A fatal error concerning DirectX has occured.(5) DirectX VertexShader 2.0 is not supported.

[GhostWolf]

Basically the title says it all, I just bought and downloaded this game to see how well it would run on my machine, given the trend of reviews stating that this game was a bad PC port with FPS and sound issues. Well just as soon as I tried to start it for the first time, I get this message immediately:

A fatal error concerning DirectX has occured.(5) DirectX VertexShader 2.0 is not supported.

Of coarse I exit out of that error message, and the game didn't start as to be expected, and unfortunately, my google searches did not turn up any results for the same issue being shared by anyone else, let alone a solution.

So has anyone else had similar occur for them, and does anyone have an idea of a potential fix I can try out first, before throwing in the towel and seeking a refund?

I would really like to give this game as good a shot as possible before I give up to these errors, since I know most of the time this sort of thing just requires some tinkering with settings, applying known fixes, etc to start it off, and I also have started FFXIII and enjoy it, so playing the full trilogy of these games is definitely something I would really like to do. Would suck to have the middle game unplayable and then move on to the last one... :(

[GhostWolf]

Well to answer my own thread (for people that might search this error in the future and wind up here) I seemed to fix my problem by doing the most obvious solution: I updated my Graphics Drivers.

After going to the radeon site and downloading the most recent driver for my AMD Radeon HD 7800 series card, the error no longer showed up and I was able to launch the game perfectly fine, just like the original FFXIII game, I was also able to watch the cinematics without any FPS issues or sound issues.

So just to restate, my personal experience with the above error was that I needed to update my graphics card driver for an AMD Radeon HD 7800 card. Hope this helps someone else out in the future :p

[Chowlax]

I cant update my drivers and im still getting this same issue

[pgali]

Are you on Windows or Linux? I had that issue only on Linux, and I forced the game to launch with an older version of Proton (7.0.6 or 7.0.5).
On Windows I posted just now a guide with the most common issues. You can try to apply all the fixes and see how it goes.