Windows 8.1 and random black screen

Hello,

I have little "freezing" problem with Grand Prix 4. While driving, sometimes game freezes and black screen appears. Nothing happens until I press keyboard (windows button) and go to desktop. Then I click back to GP4 (still running, kind of) and suddenly black screen from GP4 has gone away - and I can continue playing.

GPxpatch does have autosave, so I can live with that problem. Problem appears sometimes after 30 min, sometimes after 65 min. But it would be very nice if there would be some solution.

My computer specs are:
Windows 8.1 64-bit
AMD A6-3620 APU with Radeon HD Graphics, 4,0 GB RAM,AMD Radeon HD 700 series

GP4 is patched and GPxPatch is v.4.52. I have set GP4.exe compatibility mode Windows XP SP3 and in GPxPatch Use CPU is set to 0.

Does anyone have same kind of problem? Soon I will buy Windows 10 computer, so maybe it is more stable than Windows 8.1?

ps. Sorry for my english, I tried my best, I am no native speaker

I don't use Windows so I can't really help, but it's very unusual to be able to recover from a black screen in GP4.

Are you sure it's not a screensaver or some other power saving thing?

Doesn't sound like a GP4 problem to me.

Thank you for your response.

I have check out that screensaver or power saving settings does not do that problem. I have also set that antivirus program does not mess up with GP4

Other games, for example Grand Prix 3 does not have this problem on my computer.

It's such an unusual thing to be able to recover from a black screen in GP4 that I still think it can't be the game which is causing the problem.

In Win8, can you run the game and have the task manager running on top of it at the same time? That's what I'd do in Linux. If you can't so that, can you run the game in a window instead and keep an eye on the task manager at the same time?

If you could, you would be able to see what's happening to the CPU and memory usage as the fault occurs - and I'm fairly confident that you're going to notice that something else starts to demand 100% of the CPU or the memory when the game goes black.

At the very least, if the game goes black but the Task Manager remains visible you could be more certain that it really is a game problem.

I've had lots of black screens in my time but they have only been recoverable when it was something else trying to grab the screen or the memory, which forced the operating system to transfer the game into virtual memory to free up some RAM, which is the only way I can think of that would make things happen the way you describe.

Usually, if the game itself black screens it's because of a memory fault or because a GFX card shuts down because of overheating and it's always game over.

As I say I'm not a Windows user and I could be wrong, but that's my opinion on this.

There's a graphics display problems post in the FAQ, which is required reading.

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