Okay, I originally posted this topic on the Steam forums but it's not receiving as much traffic as I think it'd receive on here. I'll also paste every post I made on there. This is long, but please read if you have any idea how to help... If you'd rather just read through the whole thread over there, here's the link to it: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1641241

So I've put 90 hours into my game and now all of a sudden, the game is freezing immediately after loading (sometimes it won't even start up the game, it'll load then go black with no audio). It just started yesterday and it's happened about 5 times in a row now.

(If it makes any difference, it's in the North Sewers)

Furthermore, I'm unable to ctrl+alt+delete my way out of it. I'm forced to do a hard reset, and after that sometimes my monitor will just have a green blinking light (It's a Samsung, if that makes any kind of difference) and the computer won't respond. Because of this, I'm thinking it may be some kind of driver issue.

It happened first yesterday, toward the end of a play session, so instead of firing the game back up, I went ahead and did something else. Just now came home from college to play some more and it froze about 5 seconds after loading (with audio continuing). Next time back in, froze about 1 second after loading (with audio continuing). Next try, didn't even complete the loading, just went black with no audio.

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. I LOVE this game and just want to get back to playing it...

UPDATE:

Ok so after deleting some saves (thinking maybe a large amount of saves is taxing to the computer), updating my driver, and trying a couple more times, I'm still running into the same problem. One time the game loaded into a black screen, and another time it froze after a second.....

I tried ctrl+alt+delete and a blue screen comes up saying...

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

This problem seems to be caused by the following file: nv4_disp

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

The device driver got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly.

Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.

(Then there is some more information listed under technical information)

UPDATE:

Another note: reverting to an older save doesn't work. Still freezes just the same.

I managed to bring the task manager up once and FalloutNV was reported to have been taking up 566,356K of memory... I don't know what that number is for everyone else out there but this is what it read while in that frozen state.

If I uninstall and reinstall, will I lose ANYTHING? I do have saves backed up on an external hard drive just in case, but I just want to know if I should expect to lose anything.

UPDATE:

Ok, so a system restore didn't work. I think it actually made it worse because it renamed some folders and files associated with the game and upon trying to launch it, I heard that noise that you hear when you adjust the volume slider in the task bar (that fast "dong" noise). I received this message (simply headlined "Fallout") which said that it failed to load the Gamebryo engine properly or something.

Anyway... looks like a re-installation is the only option now. I uninstalled from the Add or Remove Programs tab in the Control Panel, immediately started re-installing (downloading) through Steam. However, I have it on disc so I hope it won't make any difference whether I download it or install via disc.

I'll reply with whether or not this works later tonight... and hopefully it does, because I imagine I'll feel like smashing this keyboard apart if it doesn't!

UPDATE:

OK, this is driving me insane... After re-installing, I'm receiving the same error message I was getting after I tried the system restore.

"Failed to initialize renderer.
Unknown error creating the Gamebryo Renderer."

What is there that I can do? Maybe I didn't perform a complete re-installation? And if I didn't, how do I go about doing it?

As I stated already, apparently the game was having a problem with the file nv4_disp. Where is this even located? I can't find it in the Steamapps folder or anything. I'm wondering if there are any options I can change in the configuration settings file.

Any help is really appreciated... Help me guys!

EDIT: Ahhhh, my bad... probably should've posted this under software and hardware issues... Sorry. If someone could move this post for me, I'd appreciate it.

I tried adding this by just editing my last post but for some reason it won't let me, so I'm just posting a new reply.

Okay, so no games are working now. Tried Fallout 3, Red Faction, Mass Effect, WoW, Grand Theft Auto III, and some other games on here that actually use the video card... nothing. So I guess it's good that it's probably not New Vegas... but now I don't know what to do about this new situation. I guess it has something to do with the video driver or DirectX...

When trying to launch Fallout 3, I get the same "Gamebryo Renderer" message.

Red Faction tells me: Error! Unable to initialize DirectX 8.0

GTAIII tells me: Grand Theft Auto III requires at least 12 MB of available video memory.

If you want more of the messages, I'll tell you more. Basically, this is a mess of some kind of video driver/DirectX situation. If you know how to repair it, please let me know.

Did your GFX card just die on you? Download all the latest drivers for your card (if you're using them and now you have this problem - download the previous version of drivers) Uninstall all the software for your card - and install the drivers again. Reboot as necessary, try the games again.

Other than that, I have no idea how to help you.

Sounds like a bad video card, but I would first uninstall the video driver, reboot, and re-install the latest version. I had similar problems with a card once.

Edit - Ninja'd

I've killed a few vid cards in my time and I'd have to agree with the others. Everything about your posts say video card to me, HOWEVER, I have seen a 3 com network card make everything else on my machine look like it was going bad, and I do mean everything. Try taking out every card you can and see what it does then. Swap out your vid card for another if thats an option. Even a plain PCI card just to see if you can get your machine to calm down. But having said all that, yup I'd say it's your vid card going TU.

Oh yeah. The first thing to do is make sure the heat sink on your vid card is clean. Those cans of air are almost worthless if you don't use them once a month. When it's really bad I use contact cleaner and then clean out between the fins with a plastic zip tie. Long, skinny, flexible but just stiff enough to actual do a little scraping. When FO3 was killing my machine I used the technique I just described and got another 6 months outr of it before it died. Once the heat damage is done there seems to be nothing you can do to completely revive it.

Yeah... for the past couple hours now I've searched for "nv4_disp error fix" and anything similar and most people seem to agree that it's either caused from a fusion of old and new driver information (apparently when updating the driver, it may not always overwrite everything) or the video cards are just dying.

I tried uninstalling the drivers through the device manager, yet somehow after restarting, the drivers seemed to reset themselves. I tried again via add/remove programs and it worked just the way it should. I went on to install the latest drivers and I'm running into the same freezing problems, no matter what game I play. Unfortunately, it looks like I have to face the fact that the cards in there are dying/dead. :sadvaultboy:

Looks like it's time to install Steam on a different computer and play it on there. Unfortunately it was our most powerful computer whose cards are dying...

EDIT: Question though... everything else on the computer seems to be fine. It's just gaming that is affected, as far as I can tell. I can play videos just fine. Does that rule out a dying video card or is that dependent on something else?

Playing video does not tax the card like a game, so the card could be going out but not be totally gone yet.

Yup, playing videos is easy. Rendering a 3D world takes a little horsepower. If you are runing multiple cards try running just one. It's very possible only one of them is going bad.

Well hey! Wouldn't you know it, I removed one of the cards and the other seems to be running the game well. Granted, I only loaded the game up and ran around for about 5-10 minutes, but that's a heck of a lot better than the 0-5 seconds I was getting before. I'll let you guys know if anything happens again, but in the meantime, thanks a lot! I really really appreciate the help.