Help me Escapist, you're my only hope...

[Wyes]

It's shutting down and not rebooting. At least a power supply would be cheaper than a new video card. It's odd though, because this power supply is relatively new (only about 12 months old, accidentally fried my last one thoroughly). It's starting to happen in other resource intensive games too (MW2, Fallout 3 etc.), so the problem isn't with the game.

 

[OmniDesol]

Hmmm. Sounds like it may indeed be time to upgrade.

 

[Wyes]

All but the oldest of games seem to be running poorly now, assuming it's a problem with the video card.

 

[Wyes]

Problem discovered and solved; the CPU was overheating very rapidly, because the heatsink under the fan had pretty much a solid covering of dust. Computer has been cleaned and everything appears to be running better, no crashes thus far.