Dark Souls 3 CTD (Crash) Fix

This is a short guide to help people experiencing CTDs in this great game.

CTD Fix

EDIT: Although I have not had any CTDs since the patch, a couple of friends of mine are still reporting CTDs. If you are still having the problems, follow the potential solutions below and if that doesn't work, feel free to ask me in the comments. I'll do whatever I can to help you get your game working. Thank you!

You know that feeling when you're out of estus and you finally stumble across a bonfire? That feeling of relief? Well, if you're like many of us, you don't. The reason being, you're crashing when you approach the bloody things. Some users are experiencing CTDs when approaching the bonfires. From Software is aware of this and has stated that the issue will be fixed in an upcoming patch.

The CTD is apparently caused by a bug in the lighting. There aren't really any details but if your "Lighting" settings are set above LOW you have a chance to crash when approaching a bonfire.

Therefore, the fix is, thankfully (most of the time) as simple as swapping your Lighting option (in advanced settings) to LOW. This has fixed the issue for myself and a few friends. Hopefully it will help you too. Below, are a few screenshots showing the setting that you need to swap and how the game looks with the lighting set to LOW. It still looks great but hopefully From Software will resolve the issue shortly.


UPDATE: Apparently if you wear a full helmet (a helmet that completely conceals your character's face/hair) you won't crash when approaching bonfires, even with your Lighting setting on MEDIUM, HIGH, or MAX. Source (http://www.gamerevolution.com/news/dark-souls-3s-pc-version-has-a-crashing-issue-with-an-odd-fix-36501)

UPDATE: A fellow user reported that Dark Souls 3 was changing their settings everytime they relaunched the title. In order to stop it from changing your custom settings, toggle OFF the "auto-detect best rendering settings" option in the graphics settings for the game. If you do not, the game will auto-detect what it thinks are the best settings for your system and therefore, mess up this fix. Thank you, The Dank Soul, for bringing this to our attention!

I hope that this resolves your issue and that you're able to play and enjoy the game!

Credits (This is where I found the primary solution, thanks folks.):

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1206824

Note: I'm co-owner of an IT business, http://texarkanait.com/ so I am happy to help you folks with anything else PC related that you could need. We've been in business for eight years and the founder of the business has twenty-one years in the field. If you need anything, follow the link above and contact us! Thank you.

[TheUprising]

Sorry it's not called vram, its called virtual memory, and set it to 10-12gb.

When it happens go to event viewer to post the exact error, though yes that is the symptom of a driver crash.

Really it's that exact driver version that fixed everything, along with low shaders, lighting, and effects. It's probably just one of those but I didn't test.

365.10 is the exact miracle driver version

[Dr. Wizard]

Also, I haven't heard of the VRAM fix before, so I'll try that too. Thanks for the suggestions!

[Dr. Wizard]

Hmm, I'll try doing a fresh driver install when I can. I'm just getting regular "dark Souls III.exe has stopped working" crashes though.

[TheUprising]

The driver version working for me was 365.10

[TheUprising]

Dr. Wizard, if yoi got the driver white screen crashes like me, did you increase your vram to 12gb? Other than that the only thing that worked for me was getting the nvidia .10 drivers released like May 5-6, look it up.

The newest drivers made me crash again so I had to uninstall them with ddu. Along with this, I set shaders, shadows, and effects to low and dof to high. Turning off dof made me crash, though I'm not sure shadows harm anything.

The culprit seems to be the fog, so that's either shakers or effects, or both.

[Dr. Wizard]

Still crashing a ton. I'm on the latest nvidia drivers. (Away from home ATM, I'll get more details for you!)

Specs off the top of my head:

Geforce 660ti

16gb ram

Windows 7

Constantly crashing, reinstalling temporarily fixes it, but crashing gets worse over time to the point of unplayability. I've tried cleanly installing drivers, verifying game cache, and setting lighting to low. (I'm sure there's a ton more solutions I've tried, just can't remember them. )

Any help would be really appreciated!

[Aidan McG]

Elioden : Couldnt find any of those bckup softwares you were talking about, and as for what my GPU exactly is, im not sure how to find out sorry, ive looked and all i ever find is R9 200 series

[Elioden Ward]

Giant Dad - If you haven't already, update your graphics drivers to AMD hotfix 16.4.1. This has resolved the crash for a couple of folks within the comments section already! If you have and it didn't work, do you know which specific GPU you're using? I know that you said the R9 200 series, but it's always nice to know the exact GPU we're talking about in said series. That being said, you can also check for any automatic backup software (such as dropbox/onedrive) and either set them to ignore DS3's files, or disble them whilst playing DS3. They can cause a conflict whilst the game is trying to save (which it does constantly) that can cause a crash.

If neither of those things work, tell me and I'll see if I can think of anything else! I'd drop more info here, but I'm fairly certain that I am getting close to the character limit.

[Aidan McG]

Elioden Ward : Thanks man, means alot to me, here:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz

Video Card AMD Radeon R9 200 Series

RAM 8.0 GB

Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition Service Pack 1 (build 7601), 64-bit

[Nima]

still sometimes freezing but i don't see any crash again after 1.5hrs playing