HiGame

Hardware reviewing is often a hectic process. Whenever you’re dealing with pre-release drivers and early hardware, there’s a greater-than-average chance that something might go wrong. Sometimes, that’s the fault of the company providing the hardware. Sometimes, it’s because the reviewer screwed something up. And sometimes… sometimes it’s because of mind-boggling hardware issues that you didn’t know existed in the first place.

My problems began with the death of my test mouse. At first, this didn’t seem like much of a problem. I typically test hardware with the rig configured next to my workspace for easy access, which makes shifting my work mouse from one system to another relatively easy. In addition, there are plenty of applications that provide quick administrative access to a testbed. Between these various options, I was confident I had things covered, especially since I’ve been using both RDP and TightVNC for years. I turned down my significant other’s offer to use her mouse and opted to manage my various login sessions with TightVNC for mousing and a physically connected keyboard.

I fired up my testbed, installed the new Catalyst 15.7 drivers, launched BioShock Infinite… and the application promptly crashed. This was odd, but it wouldn’t be the first time that an odd bit of driver didn’t get properly uninstalled. I uninstalled AMD’s driver suite, double-checked to make certain there were no odd bits of Nvidia software hanging around the testbed, ran Display Driver Uninstaller, rebooted into Safe Mode, ran the uninstall sequences for both AMD and Nvidia hardware (just to be certain), rebooted again, reinstalled the Catalyst 15.7 driver, ran BioShock Infinite again…
And the game crashed. The 2K intro video played perfectly, but died immediately thereafter.



I’m not sure what this person was trying to say, but they perfectly captured my state of mind.

The problem wasn’t confined to BioShock Infinite. Company of Heroes launched and benchmarked perfectly, but Metro Last Light and Total War: Rome 2 wouldn’t launch at all. At this point, I was convinced I was seeing a driver problem or Steam error — but Steam’s “Check Game Files” option found no errors. Swapping to the Radeon Fury X or a GTX 980 Ti (uninstalling and reinstalling drivers each time) didn’t work, either. Company of Heroes 2 always worked, but Metro Last Light (Safe Mode or regular), BioShock Infinite, and Total War: Rome 2 never did, whether I was using AMD or Nvidia hardware.

I downloaded and reinstalled all three applications from scratch, but it did no good. None of the crash dumps in BioShock Infinite contained any useful information, just a generic “The thread attempted to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access” error. Not helpful. Running “scannow /sfc” on the Windows 8.1 installation fixed nothing, but I clearly had a problem somewhere deep in the OS.



My preferred “drastic solution” at approximately 11 PM on Thursday night.


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