Legit Reviews

Here are my specs:

P4 3.0Ghz w/ HT
Intel D865GBF Desktop Board
512MB DDR400 RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro w/ 256MB (softmodded from Radeon 9550)
Catalyst 5.6 Drivers
Windows XP SP2

In certain games, after a while of playing them, the screen goes black all of a sudden, and the game freezes. After a second or two the sound comes back as if the game is perfectly normal. But the screen stays black. I can interact in the game and in Windows, but I don't know what I'm doing. So far this problem has happened to the following games I have:

Far Cry
Painkiller (not installed anymore)
Painkiller: Battle Out Of Hell (not installed anymore)
Grand Theft Auto III (not installed anymore)
Grand Theft Auto Vice City (not installed anymore)
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

My gfx card is softmodded from a Sapphire Radeon 9550. But its been like that for about 4 months. And the problem doesn't seem to happen to another game that I have, Juiced (could be because the game sux).

I posted this problem in other forums without any luck. If you can provide any links to other forums that have the same issues please post it here.

Can anyone tell me what is the problem? I read in some other forum that the problem is with an incompatibility, but I don't know very much about it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have never had that problem before... Have you tried the older drivers?

No I have not tried older drivers. What's the use of using them? Are there sites that still have them?

Well just because a driver is the "newest" doesn't mean that it performs best on the games that you play. The new Omega drivers that are based off of the Catalyst 5.6 drivers are available now and might be worth a try, 5.4 Omega drivers are still available here. It's a long shot, but maybe with the softmod and updated drivers something is conflicting. Maybe rolling back drivers will help...

if the drivers dont do it, this is the same things that was happening to me when my fx5700's memory started to fail. hope its just the drivers.

K, I'll try the Omega 5.4 Drivers. But I know for fact that they are slower on my PC compared to the original Catalyst drivers. I ran 3DMark05 on Omega, DNA, and Catalyst drivers.

make sure you run driver cleaner to remove any files that have been left behind by some of those other drivers unless you did a format.

remove all hardmods done and return to 9550

I'm just going to revert to old drivers after I do a reformat, which should be soon because I'm getting upgrades for my PC next week. If that fails I'll just have to go back to my old BIOS.

Damn a month later and the problem still isn't solved...

Well I found a way to minimize the problems the crash causes. I just put my computer to sleep after the crash occurs, and then revive it. It works most of the time. I'd rather do a clean reformat before doing the old driver install. It'll be beneficial to do a reformat cause I'm getting a RAM and Sound Card upgrade, with new speakers.