"Saint's Row the Third has stopped working."... but not at start-up.

[LancerChronics]

Update: 3/23
I believe the key to finding a solution is information, and I found out a few more "symptoms" of the problem, that I believe are related.

-At 1920x1080, full screen and windowed, game randomly crashes. (Followed by the message in the title)
-At 1680x1050, full screen and windowed, game crashes after first opening video (purple car + attack chopper). Always.
-Ocassionally game does not always crash, but does something else. (Next 2)
- In Full screen, game looks like it is about to crash, but instead just turns invisible. I can hear it. I can mover around and access menus, but I see my desktop background. Currently have yet to find a way to get picture back.
- In windowed mode, same as above, but instead of turning invisible, screen turns pure white.
- Crashes cause no delay in computer, so I don't think there is a "memory dump" after the crash.

Attempted to update to latest drivers, but new drivers crashed every few minutes (and recovered). Rolled back after 3rd time.

Attempted to verify caches, 2 bad files, redownloaded, did not fix.

Attempted to set game priority to "High" in task manager. Can't tell if I am getting more time or not, but crashes still occur.

So anyone have and Idea how these can be related?

Windows 7/64
Zotac Geforce GTX 285

Updata: 3/25
Determined that the problem is NOT the amount of RAM I have... Relinstalled DirectX.... No change...

[MrJoker]

Same

[LancerChronics]

...bump?

[J.D.]

Yeah, it keeps crashing for me at this one point where I'm supposed to protect a helicopter carrying a bomb. It's done it 3 times so far at the same point :/

[RoboTBagParty(Russ)☣☢]

I cant even start my career.....

[LancerChronics]

Updated original post with new information.

[BourbonKid]

Unfortunately, I can't help, I got the same problem with an AMD Radeon graphic card. The game randomly crashes too. Sometimes i play with no problems, sometimes, it crashes when i try to load my career, sometimes after 10mins of gaming. But, i got a graphic message error too. I thought the problem was my graphic card, but none of my other games crash like that. My pc under warranty was recently repaired, and apparently, my graphic card works fine...

I don't know why, but this game crashes itself and/or crashes my graphic driver. Weird...

[LancerChronics]

Well, it wasn't drivers either...performed a sweep and a clean install of them....

[LancerChronics]

Just to bring this back to the forefront, as there isn't a known solution yet...

Update:
Attempted to disable AA and AS via game, and run it via my video card settings...
I actually got a decent amount of play out of it (about 45 minutes), before the usual.

But I've noticed something.... the crash always seem to occur when something is changing, or loading, like a model or texture. Like it happens a lot in stores, when I'm scrolling through bunch of different hats, or shirts. Or when I'm scrolling through to pick a color for that items... I'll move onto the next one, but before it loads, the game will hang up and crash. (The item might load another time. but a different item will crash it...) Hmmmm.....

Also revalidated again... 3 files needed...again. it downloaded them though.,... /shrug

Tried running it in DX9... kinda works. Light can be overly bright however, and fire is invisible....(kind of annoying when blowing up cars and I keep getting set on fire.)

[matthew]

while the game is stable for me, at least most of the time, but it does crash a lot if I'm in combat, especailly after a few waves or I keep on fighting after I completed all the waves, but it has also crashed in a few places too, switching to DX9 mode doesn't help, as it crashes there too, I tried validating the files, no sucess, but for me, it crashes mainly in heavily combat or if I use the rocket lauchner a lot, otherwise its fairly stable if i'm not in combat

[LancerChronics]

Hmm... still might be the same issue....though i just spend 30 minutes rolling around in a tank destroying multiple waves of the army, with no crash...grrr this is frustrating.

[matthew]

tell me about it, I can complete alll the mayhem challanges just fine, but if I pick a fight with a gang and perlong that fight, it will crash, but yeah so frustrating

[LancerChronics]

Well, this is odd... apparently Saint Row the Third has issues with quad core processors... funny thing is...I have a 3 core, yet when I go to set affinity...my computer thinks I have 4 (CPU 0,1,2,3)... I wonder if there's some sort of dummy core there that causes an issue. Did 0/1 and still crashed. Now to try 2/3, 0/3, and 1/2.

Edit: Hmm, got 1.5 hours of play after setting affinity to only 0,1,2.....closed game myself. Further tests are required.

[Kewee]

I cant even pass the first thing without it crashing in a new load!

[matthew]

Originally posted by lancerchronics:

Well, this is odd... apparently Saint Row the Third has issues with quad core processors... funny thing is...I have a 3 core, yet when I go to set affinity...my computer thinks I have 4 (CPU 0,1,2,3)... I wonder if there's some sort of dummy core there that causes an issue. Did 0/1 and still crashed. Now to try 2/3, 0/3, and 1/2.

Edit: Hmm, got 1.5 hours of play after setting affinity to only 0,1,2.....closed game myself. Further tests are required.

looks like you nailed the issue, I added this to the shortcut -CPUCount:1 -CPUPriority:high

and did a lot of fighting and no crash, and I do have a intel quadcore CPU, so it does seem that the game can't handle multi core setups, and for a game that is suppose to be fairly recent too, its a very bad oversight, but yeah, adding that to the shortcut seems to have solved the issue for me, thanks

[LancerChronics]

Originally posted by matthew:

looks like you nailed the issue, I added this to the shortcut -CPUCount:1 -CPUPriority:high

and did a lot of fighting and no crash, and I do have a intel quadcore CPU, so it does seem that the game can't handle multi core setups, and for a game that is suppose to be fairly recent too, its a very bad oversight, but yeah, adding that to the shortcut seems to have solved the issue for me, thanks

Interesting, I'll try to add that to my shortcut. It's a pain having to minimize and do it manually each time I start the game.

Edit: Yep, seems to work. Went shopping, did genki bowl, mayhem, etc. no crash....