PMC main development computer video card fried

[Snake Man]

I decided to post this here in generic PMC news as it influences both ArmA and Falcon 4 development.

Today my video cards fan broke, it was really hot in my room so the video card fried. I've had broken video card fans three times now, but every time there has been no damage on the card, this time I wasn't so lucky. Now when I start up my computer I just get bunch of digital garbage on the screen, I removed and re-installed the video card for three (3) times to make sure.

My video card is fried.

I will try again one last time tomorrow when I have "gathered" myself a bit from this letdown, but I'll doubt it will start to magically run again. Luckily I had a old computer here laying around so I grabbed a GeForce 2 GTS card which I'm now using.

This now means that I cannot play ArmA or use buldozer in O2 (all I can do is edit configs and terrains "blindly" without ingame testing). I can however run Falcon 4 normally.

The final result is that all my ArmA projects are on hold until I get new video card, which might take up until late December if not early next year (and I wouldn't be surprised if it took even longer). As my computer is from 2004, I'm not sure I can still just walk into a computer store and buy off the shelve a new video card which runs in my machine (or my machine runs it more likely).

I cant imagine what will I do with VTE and the few other ArmA projects I had going on, if I cant edit models and more importantly test anything ingame, its pretty useless to start to release anything (except the super heavy RC2 of course). Anyways that's more for the ArmA topics.

Well, at least now finally I have time to start working on PMC Editing Wiki and make it what it was visioned to be

[banana]

Why is this world always around money

[Snake Man]

I will try again one last time tomorrow when I have "gathered" myself a bit from this letdown, but I'll doubt it will start to magically run again.

Its voodoo magic baby!

Yeah it works, I could not believe my eyes what happened when I installed the fried video card back and turned on my computer, it worked. Amazing. I cannot believe it works after I tried it three (3) separate times earlier.

Oh well, now I am really happy as my life can proceed normally

[Snake Man]

2022-06-03T22:23:00Z

Nvidia GTX TITAN X has been my main Gaming GPU since may 2015, but now its dying, it will crash nvidia drivers once I run graphics heavy games like Farming Simulator 22, Elite Dangerous and even ArmA 3. I actually moved the card to PMC DevSurf which is my daily editing and surfing computer.

Today just hour ago I had my last crash, had already been suffering with these crashes while editing PMC Bravo Hammer campaign and testing PMC terrains in previous months, but now I reduced arma3 resolution to 1920x1080 window mode which is a joke by itself on 4k windows desktop... and it still crashed (seems like the actual resolution has nothing to do with the crashes, its just the amount of textures in VRAM, my best guess is that part of the VRAM chips are burnt out or something like that). Yesterday it already crashed twice but only got the black screen for a moment and then nvidia driver notification in windows task bar tray thing.

But today... it went to black screen and then rebooted whole windows / computer.

Once computer started BIOS, it could not get windows 8.1 loading, took me a while trying all the options until I finally went to BIOS and used manual boot override for the correct EFI booting thingy and win8.1 came back up.

However when I went back to my dev-diary-brave-hammer.php text file... it was 28kb in size but full with empty lines, I had lost all the recent days dev diary writings on that crash

This kind of hardware instability is simply unacceptable.

If you cant trust you computer, who can you trust?

Luckily no other files got damaged/lost, at least I haven't found any yet, all the daily stuff I was using while it crashed works fine except bravo hammer dev diary text file.

PMC Gaming computer got Asus RTX 3060 TUF Gaming 12gb card which works as expected, my only option now is to stop playing games with that computer, scavenge the RTX 3060 to PMC DevSurf and then continue editing only without the ability to play normally.

Yes I know I could play arma3 just fine on editing computer, but various reasons like without plugging in TrackIR 5 etc its just not the same, for example all editing computer addons are in old western digital 4tb green hard disk drive instead of fast M.2 NVMe as they should be. To me gaming its not only if you can run game in any means necessary, I love PMC Gaming computer on the other desk over there and that is where I have had my last 7 years of favorite gaming moments, editing computer is for editing, not playing games.

Also who knows maybe arma3 would get a bad performance on triple screen 4k computer even if its running on the center screen only. Sure I can edit/test terrains, missions and campaigns quickly to see if there are errors etc, but nah I wont be doing any 15-17hrs all day gaming sessions on it.

So because hardware issues I'm sacrificing my own gaming enjoyment for the community, the future and greater good. I need to press on with hardcore editing as long as there is time, win8.1 support ends january 2023 and after that it is extremely likely I'll switch completely to Linux and I have fairly good idea editing is not possible under linux. But anyways that is whole another topic.

Just wanted to post this update before scavenging the RTX 3060, who knows maybe I'll suck it up and play some arma3 missions in this 4k triple screen environment if there is enough performance in thirty sixty. But if everything else fails, at least community benefits as I will be focusing all my time just editing and frequently pushing good releases out.

If only we had community which gave a lot of feedback from game-play, I sure as hell cannot game-play test until GPU issues are resolved.

2022-06-04T01:27:00Z

Well here is hilarious turn of events... Asus RTX 3060 TUF Gaming 12gb video card does NOT work with Windows 8.1

None of the various nvidia drivers I tried to install works, they all say the same that windows is not supported and could not detect video hardware. Beautiful.

After huge struggle trying to get it to work and then as last resort put GTX 1060 3gb card (back) into editing computer... its finally running in 4k triple screen setup and arma3 runs in 4k 60FPS using video preset LOW. That is good enough for me, I take stability over fluff any day, you don't need pixel porno when editing missions.

BTW During that hardware hustle, I came to this '' close of starting to install Linux desktop...