mallchin.com

Battlefield 2 has to be one of the best games I've ever played, I even bought a new GFX card to play it -- Eye-popping graphics, jaw-dropping game-play and mother f*#&ing bugs! Yes, even silver linings have a cloud.

It all started with an nVidia update in what seems like a lifetime ago (I blogged it here). Having spent a few days getting BF2 (somewhat) working in the first place I was a little hesitant to start changing things around, but curiosity got the better of me and I found myself updating to spanky new drivers. What a mistake that turned out to be

From then on ~5 seconds into joining a match the PC would freeze forcing a hard-reboot (yikes). I downgraded the driver but I had obviously pissed something off and it refused to work thereafter. I spent the next few days, weeks and months trawling the new for a fix.

Amongst the many, many forum posts I gleaned the following suggestions:

• Uninstall, reinstall BF2
  
• Use low settings
• Manually update PunkBuster
  
• Kill unneeded tasks 
• Update mobo chipset drivers
• Update GFX drivers
• Update SFX drivers
• Update SATA driver
• Disable DVD-RW
• Disable 2nd monitor
  
• Disable SATA, insert fresh IDE drive, install OS
• Sacrifice goat on blue moon facing due South
  

Still it wouldn't work.

I had noticed by this point that it worked in single-player mode, and in multi-player on a non-PunkBuster (PB) server, but not in multi-player on PunkBuster enabled servers. I put the problem down to PB and decided to open a ticket with them.

I got a default reply with some suggestions, most of which I'd already tried. After a few exchanges with them I was still none the better. Shortly after they stopped replying to my ticket at all, so I opened another. I played dumb this time and got a little further. PB said they'd 'work with me on this' if I ran a tool to get some info about my machine and send it to them. I did just this, but yet again the ticket was quietly ignored. I have decided PB don't care much about supporting gamers.

I was lost.

That was until I found a post mentioning BF2 could choke on irregular resolutions. Could this be the Holy-Grail? Had I sacrificed a goat in vein? With nothing to loose I switched off the 2nd monitor and adjusted to 800x600 and hey-presto, it only bloody works Now I think about it, It seems such an obvious tip, and I'm pretty sure I'd tried it already, but it sure as hell works tickity-boo now.

So if you're having problems try adjusting the resolution to the same used in-game and see what happens, and leave the poor goats be.

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.