• If you are experiencing instability, frame rate issues and have an AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core Processor then install the AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor Driver for your operating system
  
  
• If you are using NVIDIA Force ware drivers 81.84 to 82.12 then you may wish to disable dual core support to see if that helps with stability. This fix is courtesy of AMDZone
  
  
  • 1. Go into Regedit and determine the current primary display card by looking in HKey_Local_Machine\Hardware\DeviceMap\Video and note the GUID (global unique identifier assigned by Windows) for the entry \device\video0 which is the long string at the end of the entry in brackets { }.
    
  • 2. Edit HKey_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{guid}\0000, where {guid} is the number derived from the above step.
    
  • 3. Open the 0000 directory and enter a new key called OGL_ThreadControl and give it a value of 2. This will disable multithreading in the driver for all OpenGL [OGL] apps.
    
  • 4. In the same 0000 directory, to disable driver multithreading for all Direct3D [D3D] apps, you can enter WTD_EXECMODEL and give a value of 0.

  NOTE: That these changes will affect all applications.

General

• Overclocking your video card and/or CPU can cause problems that were not manifesting themselves in other games. Try default clock / speeds for your video card and CPU
  
  
• If you are using Windows 2000 and an AMD Athlon, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon XP or AMD Thunderbird then try the page file extension patch from AMD and Microsoft. 
  
  
• Reduce the hardware acceleration on your sound card by one notch, this can usually be found under multimedia in the control panel. Soundblaster Live! cards before 5.1 have an issue with ACPI, try to disable ACPI and IRQ steering for your operating system. 
  
  
• If you have an AMD Irongate 750/751 chipset based motherboard then see if disabling 'SuperBypass' in the BIOS helps. You should also try the latest AMD Chipset drivers and miniports
  
  
• If your BIOS has an option for write combining for video memory then see if changing it from USWC to UC helps.
  
  
• If you have a NForce chipset motherboard and are running ram at a higher speed than the FSB, try SYNC or 1:1 ( 2:2, 3:3, 4:4 etc.) option to synchronize your memory clock with the FSB. Example FSB at 166 with DDR ram at 333, try setting DDR ram to 266.
  
  
• Some motherboard and graphic card combinations are unstable at AGP 8x or 4x transfer speeds, try reducing AGP speed to 4x, 2x or even 1x
  
  
• When using a VIA chipset based motherboard be sure to upgrade to the latest 4in1 drivers found at VIA's Official Driver Page
   
  
• When using a SIS chipset based motherboard be sure to upgrade to the latest drivers found at SIS Driver Page
  
  
• If you have a Nvidia Geforce chipset based video card then visit the excellent Geforce FAQ and read the troubleshooting and instability sections
  
  
• Although some sections are specific to the Abit range of motherboards you will find a lot of useful information on Athlon CPU and VIA Chipset motherboards in the ViaHardware FAQ pages. 
  
  
• If you have an IRQ available for each card / device in your system then try disabling ACPI and IRQ Steering. Some cards such as the Soundblaster Live! before 5.1 have an issue with ACPI.