Widescreen Gaming Forum

I have an issue of BF3 locking up my system when I launch it full screen with surround or try alt-enter back full screen from windowed mode or alt-tab to and from the game. The monitors stay on, but stop receiving signal. I can not change caps, number or scroll lock on my keyboard (indicator lights don't change) and I have to do a hard reboot.

This occurs with the newer 300 series drivers with my GTX275s on my old system (Gigabyte EX58-UD4p, i7 920) and my new system (Gigabyte Z77x-UD3H-latest F18 bios, 3570k). The problem with my new Z77 setup is only the 300 series drivers work with surround, so running the older 285.xx, 290.xx and 295.xx drivers are out of the question as there is no option to "Span displays with Surround" in the driver settings.

After spending a full day trying to troubleshoot this on my day off I found a workaround, but I would rather not have to go through these steps every single time I want to play BF3, or if I forget to change the settings have to do a hard reboot.

Workaround: If I change the PROF_SAVE_profile to launch the game full screen @ 1280x1024 ( changinge GstRender.ResolutionWidth 3840 to 1280), Launch the game and then go into the options and change it to 3840x1024@60hz the game works. I still bet a system lock up if I alt-tab, or alt-enter back to full screen but the game is at least playable.

If I don't do this the game locks up the system forcing a hard reboot. I have left the system in this frozen state for about 20 minutes to see if something was trying to work itself out, but no go. I have tried different refresh rates and having no background programs running, still no go. I tried adding 1280x1024 to the user.cfg file as a work around, but it does not take effect so I have to change the PROF_SAVE_profile file each time I want to play.

The same hard-lock up behavior also occurs in Crysis+Crysis Wars (Mech Living Legends mod), although I can launch the game in surround full screen. The lockup only occurs when alt-tabbing or changing resolution options so I have it set to launch at 3840x1024 even the config gets reset.


EDIT: Went through every driver pack and found that the WHQL 301.42 do not exhibit the BF3 problem. I opened a support ticket with Nvidia about getting the incompatibility performance of the 2xx.xx drivers back on these cards.