Half-Life 2, monitor going into suspend-type mode

Lately when I play Half-Life 2, my monitor will go into a suspend mode that
I usually can't get out of, sometimes it comes back on its own.

I don't think it's the monitor itself, because I tried a different monitor
with similar results.

It may be that my video card (NVidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra) is going bad.

But I wondered if anyone else was having a problem like this, which might
indicate that some change in the Half-Life 2 software is the culprit?

algomeysa2 wrote:
> Lately when I play Half-Life 2, my monitor will go into a suspend mode that
> I usually can't get out of, sometimes it comes back on its own.
>
> I don't think it's the monitor itself, because I tried a different monitor
> with similar results.
>
> It may be that my video card (NVidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra) is going bad.
>
> But I wondered if anyone else was having a problem like this, which might
> indicate that some change in the Half-Life 2 software is the culprit?

This has happened to me before on Half-life 1 running under win98. The
issue was Win98's power saving - for some reason, whilst HL was running,
win98 assumed that the system was idle, and automatically switched off
the monitor after 20 minutes of percieved 'inactivity'. I'm sure that
recent versions of windows are more intelligent, but its worth checking.

Otherwise i'd suspect that maybe the video card is attempting to display
something which it doesn't fully support (or maybe that the driver
doesn't fully support), and somehow the signal is cutting out. You
could try lowering the game's visual settings - resolution, lighting
effects, etc. Or reverting back to an older driver for your card (one
which may be more stable)

--
Ben Cottrell

"Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out"