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Prolo Jul 27, 2023 @ 8:52pm

Game crashing may be a graphics card drivers issue

I wanted to share my experience over the last week or so in the hopes that it helps someone who is running into game crashes. From what I've read in various support forums in the past 5 days, this type of issue is affecting by and large only Nvidia graphics cards, and appears to affect a wide spectrum - 20 series, 30 series, 40 series etc.

I have an MSI Z390-A PRO, i7-9700KF, RTX 2070 Super, 16GB DDR4, 1 TB SSD. I know it's not the newest hardware, but I've never had any issues with any game up until recently. I bought the Ultimate Edition of Remnant 2 and got to install and play the game a few days early. Running the most recent Nvidia graphics drivers (536.67) I ran into the exact same crashing results as countless others have reported in recent days across different game releases. At first I attributed it to poor game optimization.

After 2 days of searching through support forums and trying many different solutions, the game barely made it (a couple times) to the opening cinematic where it would subsequently crash. I decided rather than keep wasting time on this, that I was going to refund Remnant 2.

I then decided to re-install Cyberpunk 2077 onto my PC to play through the game before the new expansion arrives. This was a game I had played fully without issues back when it was first released. I had not installed or played it since then. I didn't expect to have any problems playing it when - you guessed it - the exact same symptoms as Remnant 2. Stuttering, barely able to make it past the opening cinematic (if that) and hang/crash to desktop. At this point I was determined to find out what was going on since I know I can run Cyberpunk 2077, it ran on Ultra settings without issues before.

I have not installed any new hardware or made any major software changes on my PC. I run malware checks, keep it clean, make sure things are connected properly etc. So after checking through all the basic potential problem points, I knew it was likely an issue with software configuration. Again I dove into all the troubleshooting suggestions. One of those suggestions was rolling back the graphics driver to an older version. I attempted rolling back to the previous 536.40. Unfortunately I got the same result. I had a feeling that the driver may be the issue so I went one by one, working my way back from 536.67 all the way until 528.49 (February 2023). Up until this point, all 11 recent driver updates from Nvidia resulted in the game crashing. Sometimes I would get to the character creation screen, but never past it.

As soon as I launched the game with 528.49 installed, Cyberpunk loaded up perfectly. I've experienced no issues and have now played the game extensively for hours on ultra settings as before.

I've contacted Nvidia to let them know about this experience as I suspect many people are running into problems with recent game releases and may not be aware it's the driver causing the issue. The fact that I had to revert back to a driver from 6 months ago is not ideal, but if you really want to play the game, maybe it's something you can try. I know it's not affecting everyone, but there are enough complaints in different support forums to support the idea that this may be a widespread issue with certain PC configurations.

Hopefully by sharing this experience it helps others so they can enjoy the game.

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