SOLVED - Hard crash after choosing a house / sorting hat

[Neikei]

I give up for now.

I have a Ryzen 9 3900X, 64 GB RAM, and a 7900 XTX - hardware should not be an issue.

The game always hard crashes after I choose a house. It won't load the save file, and when I load the autosave right before the sorting it works fine until I pick a house - then it hard crashes to desktop again.

Also: Everytime I load up the game it is "Preparing shaders ..." for 30 sek.

So far I:

update the AMD driver
disabled HAGS
raised my pagefile to 96GB on an NVME drive (the game is also running from an NVME)
deleted shader cache with disk cleanup
set all graphics settings to low and disabled FSR
deleted the SavedUserSettings

Any more ideas?

[Neikei]

Found a solution: As stupid as it sounds... verifying the game files.

Found the tip on Reddit. It had to verify twice but it eventually re-downloaded two files and now I got past the sorting ceremony ... albeit still in crappy resolution.

I will update this thread with results at max settings and also if I will run into other random crashes as most people do after the summer update.

[Neikei]

Well, I now played for 3 hours on max settings without a single crash. The only thing I didn't activate is FSR 2 because it looks nicer without. So frame generation might still be a culprit but at least for now I'm happy.

[Neikei]

Even with FSR 2 I didn't experience a single crash anymore. So AMD seems safer than NV for now