Driver crash

[ZombieHunter]

I'm getting a consistent driver crash with this game on my recent save game. Play for a bit with vsync on or off and it crashes the driver in about 5 minutes requiring a hard reset. I turned bloom on and it seems to happen more often since then.

I have TDR disabled so if the driver crashes the system must be rebooted b/c TDR sucks and rarely works like it is supposed to.

GTX 970
16 GB RAM
AMD FX8350 @ 4GHz

Video card is basically asleep with this game. Not sure why it would cause a driver crash. No other game causes this - well one. Subnautica built on the same engine can also cause this crash but extremely rare. I have a ton of other Unity games, unfortunately, and none of them cause this.

[u2020bullet]

Your card might be dying, had the same issue and it started to happen more and more frequently. Nothing you can do about it but replace the card. But on the off chance that this is not the case, i'd advise you to wait for someone else to chime in, just in case.

EDIT: A friend had the same issue as well, but his was on a laptop, basically he had to end up tossing the whole thing.

[ZombieHunter]

This is a new replacement card from EVGA. Other one died. Only had it 3 months.

[Choose]

What precis happens, when the error occurred.

[ZombieHunter]

Driver crash. Grey screen but game still running. Requires restart. ALT F4 and CTRL ALT DEL do nothing. Also have had freezes where game just stops and I have to reboot.

I'm getting new drivers to see if it fixes it. I highly doubt it is the card since I just received this EVGA recert replacement for my old one that completely died. Died as in my system would not boot b/c it did not detect a card.

My CPU is water cooled and my case has 2 250 mm fans on the side and my PSU is an Antec 1000W with the card on its own dedicated rail. The video card is not under serious load in this game and why would it be? The game's graphics are good but not earth shattering and my card and system can handle a whole hell of a lot more than this game. I only seem to have this problem with Unity based games and only 2 of them at that. Unreal games (any Unreal version) have never caused this and neither have Euphoria or Gamebryo based games.

I will try to force my memory to the speed it should run on my system. Maybe the Auto setting is not working as expected at times. My memory can run 2300 but I can only run at 1866 due to my AMD FX8350 not supporting 2300. No way my memory is having timing issues when it so underclocked.

[Choose]

Sounds more to me, that it is your ram (and maybe motherboard) is failing.
Same thing happened to me last year.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by Choose:

Sounds more to me, that it is your ram (and maybe motherboard) is failing.
Same thing happened to me last year.

Only 2 games have ever done it and they are both Unity based. Out of 660 games 2 do this and my mobo or RAM is failing? Don't think so. If I had this problem across a wide gamut of my games then perhaps but I don't. I can play other games for hours upon hours, quit and play other games for hours upon hours with no issues.

Probably a driver issue between Unity and Nvidia. Updating to the latest now.

[Choose]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

Originally posted by Choose:

Sounds more to me, that it is your ram (and maybe motherboard) is failing.
Same thing happened to me last year.

Only 2 games have ever done it and they are both Unity based. Out of 660 games 2 do this and my mobo or RAM is failing? Don't think so. If I had this problem across a wide gamut of my games then perhaps but I don't. I can play other games for hours upon hours, quit and play other games for hours upon hours with no issues.

Same thing happened to me.
Only game the pc would fail in was this. Then after a month it got worse, i could not play the game more than 3-5 minutes. I could restart it and play ets2 in 45 minuts, it suddently crashed it to.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by Choose:

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

Only 2 games have ever done it and they are both Unity based. Out of 660 games 2 do this and my mobo or RAM is failing? Don't think so. If I had this problem across a wide gamut of my games then perhaps but I don't. I can play other games for hours upon hours, quit and play other games for hours upon hours with no issues.

Same thing happened to me.
Only game the pc would fail in was this. Then after a month it got worse, i could not play the game more than 3-5 minutes. I could restart it and play ets2 in 45 minuts, it suddently crashed it to.

Just did it again. Only on my current save. No driver crash this time. Just froze with Windows progress icon and locked up. Rebooted and my memory was actually at 1333 so super underclocked. Set it back to 1866.

I can play ETS 2 for hours. It has never crashed on me. I can play Elite Dangerous for hours as well. But doesn't matter b/c those games don't run on the same engine as this.

I really think it is my save game. Something is causing everything to lock up.

[u2020bullet]

Try backing up your old save and playing around with a new save, see if the same thing happens.

[ZombieHunter]

Just started a new game. No issues. Weird. Definitely something in my old save. My van stopped after those idiots in town rammed me and it would not restart. I just figured I was out of gas. Then I realized it was Sunday and well..dehydrated. Since I was not on permadeath I drove yet another vehicle to town to fix the issue..on Monday morning. But when I got there the store was closed. So I Google and he is supposed to be open at 8 am. Well no clock. Then the bus comes and I board to see the clock. 8:30 am. But the store is still closed. Died again of dehydration. So I go get the big semi truck and drive to town. Well I get stuck after the T where it curves hard left. I get stuck down in the ditch. But I finally am able to diff lock and back out and head back to the road. As soon as I crest the ditch I die. No reason at all except traffic accident. No clue. After that the game would freeze or cause a driver crash within 5 minutes.

So it probably was throwing an unhandled exception somewhere and the render portion would just die while the rest of the game thread would keep running. No clue. But I can play on a new save just fine. Contrary to popular belief it IS possible to crash the driver b/c of bugs. I've done it in my own development. Drivers don't do bounds checking on vertex buffers, etc. This makes them faster at the expense of if you mess up you might get away with it for a bit and then....bam...it all comes crashing down. I've caused BSODs in W7 due to bad shaders and/or bad render code.

I don't know what caused this since I don't have the source code...but I'm glad I can play now. Maybe windowed mode would have given me more clue as to what happened. When games crash in full screen sometimes there isn't a way out.

[u2020bullet]

Glad to see it works well now and there isn't a serious issue behind it and sorry you had to toss your old save, but i guess better that than the gpu.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by u2020bullet:

Glad to see it works well now and there isn't a serious issue behind it and sorry you had to toss your old save, but i guess better that than the gpu.

Well if you read my horrid story you know my old save was not that great.

[u2020bullet]

I read it, and it actually does seem to happen from time to time, if the store doesn't open chances are Telmo somehow managed to get himself killed on his way to work and the only way to remedy that is to save and load the game. Oh, and doesn't the store open at 10 now?

[ZombieHunter]

Ok I was able to get this to repeat on another save. It happens if the game saves and you are NOT mortal. After it saves your game is messed up. The first time I pressed ALT F4 before it saved and was able to continue from my last save. But if it saves after you die, your save will eventually crash. I'll try to use MSC editor to see what is wrong.

[f03n1x]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

Ok I was able to get this to repeat on another save. It happens if the game saves and you are NOT mortal. After it saves your game is messed up. The first time I pressed ALT F4 before it saved and was able to continue from my last save. But if it saves after you die, your save will eventually crash. I'll try to use MSC editor to see what is wrong.

Maybe revalidate the game cache? sometimes with games (not sure about this one) updates can leave unwanted files that end up causing unexpected crashes like this.