[REPORT] Game crashing/freezing randomly or after loading maps

[SodaPop]

Hey everyone, many players have been experiencing a problem, which multiple users have mentioned in this forum or in the bug-reporting section in the official Phasmophobia discord. After personally contacting multiple users who seem to have been experiencing this crashes and gathering information about the different computer specs I have narrowed it down to the well-known Unity crash on AMD GPUs.

This seems to be affecting mostly AMD graphics card users where the game will randomly crash right after loading any map that isn't the Tanglewood house or just experience a random crash a couple of minutes into the game for no reason whatsoever.

User Delacroix has found a fix for this problem. Cheers mate, thank you very much!

Try this at launch options, -force-feature-level-10-1

Possible fixes for crashes on Unity games with AMD GPUs

NOTE: All of these are fixes that have worked for different games running on the Unity game, not for this game that I know of, so try at your own risk, but there are no promises that any of these will work for you; the blackscreen freeze/crash is a constant crash on Unity games for users using AMD GPU's so these are workarounds that have worked for the same issue on different games 5




Possible Fix 1: Underclock or Disable Overlock of GPU
You must note that even when you have not manually overclocked the GPU, it may still be factory overclocked. Hence, you must Underclock the GPU. If you are using a software to overclock the GPU, disable the software and revert the settings. To Underclock the RAM, you can do it via the BIOS. A user that resolved the problem under clocked his 8GB RAM from 2000 MHz to 1600 MHz and it fixed the crashing with Unity error.

Possible Fix 2: Alter the Power Options
Multiple users have found a workaround for the issue on various games by changing the power options on Windows 10 or straight up modifying their GPU's power settings.
Setting the video card to consume less voltage on the Afterburner software seems to have worked for some AMD users.

Possible Fix 3: Disable full screen optimizations
Another workaround for some games running on the Unity engine seems to be disabling full screen optimizations directly to the .exe game file.
Locate Phasmophobia.exe on your drive, right click it, go to properties, and then compatibility, then check the box for Disable full screen optimizations, apply and run it.
NOTE: Personally all this did for me was getting my game stuck at the 90% loading screen, so to fix the issue I had to delete my game save file. Which I will add below.

Fixes for your game getting stuck at 90%:
1. Remove or replace your saveData.txt located in
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Kinetic Games\Phasmophobia
Note this will remove your progress, so contact a moderator for assistance with restoring it.
2. Delete everything in the LocalLow\Kinetic Games folder, then uninstall Phasmophobia, restart your computer, and reinstall. This will also remove your progress.
3. Close out of Steam and make sure you're running it in Administrator mode.

Here's a list of all the AMD GPU's currently facing the issue:

AMD Radeon HD 5700 Series*
AMD Radeon HD 6500 Series
AMD Radeon HD 6570*
AMD Radeon HD 6670
AMD Radeon HD 6700
AMD Radeon HD 7500*
AMD Radeon HD 7500M
AMD Radeon HD 7600M*
AMD Radeon R7 M360
* = indicates multiple reports on the same GPU



Hopefully this issue will be sorted out by the developer/s in the near future!

[Stoic Vennox]

Good compilation. Nice work. I'm hoping the dev will find a fix for this as I'm running on AMD Radeon 7500 HD as well.

[SodaPop]

Originally posted by Stoic Rising:

Good compilation. Nice work. I'm hoping the dev will find a fix for this as I'm running on AMD Radeon 7500 HD as well.

Hopefully, I went ahead and linked this post to the developer so he's aware of the issue now, so now we just have to wait for a workaround or a proper fix.

[Hauntedpunto]

What about us that we are having these issues with Nvidia GPUs?

[Deceptive Pastry]

I get it with Nvidia as well. It can happen on any map somewhere between every 5-15 rounds but it seems 2x as likely to happen on Asylum.

[Sapphire]

Works fine for me on R7 260X and FX-6300, it froze for like 10 seconds once in the van and that's it.

[SodaPop]

Originally posted by Hauntedpunto:

What about us that we are having these issues with Nvidia GPUs?

I've talked with users having issues with Nvidia GPUs and so far most of them have them every few games or not at all, unlike AMD users who are unable to play the game at all due to the crashing. I have also come across a couple of discussions with Nvidia GPU's claiming to have fixed the issue by disabling the Overclocking or disabling the Nvidia Overlay.
Unity has been known to have blackscreen crashes with AMD drivers, specially with older ones, which to me is exactly what is happening here since the audio still plays but the screen goes black and then forces a crash, clearly a texture or display issue going on, forcing the game to close itself. However I could be clueless and completely wrong with what I'm saying, and this could just be a wide issue affecting both Nvidia and AMD users.

[SodaPop]

Originally posted by Sapphire:

Works fine for me on R7 260X and FX-6300, it froze for like 10 seconds once in the van and that's it.

Newer AMD GPU's are not affected at all from what I've seen luckily.

[Sapphire]

Originally posted by SodaPop:

Originally posted by Sapphire:

Works fine for me on R7 260X and FX-6300, it froze for like 10 seconds once in the van and that's it.

Newer AMD GPU's are not affected at all from what I've seen luckily.

Well actually the game crashed once for me (I think it was when I changed voice recognition language?) and went into the match, couldn't hear anyone and after finishing the match it crashed in lobby. Next match I had a 10s freeze like I said before and that's it. I also was recording since it was a match with funny dudes lol

[SodaPop]

Originally posted by Sapphire:

Originally posted by SodaPop:

Newer AMD GPU's are not affected at all from what I've seen luckily.

Well actually the game crashed once for me (I think it was when I changed voice recognition language?) and went into the match, couldn't hear anyone and after finishing the match it crashed in lobby. Next match I had a 10s freeze like I said before and that's it. I also was recording since it was a match with funny dudes lol

Yeah it sounds like a complete different issue if you're being able to play the game at least, the game is clearly in an alpha state so random crashes from time to time are to be expected but this right here is a driver clashing with Unity problem not allowing us to even play the game.

[Sapphire]

Originally posted by SodaPop:

Originally posted by Sapphire:

Well actually the game crashed once for me (I think it was when I changed voice recognition language?) and went into the match, couldn't hear anyone and after finishing the match it crashed in lobby. Next match I had a 10s freeze like I said before and that's it. I also was recording since it was a match with funny dudes lol

Yeah it sounds like a complete different issue if you're being able to play the game at least, the game is clearly in an alpha state so random crashes from time to time are to be expected but this right here is a driver clashing with Unity problem not allowing us to even play the game.

I mean yeah that's early access, stuff like that can happen

[ShahrukGer]

i have an Nvidia GForce GTX 1060 and have the same problem. Is it the same Fix or is it there a difference?

[TimMer]

I have nvidia 1050TI. I still have game crashing. At the beginning of the game or at the end of the game

[SodaPop]

Originally posted by ShahrukGer:

i have an Nvidia GForce GTX 1060 and have the same problem. Is it the same Fix or is it there a difference?

Take what I say with a grain of salt since I don't have an Nvidia GPU, but I've seen discussions where players managed to fix the crashes by disabling the Nvidia Overlay or limiting FPS.

[MrDND14]

Thank you so much for this post! I have been kicking myself screaming wondering why the game has not been working! Have any of the possible fixes worked for anyone to run a game once in a while smoothly?

[Setari]

If the game gets stuck loading a map at 90% from the lobby, just wait. It might take up to 10 minutes but the game will load eventually.