Screen going completely black at random then coming back in game

[[TK!] (´･ω･`)]

Log: http://pastebin.com/1ZdZhK95

I've been replaying this game a lot recently, using the 64bit version. Have had 0 performance issues whatsoever up until I tried playing it today. Menus are fine, but as soon as I get in game the screen will randomly go black for random amounts of time, then come back as though nothing happened. The game continues to run and accept input (E.G. I can move the camera, walk around, interact with stuff), sound is uninterrupted, etc. Everything continues except the actual display is totally gone.

I tried running 32bit instead but the same problem occurs. The log I posted is the 32bit one since it's much shorter. I faffed about in settings a little, set an FPS limit, then loaded the game and immediately experienced the issue.

19:29:56 LOG: Player killed at #WorldLocation
The screen was still black, and I was just holding down "s" and fell off a cliff. The screen didn't come back until halfway through the restore sequence.

GPU-Z shows everything is fine, temperatures are fine, drivers are up to date, no other game presents the issue. Cables are secure (screen doesn't turn off like a loose cable anyways).
GTX680 Lightning, Intel i5 4440, 8GB RAM, Windows 10 Pro x64.

[[TK!] (´･ω･`)]

Originally posted by Aergistal:

Sounds like a graphics driver timeout, check the Windows Event log for "Driver stopped working" messages. Does GPU-Z show high load? If so lower the graphic quality. You can also try a clean driver reinstall (there's an option in the Nvidia update application).

Again, GPU-Z shows everything fine. It remains well below high load and temperature stays under 65c.
Event Viewer doesn't show me any driver failures. Nor does my secondary screen react in any way when this occurs, as it would normally if a driver failure occured.

[AlenL]

Two things come to mind:
#1 have you tried playing in windowed mode?
#2 maybe there's something going on with exposure. I saw things like that when GPU outputs an impossibly large value (infinity) for some pixel by mistake (either hw or sw bug), which drives exposure into full pitch black, as it thinks that you are looking into something super-bright. You can try to disable auto-exposure using efx_bAutoExposure=0 setting, to see if it helps.

[[TK!] (´･ω･`)]

Didn't try windowed, but #2 made me think of supersampling, even if it's a totally different thing. It was set to 2.4 internal resolution (1920x1200) and I'm on a 1920x1080 screen. Turned it to 2.1 (1920x1080) and it seems to have fixed it entirely.

[hwertz]

Believe it or not, I'm having the same issue 8 years later (2024). Ubuntu 24.04, GTX1650, 550.17 drivers. It did it for me in DX11, DX12, and Vulkan. (Although, since dxvk and vkd3d used in Proton convert dx11/dx12 to Vulkan, all 3 are ultimately going through Vulkan in my case.) I did notice mine did it more in brightly lit areas, and like if you're looking down at the snow etc., so the possibility of the shaders or whatever having a value overflow seems possible. (Given I'm running it in a window, it'd be great if this would at least just affect the window rather than black out the entire screen.) In my case, power cycling the monitor would actually bring the screen back up; or switching to a text console and back (although that freezes the game.)

I had that set a bit higher than my screen resolution too, I'm definitely trying that out to see if it fixes it!

[zulater]

I'm getting this as well now. I got through nearly all of the B building until it started acting up. My screen doesn't go "black" like nothing is plugged in but it is dark grey. Game pauses, then goes black and like you mentioned you can walk around but you can't see anything. Cycling monitor didn't work for me. and my resolution is the same as my monitor. Did you get it to fix? I'm on win10 through steam, nvidia latest drivers.