hardcore gamers are the ones that push the edge in hardware adoption as they are the ones snapping up X800s and NForce 3 boards. For gamers, the two most frustrating things in the world are probably cheaters and hardware problems. Besides the common thread of gaming, it seems that the two spheres of hardware and cheating are separate but it has come to my attention that the two have become inextricably linked. For me, the story begins a couple months ago when I got an email about our review of MSI's K8N Neo, one of the first NForce 3 250Gb boards to hit the market. The reader was critical of our review specifically noting that we did not test games online . It was sort of a strange criticism - usually the comments are more along the lines of "why was it not tested with benchmark x or compared to board y from manufacturer z?" Rest assured, there is not conspiracy theory and the lack of comparative results are usually time or hardware limitations. But I digress. The wording of the email was very specific - the question was "did you ever test this board for online gaming, maybe with a ATI graphics card and found that it does not work with games with punkbuster?" Further email exchanges revealed that the user was having freezing problems. This sounded suspiciously like a networking issue - the firewall onboard the 250Gb had been introduced not long ago and it would not be a stretch to assume that it was an improperly configured firewall. This was quickly dismissed the user stated that an external NIC was used and the freezing problem still occurred.

Source: Neoseeker

Sputnik

that has to be one of the strangest things i've ever read. for some reason, as stated in the artical, it seems that only the GART driver could be causing it, but why should it be affected by the memory scan that only happens in user memory space? makes no sense.... anyone experience it first hand?

WhiTeRaBBiT

Yes. I just got an AMD 3000 with the k8n-e motherboard with the nforce3 and a ati 9800 pro. My machine does freeze when I try and play on a punkbuster server. It took me a bit to figure it out.I was reinstalling drivers and going back into the game. Then it started to work off and on. Thats when I realized I was joining Punkbuster server vs no punkbuster and what did I find out. I was Punkbuster server doing it. I talked to someother gamers and they have the same problem too but it only last 10 to 20 seconds for most. But I have to reboot.So we know there is a problem with this. What is the fix?

primesuspect

http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21666