It's likely your card or video drivers.

Normally the screen goes "black" because a GPU "reset" is occuring after the video driver has hung up for whatever reason.

What should happen next, is Windows will show the desktop again, and you should see a "GPU Recovery" message superimposed over the desktop.

The sim will continue to run, but by the second GPU crash, things are so corrupt that your only recourse is to reboot, else your machine will hang up.


I was having similiar problems with my Nvidia GT 295 card and the latest drivers running even more graphic intensive programs such as Mafia II with full Physx support ... It wasn't until I downloaded and CLEANLY installed the latest BETA drivers that my problem(s) went away.