[FIX FOUND][Official Thread] Black screens and bad loaded textures errors

[Sylveon™]

I'm making this thread to look for a solution or to put pressure on Square Enix to release an urgent fix.

In my case the game goes crazy, cinematics are locked with the characters staring at you, textures start loading incorrectly, the NPCs stay still in place, the music stops playing and if I open the menu or rest on a bench it goes to a black screen and never loads.

my PC: I5 8400 - RTX 3070 - 16gb ddr4 (Game and windows installed in NVME)

things I tried to solve black screens:
- Update bios and enable resize bar
- change settings low - high - ultra / dlss 50% - 66 - 100%
- Uninstall vanguard
- new game / other saves
- Installed DLSS4 (It improved the performance and visuals of the game but it didn't solve the error lol)

-DETAILS TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT-
- the versions of windows 23h2 and 24h2 are not related to the problem, both fail.
- PC specs are not related to the problem, super PCs with r7 9800x3D, 4090 and 64gb ram crash in the same way
- Pc temperatures and nvme tempetures are ok
- CPU and GPU are good, they don't even reach 100% usage.
- Stable 60fps framerate

[Sylveon™]

AM lähetti viestin:

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this on this thread already but I have an RTX 3060 and this fixed the black screen problem for me. https://steamcommunity.com/app/2909400/discussions/0/597390757221949757/?ctp=5

i try it but not fix the problem :(

[Sylveon™]

I am 90% sure that one of the problems is with the RAM. The game has a big memory leak, it starts to consume until it is full, then the models start to look poly until it has no more ram to consume and that's when the cutscenes freeze and the game world stops responding, it just works what is already loaded in RAM.

[Summa Blasphemia]

Same issue here. After some time textures don't seem to load in properly, the map will appear blank when you open it and opening the menu will cause the game to get stuck on a black screen.

[n4mm0]

Same here. Texture got super blurry and lowres and after a short time game softlocks.
Happend two times after 1 hour of paytime approx. The first one before a miniboss fight on mt. nibel, I was able to move Cloud but the miniboss cutscene didn't trigger, I tried to open the main menu and game softlocked with black screen; the second during the Shinra Mansion cinematic: got a black screen during a transition and wasn't able to do anything anymore.

Specs:
i7-12700K
32gb ram
RTX 4070s
Game runs on a separate nvme drive, never had any problems with any other game.

Let's hope for a quick fix

[Sarda]

I've noticed this tends to happen going into or out of Kalm.

[Crouton]

Honestly, I'm mystified by what is causing all of this. There's so much variance in hardware and OS that it's so hard to pinpoint an issue. I played for like 7 hours straight earlier with no issues whatsoever and I feel like my situation would fall in line with some of the issues people have been having. I just don't get it.

[MiTH]

5 freezes/black screens experienced during the first 5-30 minutes of play. I've given up trying to restart at this point. Most freezes happened during transitions between cutscenes, once trying to skip a cutscene. The longest I've gotten is Nibelheim. There the game froze when trying to talk to one of the soldier NPC's.

Specs:
i5-8600K
RTX 2080
16b RAM
Nvme M.2 drive with plenty of free space
Windows 11 Pro 24H2
All drivers are latest and Windows is up to date.

FPS-wise the game seems to run OK, steady ~60 FPS on 1440p high-medium settings.

I tried increasing shader cache size to unlimited, recompiled shader cache afterwards, verified game file integrity, removed temp files and so on. Even moved my Documents folder from C:\ drive to the same drive that I have the game installed on. No change.

Also contacted Square Enix tech support.

[*******]

It'seems it has nothing to do with the systems of the users or with windows, maybe it's an nvidia thing, but then again amd users report the same issue.....

I expect it simply is faulty code in the PORT ...
And it does not help that Square Enix doesn't react on it.

They clocked the prices, for selling the game , now it is also up to them to mak ethe game playable !!!

[*******]

Alot of us are already past teh part of refunding,,,,,, because these problems started happening more often when reaching teh open world area of the game..

1. Invisible walls resulting in Black screen bug
2. Low re stextures resulting in Black screen bug .
3. Sound keeps playing endlessly,
Waited for 10 minutes on a black screen itd oes not solve itself !!

[*******]

Only thing that helped was a reboot of the game, and then it happened 3 more times till teh point that i just stopped playing ,,,,, it is an insult to their customers simple as that...


And i feel cheated by the purchase , or not being able to refund !
Also the lack of ocmmunication is typical to square enix,,, there is no DAY 1 patch, or quick hotfix....

I sincerely doubt they even care !

[Sarda]

Crouton lähetti viestin:

Honestly, I'm mystified by what is causing all of this. There's so much variance in hardware and OS that it's so hard to pinpoint an issue. I played for like 7 hours straight earlier with no issues whatsoever and I feel like my situation would fall in line with some of the issues people have been having. I just don't get it.

Interestingly I didn't have this until about 5 hours in, now it happens constantly. I'm just shelfing the game til a patch is out because I'm tired of losing 10m of progress left and right.

[Extra Big Swimjim with Cheese]

Similar problems here on the 3060TI, but only long black screens when it's loading new scenes and LOD of textures taking a while to load. I also had a few problems with NPC positions and cinematics locking up followed by fastforwarding. Setting the world detail to Ultra and locking framerate to 60fps helped a little with texture pop-in. I'm moving the game to a different hard drive to see if that helps.

Edit: So far haven't had a real cutscene but the character pop-in is largely improved on my trash SSD. Texture pop-in is still very noticable but not game-breaking like it was before. Had installed my standard drive because it wasn't in system requirements, mostly because of the size and I wasn't sure if my trash SSD wouldn't cause anomalies. But right now it's running way, way better than FF16 and more comparable to games by other publishers.

[n4mm0]

Happened again in Kalm: did almost everything there (card quests, talked to every team member) then when I interacted with the weapon shop npc, the game soft locked again. Everything kept going on (sound, npc animations), but that the dialogue with the npc didn't start and I was forced to terminate the game after ~5min of waiting. Again after roughly 1hr of gameplay.

I'm shelfing this game too, waiting for a patch.

[n4mm0]

As posted in another thread (https://steamcommunity.com/app/2909400/discussions/0/597390757221912574/?ctp=2#c597390873150409407) I managed to fix (or at least delay) this issue doing what Eltarimus suggested (capping fps at 60 on both nvidia cp and game, and set background model to medium).
Did a ~2hrs session (outside Kalm in the first openworld section) without any problems. Might need to test this for longer sessions, but at least it's something.

I believe, like OP said, this is has to be a memory leak of some sort: lowering background model presumibly lowers the amount of data loaded into memory and thus reduces memory consumption. Might as well work with lower texture details, dunno.

[WryFlavoredBread]

I will try this today and see if I notice any difference.