What exactly went wrong to make a video game freeze
In: Technology
If you are on a custom PC, it could be most likely the video card. Another reason is there is to much RAM usage. My brother in law when he plays and it freezes. He clears up the RAM and he’s good to go
So many things can go wrong it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive list. Another comment blames it on the GPU but this isn’t necessarily true at all; programs that don’t use your GPU can and do freeze all the same.
The only real answer is “the program got stuck somehow.” Maybe bad coding caused an infinite loop, or a memory leak that made your machine run out of resources and unable to keep running smoothly. It’s impossible to pinpoint specifics without looking at things on a program by program basis.
That’s like asking “what exactly went wrong that made me trip”. Who knows? *Something* happened that you didn’t expect, and you tripped. You can often recover your balance, but if you tripped badly enough then you’d crash into the sidewalk. Well, when *something* happens that the software doesn’t expect, the software might recover and keep going…or might notice the problem before it happens and give you an error message…or if the problem was bad enough, it might crash.
A couple of possibilities:
* A lot of things happened in the game at the same time – way more than the programmers expected – and processing them all takes a long time. (think of blowing up a shitload of TNT in Minecraft)
* A lot of things are on the screen at the same time and it’s taking a long time to render them. (think of the smoke effects from the TNT)
* You made the game do something that never ends (the chicken is riding the pig; the pig is riding the chicken; what are the pig’s coordinates?)
* The game popped up a window saying it crashed, and when you click OK the game will close, but you can’t see the error window because the fullscreen game is in the way…
It really just depends, freezing is often a case by case basis issue and not just one thing that causes it. It could be information overload, where the game engine wants one or multiple of your pc components to do more than it/they can at that specific moment hence the game freezes until the components are able to process what the game engine needs them to, maybe another application is using some of your pc resources or maybe the game is having to load in new assets from memory such as textures, buildings etc and the game freezes until the new items can be loaded.
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