Viewing topic Games freezing, help needed

Games freezing, help needed

SirKatar Mar 5, 2016

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Really would like some help with games that freeze while playing and would really like some way of not having to hard reboot my PC.

Specs:
OS: Linux Mint 17.3 fully up to date
GPU: 750ti NVidia 361.28 drivers
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G2030 @ 3.00GHz
Ram: 8 gig

The problem I have is that some games will suddenly freeze but the mouse still moves and the game is still running as sounds are still played but the graphics are stuck and it seems the keyboard is frozen also (pressing CAPS-LOCK does not light up the LED).

You can tell that the game is still running as in zombie games for example you can hear them comping on you and your character going "ouch" (for want of a better word!)

Is there any way of having games run in some kind of separate X session that I can kill off to at least get back to the desktop?
Currently I have to power off my PC.

With the keyboard not responding I can't drop to a command line and kill off the game.

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coryrj19951 Mar 6, 2016

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In Mint, (I think by default) you can press ctrl+alt+backspace to restart your current x session. I've had that problem many times also and this is a huge time saver :P

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m2mg2 Mar 7, 2016

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Can also try ctrl+alt+f2 or another fkey up to like 7. I've had these issues before, pita. Could be a driver issue but probably hardware issue if it happens a lot. Most likely RAM but could be video card or possibly hard drive.If you have more than one stick of RAM I would try 4 gigs and if it keeps happening try the other 4. I went from 32 gigs of RAM to 16 because two sticks went bad. Had exact same symptoms. You can also run memtest.

When this happened to me sometimes I could go to a virtual terminal, sometimes I couldn't. Sometimes it worked but took 2 - 4 minutes to change to the terminal. Then I had to use ps aux | grep (string from executable name). Then kill -9 pid. Sometimes the process would die sometimes, I would have to reboot (sudo reboot). When it was hung like this it could take 2 to 5 minutes to actually shut down and reboot.

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SirKatar Mar 7, 2016

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Thanks for the advice, unfortunately my keyboard does not respond in this situation (my mouse still works though).

I was hoping there might be a way to run games in some sort of container that I could kill when this happened. Like if it was running in a window and only things in that window had crashed.

It could be hardware, although I find some games get better after updates and no longer have the problem.

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tuubi Mar 7, 2016

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Have you tried rolling back to an older gpu driver? I think I've seen reports of version 361.28 causing problems on certain hardware. Maybe you could try the 358 series?

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