A FIX for crashes\freezes with nvidia Geforce graphics cards.

[Ozzuneoj]

Since I bought this game a month or so ago I've had lots of stability problems that have gotten progressively worse. The game will freeze, and the sound and gameplay will still be going (running out of oxygen with a frozen screen is no fun) but the screen is simply a still image. It would happen anywhere from less than a minute into loading a game to 10-15 minutes in. Recently I haven't even been able to play because it would freeze in only a few seconds after loading my save file. All I could do is minimize the game (by doing ctrl-alt-del), at which point I would generally see a system-tray popup indicating that the graphics driver caused a crash and the system was able to recover from it.

After having lots of quirky problems on TWO different systems running the latest nvidia drivers (also causing crashes in Project Cars), I did some reading online and it seems that MANY people are having these problems with nvidia's drivers from the last couple of months. So, I uninstalled the current drivers (353.30) and reinstalled 350.12, which I had used before and are from late April or early May.

I'm happy to say that I just played Subnautica for a couple of hours with NO crashes or errors of any kind. In the case of this game, it seems to be best to recommend nvidia driver version 350.12 or 347.52 (in that order)... not the latest versions. You'll also want to ignore any suggestions to update drivers from Geforce Experience for a while until people on nvidia's forums start reporting that they've fixed the problems.

My specs:
Intel Core i5 2500K at 4.2Ghz
8GB DDR3 1333
PNY Geforce GTX 970 4GB
Samsung SM841 128GB SSD
Toshiba 3TB HDD
Windows 7 Pro SP1

I would suggest adding this driver recommendation to one of the stickies because this is a wide spread problem and currently it seems that updating drivers from these earlier versions is more likely to cause problems with this game (and others) than fix them.