I was experiencing similar errors recently - I have an ATI card and installed ATI tools which allows you to have an on screen display of the amount of texture memory and heap memory being used by the 3d process.
I had been running my GW with heapsize option set to half a gig (under the misguided belief that it would improve performance). With this option on, I noticed crashes within 10 minutes of starting the game. I turned it off, then watched to see how much memory the application was using. It would vary in size, from 175 Mb to around 300 Mb, depending on how large the map area and how populous the town was.
I think that what triggered the errors for me was changing the main processor on my comp. I went from an AMD 64 3000+ to the x2 4400. Different memory structure - or it could be that a memory cell went bad. Or heck, it could have been the way the update changed the handling of a forced heapsize.
Anyhow, run a memtest utility to see if there are hardware errors, if you are using the heapsize option, turn it off, and if you are using an ATI video card, you can try that tool I mentioned to track the memory usage.
Good luck!
|