GTX 1080 Ti Game Freezes and then Crashes

[Atriox]

I have seen other people making topics for this, but no solutions have been made that I've seen so far. From what I've seen, it looks like what people are saying fixes the crashes is to revert back my graphics drivers to January 2017, which ideally I don't want to do because of how this would effect the other games that I play, especially being as the driver is so old.

As the title says, the game would freeze, while the audio continues in the background for a few seconds before it eventually crashes back to desktop.

Has anyone else come up with a working solution to this problem?

[cmaesing]

Am on a 1080 Ti meself. Just want to chip in that I am having the same problem with a fresh install. Interestingly enough, a similar install worked perfectly about half a year (and another one some two years) ago. The only thing that has really changed in the meantime is a fresh W10 install (now on 1909) performed one month ago.

Behaviour is that after game start and save load, it will take a couple of minutes only (length seems random, but between two to ten minutes or so) for the game to freeze. With "windowed borderless", the game will continue to run, i.e. you hear sounds, Geralt reacting to your keyboard/mouse or controller inputs etc. With "fullscreen", it will ctd almost instantaneously thereafter.

That said, I have read the past days over the net in multiple forums. No suggestion (or combination thereof) helped me. A not exhaustive list of what I tried:

- roll back to pre 400.xx drivers (399.24 and 378.78; clean install each time; now back on 445.87)
- limit fps to 60, v-sync off and similar changes
- someone even said that installing the game on an external drive (vs an internal one) helped, so tried that - to no avail
- Windows game bar & mode turned off
- running game as admin (not installed in one of "those" dangerous W10 directories like "program files" etc)

The crash reason for all of these scenarios is always: "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (3221225477), Error reading location 0xaf4a15ac" [the very last number varies with each crash]

Any help is much appreciated.

[Red™]

I want you to tell me 2 things:
Do you have any overclock or XMP profile?
Do you have any mods installed and also script manager?

[Atriox]

Originally posted by cmaesing:

Am on a 1080 Ti meself. Just want to chip in that I am having the same problem with a fresh install. Interestingly enough, a similar install worked perfectly about half a year (and another one some two years) ago. The only thing that has really changed in the meantime is a fresh W10 install (now on 1909) performed one month ago.

Behaviour is that after game start and save load, it will take a couple of minutes only (length seems random, but between two to ten minutes or so) for the game to freeze. With "windowed borderless", the game will continue to run, i.e. you hear sounds, Geralt reacting to your keyboard/mouse or controller inputs etc. With "fullscreen", it will ctd almost instantaneously thereafter.

That said, I have read the past days over the net in multiple forums. No suggestion (or combination thereof) helped me. A not exhaustive list of what I tried:

- roll back to pre 400.xx drivers (399.24 and 378.78; clean install each time; now back on 445.87)
- limit fps to 60, v-sync off and similar changes
- someone even said that installing the game on an external drive (vs an internal one) helped, so tried that - to no avail
- Windows game bar & mode turned off
- running game as admin (not installed in one of "those" dangerous W10 directories like "program files" etc)

The crash reason for all of these scenarios is always: "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (3221225477), Error reading location 0xaf4a15ac" [the very last number varies with each crash]

Any help is much appreciated.

Yep, I have seen and tried all of the same stuff as you have and still not fixed.

[Atriox]

Originally posted by POGGER™:

I want you to tell me 2 things:
Do you have any overclock or XMP profile?
Do you have any mods installed and also script manager?

I have overclocked both my GPU and CPU, but they weren't overclocked when this issue started so this isn't the problem. The same goes for mods as well, the issues started before I ever even considered to have mods.

[Atriox]

Originally posted by monky:

Originally posted by POGGER™:

I want you to tell me 2 things:
Do you have any overclock or XMP profile?
Do you have any mods installed and also script manager?

I have overclocked both my GPU and CPU, but they weren't overclocked when this issue started so this isn't the problem. The same goes for mods as well, the issues started before I ever even considered to have mods.

It's also worth mentioning that I played this game a lot on GOG and it worked fine then. I went through about 3 full playthroughs with no issues.

[Red™]

Originally posted by monky:

Originally posted by POGGER™:

I want you to tell me 2 things:
Do you have any overclock or XMP profile?
Do you have any mods installed and also script manager?

I have overclocked both my GPU and CPU, but they weren't overclocked when this issue started so this isn't the problem. The same goes for mods as well, the issues started before I ever even considered to have mods.

Yeah both are unpredictable like that. Witcher 3 is one of the few game that have unfortunately bad engine design. My OC used to work for couple days before it kept crashing. Just turn down the oc or disable it completely.

[Atriox]

Originally posted by POGGER™:

Originally posted by monky:

I have overclocked both my GPU and CPU, but they weren't overclocked when this issue started so this isn't the problem. The same goes for mods as well, the issues started before I ever even considered to have mods.

Yeah both are unpredictable like that. Witcher 3 is one of the few game that have unfortunately bad engine design. My OC used to work for couple days before it kept crashing. Just turn down the oc or disable it completely.

Thing is, like I said it worked fine before I had even overclocked my stuff. I only overclocked my GPU and CPU this year, and before that I had an entirely different CPU which couldn't be overclocked.

[cmaesing]

No overclocking at my end. Mods? Yes (no Reshade, but PLM Ultimate v7), and of course there COULD be one of them that's the culprit. I am pretty much using the same ones as during my last playthrough (which worked without any issues). All installed (except those where manual install is required, of course) via TWMM, verified via ScriptMerger.

Once I have a bit of more patience (again), I might have another look at my setup. It's so frustrating since it *used* to work perfectly.

Fyi, the ctd happens in a "White Orchard all done" save, even with me merely standing around at night with say 2-3 NPCs in the area. So nothing too fancy going on re those mods, me thinks.

[Atriox]

Originally posted by cmaesing:

No overclocking at my end. Mods? Yes (no Reshade, but PLM Ultimate v7), and of course there COULD be one of them that's the culprit. I am pretty much using the same ones as during my last playthrough (which worked without any issues). All installed (except those where manual install is required, of course) via TWMM, verified via ScriptMerger.

Once I have a bit of more patience (again), I might have another look at my setup. It's so frustrating since it *used* to work perfectly.

Fyi, the ctd happens in a "White Orchard all done" save, even with me merely standing around at night with say 2-3 NPCs in the area. So nothing too fancy going on re those mods, me thinks.

I personally think this is something to do with the 1080 Ti, as people with this issue who can't seem to fix it all have that in common.

I'm looking to upgrade to the 3000 series once that is released, so I will try to play the game again with a new card and see if that fixes the issue.

Hope that this gets fixed before that though, because we shouldn't all be forced to buy a new card just to play one game, especially being that this card is still good today.

[cmaesing]

My last attempt is to see whether a completely new game will do the trick. Had downloaded one of those non-modded, clean saves from the Nexus - and that one was giving me the ctd.

Am now trying to check whether it's the same behaviour with my previous saves from my last playthrough.

[Atriox]

Originally posted by cmaesing:

My last attempt is to see whether a completely new game will do the trick. Had downloaded one of those non-modded, clean saves from the Nexus - and that one was giving me the ctd.

Am now trying to check whether it's the same behaviour with my previous saves from my last playthrough.

I personally have made new saves that didn't work, but I hope it works for you.

[cmaesing]

This savegame here https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/4822 works for me at the moment. Means the game didn't crash on me (yet) after some 15-20 min of running around.

An ng btw also works (not being able to judge after say 10h of gameplay, but the difference I can see from what I had earlier today).

[Atriox]

Originally posted by cmaesing:

This savegame here https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/4822 works for me at the moment. Means the game didn't crash on me (yet) after some 15-20 min of running around.

An ng btw also works (not being able to judge after say 10h of gameplay, but the difference I can see from what I had earlier today).

Let me know if everything still goes on alright for you.

[k3stea]

Originally posted by monky:

I have seen other people making topics for this, but no solutions have been made that I've seen so far. From what I've seen, it looks like what people are saying fixes the crashes is to revert back my graphics drivers to January 2017, which ideally I don't want to do because of how this would effect the other games that I play, especially being as the driver is so old.

As the title says, the game would freeze, while the audio continues in the background for a few seconds before it eventually crashes back to desktop.

Has anyone else come up with a working solution to this problem?

Limiting to 60fps worked for me. Don't need to turn on vsync or anything else. Had the same issue as you, game randomly crashing from time to time (screen freeze but you can clearly hear the game still running based on the audio). After limiting to 60fps I have 0 crashes.

It sucks when clearly the 1080ti can get much more frames out of this game but that's the only stable fix I know of so far.

Edit: spelling

[cmaesing]

Ok, the game runs smoothly for now. I just had one ctd at the end of a cutscene. THAT one I remedied via a short video tutorial @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjNMySORlc

Fyi, I already had the 60 fps set in user.settings - but I did not have the settings per (a) NVIDIA Control Panel (max. power) and (b) NVIDIA Inspector (underclocking). Also, I did *not* yet turn off "hairworks", as recommended in the video (have it set on "Geralt" for now).

Per what I quickly read in another thread here on Steam, it seems that the small adjustments discussed in that video helped esp. 1080 Ti users.

My guess: Something about the voltage being limited - and that coupled with a normally clocked or overclocked 1080 Ti made the game crash.

Good luck!