The C# game I'm working at freezes at random moments, usually in the first 20 minutes of game play. The freeze occures even when I do nothing. It happens in both windowed and fullscreen mode. I thought my video card is playing jokes on me so I got another one. But the problem is still there. I don't have any problems playing any other game. My conclusion is that the problem is somewhere in the C# + MDX mix. Did someone encountered something similar? I forgot to mention the freeze is so bad I can recover only by resetting the computer. I'm running on a AMD Athlon 2200 with WinXP and a GeForce 5500 graphics card [Edited by - Calin on June 1, 2006 6:04:03 PM]

20 minutes is a long time to try to repro, especially if you get no errors.

Was your new card a different make? Check you have WHQL verified drivers or at least a latest release version.

Try is running it on another machine to rule out something on yours, though you have done some of this by switching video cards.

The only other suggestion I have is running it against the directx debug runtimes to see if you eventually hit some call with bad parameters or something. Crank the debug output up - it will slow things down but you might see something.

Finally use perfmon to see if you are eating up memory, its quite easy to get an ever increasing, never garbage collected situation in managed directx with the way the events work. Maybe after 20 minutes you have used up so much that the GC and virtual memory just can't cope.

Definitely try testing the game on another PC. I've seen similar freezes caused by lots of different things including something like directx getting corrupted and freezing only on one specific game.

If the game doesn't freeze on other PCs, try reinstalling DirectX and try different driver versions. I once had a problem with the latest drivers on a GeForce 4 MX.

Rule out hardware/driver problems first and then go wild on bug-hunting

I've tested the game on a laptop today and it run just fine. Must be a hardware issue after all.