Attention: Call of Duty 4Tip for SLI Users

Hi folks. Nomec, if you're reading, I never did give up trying to find the cause of your Call of Duty lockups and crashes, I hope this helps.

I've been plagued by the Nvidia driver crash issue while playing Call of Duty 4 in Vista now since I first installed it, and found two things that have as of the moment, completely eliminated the error. I don't pretend to know all of the potential problems that can cause these errors, but considering I have gone from at least 3 crashes per gaming session, including system hard locks requiring reboot, to a flawless, pleasurable gaming experience I thought I would share.

I used to get:

• Program crashes to desktop.
• NVidia Driver failures.
• A "stuttering" when the program first launched.
• System lockups.

I get none of these things any longer (knock on wood)

1. If you have SLI, do not override the automatic detection of "single card". Selecting "dual cards" is something that seemed natural when I was tweaking the graphics settings. After trying 4 installations of drivers in an attempt to fix the problem, I figured it had to be a software issue, so the next place I looked was in the program settings. As soon as I changed this selection back to "single card" the issues all but vanished.

2. I replaced my mouse, and when I did so, I installed the mouse driver from a disk, it was not automatically detected by Vista. The remainder of my issues with Call of Duty 4 went away.

I do not know if the second item had any impact or not, I can only relate what I observed. Based on my observations, I believe if it is at all possible, you do not want Vista to automatically find any drivers for anything attached to your system. If you have peripherals you are re-using from a previous system and are experiencing problems with Vista, it can't hurt to dig out the driver disk for that mouse or printer and install manually.

I hope this helps some of the people that have had a rough go of it in Vista with SLI. If I do happen across any further issues and/or fixes, I will pass them along.



Edited by Tyler Lowe - 05 Jun 2008 at 11:19pm

Hmmm...which GFX cards are you using for SLI?  Also, are you using the companys drivers or the offical NVIDIA ones?