Left 4 Dead Forum

I have another post on this issue, but since it appears this also affects offline (single-player) mode I figured I would give this another shot.

There appears to be a serious regression with ATI Cards and Left 4 Dead in 8.1.4. There are many CTDs, and they appear to be caused by pre-rendering effects and textures as lowering the settings improves the issue but does not resolve it. Left 4 Dead is nearly unplayable. I have submitted a ticket on this issue, but the person who responded tested on an NVIDIA setup which is not much help in this case. Therefore the issue remains unresolved. Am I really the only one having these issues with the original Left 4 Dead using 8.1.4 and an ATI Card? I understand that CrossOver is a continuous work in progress, but I am almost tempted to switch to BootCamp because of going from one issue to another. I hate to do that as I feel this software has a lot of potential.

I hope to garner a response. Thanks in advance!

and you never said which ATI card you have, or which ATI driver you have.

Sure...

Two machines

Mac OS X 10.6.2

One has an X1600, this was surprisingly more stable until recently - The other has a 2600HD.

They are both iMacs, one a Core Duo and one a Core 2 Duo.

Kenneth Stevens wrote:

Sure...

Two machines

Mac OS X 10.6.2

One has an X1600, this was surprisingly more stable until recently -
The other has a 2600HD.

They are both iMacs, one a Core Duo and one a Core 2 Duo.

Hi,

I'm not a Mac person, but I am seeing folks have issues with these chipsets on
the Mac (x1600, 2600hd) -- as best I reckon it, the Mac OSX version is also participle
to these things. When you say, "this was surprisingly more stable until recently",
that's too grey to be of any help...if you could isolate that to something like "worked
fine in version x.x.x of crossover-games, but not in version y.y.y" ..that would be
a better clue...

I did find this thread which seems somewhat related...

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=4672;forum=1;msg=68190

I'm pretty sure there's another thread around somewhere that discusses another
registry key introduced with the latest COG releases...but I'll need find it...

Although arduous, you could look through the following links for clues to try...

http://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/?keywords=x1600&search=forum&=

http://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/?keywords=2600&search=forum&=

Also, the following thread may be pertinent...

http://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/general/?t=25;mhl=67459;msg=67441#msg67459

Seems like the Mac devs are mostly to sneer at for a lot of this...

Cheers!

Honestly, it may be more Apple to blame with the Snow Leopard ATI driver issues...

I didn't start using CrossOver until late last year. Left 4 Dead worked absolutely great in 10.6.1 and earlier on my 2600HD iMac and 8.0.0, it was unable to work on my X1600 iMac at that time. When 10.6.2 came out, the 2600HD also stopped working. It was the black screen issue where all you could see was the text. This is exactly what was already occurring with the X1600.

I cannot remember which version of 8.1.X fixed the issue with ATI cards on Snow Leopard to get them to run at all (most likely it was 8.1.0). Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 ran like a champ on both systems with no notable crashes. The crashes did not get this frequent until the 8.1.4 update. Unfortunately, that update is required to run Left 4 Dead 2, so it would be a double-edged sword scenario to downgrade. I've experienced a rare crash or two with Left 4 Dead 2, but it appears to be more stable than the original at this point. TF2 runs without issue. I play Left 4 Dead online more because it is still all a lot of friends of mine own (they didn't pick up L4D2 yet).

I have tried most if not all recommended toggles and suggestions. All I can figure is that this is a hard crash with the ATI Driver. I chased my tail in a lot of other directions, but it truly appears that it dumps when trying to cache/uncache effects and textures. The crash occurs when first entering a map, when changing to the next map (in the same campaign), when a molotov is thrown and pretty much any time a lot is going on on-screen. These issues now affect both machines when at first it only really seemed to affect the 2600HD - the best of the two.

One thing funny that I've noticed is that I have seen a lot more aimbot-using a...hats lately. I can now tell when someone is using a hack as when the map first loads I am missing textures (ground missing, general corruption). After leaving and then re-entering (which corrects the missing-textures and corruption), I noticed that the same person kept head-shotting the infected team as soon as they spawned. I'm usually a hack doubter, but I got a pretty good demo this time and noticed that this was common with the other times it occurred as well. It may be a very strange coincidence.

I am not angry with the CrossOver team, I am just a bit frustrated that I didn't hear of any tests with ATI cards. No one else using a Mac appears to have reported the problem, but maybe everyone has moved on to Left 4 Dead 2.

Maybe I am the only one...

Sorry...by 'Mac devs' I did in fact mean the Apple camp :)

I doubt you're the only one left playing l4d - I wish I could find
the other thread I noticed a day or two ago...I'll keep looking...

edit: this was the other thread I ws thinking of...looks like it
(the registry key) should've been included in 8.1.4 ...;

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=5629;forum=1;msg=62137

I am not sure that would apply here, as this is a complete CTD (crash to desktop). I did give it a shot, crashed in my first versus game in the middle of Crash Course. Unfortunately, no change there.

Hi,

Could you create a debug log, post it to some public repo (like rapidshare etc),
and post the link back here so I can grab it and have a look? There's some
instruction on how to create such a debug log this here;

http://www.codeweavers.com/support/wiki/submittechsupportlog

Probably the debug channels to catch are +seh,+trace,+d3d

Cheers!

Thank you very much, I had actually already asked if there was a way to do this (this was the first time it was answered). I'll give this a whirl and report back.

EDIT - I did it, however it created an 8.53GB file that cannot be opened by anything. There were tons of errors in it, but most of them were labeled as fixme: This crash sometimes takes time to happen (5min - 1hr or more) so I'm not sure how I can do this with that large of a file. Plus it is monsterously slow to run with all of those options on, making it even harder to get to a point where it will crash. I did get it to crash once, but the file was unreadable.

I will say that it will almost always occur in Blood Harvest if anyone else has similar specs.

EDIT2 - You also cannot play online when using this method, it claims the User cannot be authenticated with Steam

I've got an iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 and am running Snow Leopard 10.6.2.

I just played through the whole Dead Air campaign without trouble using CrossOver Games 8.1.4. I have all of my video settings set to low/disabled/none, though (except filtering mode, which doesn't seem to cause trouble very often).

Game crashes are usually running out of address space. The texture/model detail contributes to that, a lot. If you set the paged pool memory available to low, that helps, too. Basically, that tells the game that there isn't much free memory available, so it tries to minimize its own use of memory. I think that mostly means game objects (zombie corpses and the like) are cleared out earlier or don't appear until you get closer to them.

If you still have problems, please report which video settings you're using, what launch options you're using besides -novid, and what registry settings you might have set.