sleepytime

Cdiaz, Here's a sampling of what Afterburner shows for GPU power usage in a few different scenarios that might help you nail down the issue: Desktop - 13% Idle Champions open - 14% Idle Champions and Hearthstone open - 37% PoE II at Title Screen - 34% PoE II at Grand Promenade - 39-40% PoE II at Forgotten Mausoleum (one of the zones that used to cause a restart) - 89-113% I've posted about this issue before, but didn't really have much to contribute other than the fact that certain animations (such as the braziers in the Forgotten Mausoleum) caused this issue to occur on my system. I was able to circumvent the issue entirely by putting my video card on a dedicated, separate PSU from the rest of my system, but that's really not a great workaround. I've been trying to help others with the same issue and someone on Steam recently saw a Reddit post that seemed to narrow down the exact cause: "There was a community mod post in the reddit sub section yesterday, did you see it sleepy ? Trying to find it again now. Basically the jist was about their being a issue comprising of a combination of the unity engine bug and optimization issues in the game renderer that is causing a limitless ceiling in certain render scenarios. It mentioned lighting and animations, sounded similar to your issue." Hope this helps, Cdiaz. moragb, what video card do you have? I've never done it before, but it may be possible to limit your GPU power consumption through a program such as Afterburner. That may or may not resolve your issue. I never got around to trying it with my other PSU before I found a fix that works for me. Running the game in windowed mode (as small as possible and still playable) with all graphics options unchecked was a "good enough" workaround until I put my GPU on a dedicated PSU. It still runs incredibly hot in certain zones (72-73C), but it never crashes and never hits a temperature that I would call unsafe. Another video card I tried got to 82C before I killed PoE II.

I resolved the issue by putting my video card on a completely independent 1000w PSU (my system PSU is 850w). Whatever is going on in that particular zone (Forgotten Mausoleum) cause immense strain on my video card. I tried a 1080ti Blower Edition that reached 84C idling in that room before I closed PoE II. My current video card, which has better cooling, hit 71C while idling. Compared to the 54-58C temps I usually experience while playing the game, this tells me that some of the animations in that room are putting some strange strain on my video card. Hope this info helps the devs and anyone else facing this issue.

I'm currently experiencing an issue in which my computer will perform a hard reboot (no warning messages, just straight to the BIOS splash screen) in certain zones. The two in particular that are 100% reproducible are in the Forgotten Masoleum and the zone the animancers send you. I've also had it happen in Cannon Rampart. The issue seems to have to do with certain animations. One user in the forums mentioned this happening with certain braziers. I've seen similar behavior from those braziers as well as certain explosions. The current workaround that seems to work decently well is turning all graphics options off and selecting a windowed mode that is less than the native resolution than the monitor. I'd love to help provide crash and error files, but nothing is logged when the hard resets occur.

Hi Beohel, I've experienced the exact same behavior and read in another thread that a user narrow this down to the braziers in the room causing issues. I've kept a save in this exact zone to test out different fixes, as I typically see a crash within 1-2 seconds of loading screen completion. I was able to make this room playable by turning all of my graphics options off and choosing to run the game in windowed mode at a resolution less than my native monitor resolution. This seemed be an adequate workaround, however, certain explosion animations still cause me to experience a hard system reset. Hope this helps you regain playability in a limited manner until a fix can be released.

Hi Arsene, So glad to hear the patch is working well for you! To elaborate on the hard reset, it's literally as if I were to pull the power cord out of my PSU, plug it back in, and power on my computer. I play almost every game exclusively in windowed mode (windowed fullscreen, to be more accurate) and have been doing the majority of my troubleshooting in windowed mode. Given your recent success, I'll give fullscreen another whirl. Although I've found some success with specific settings, I have not found a way to make the game avoid hard resets entirely. To be perfectly honest, it may be somewhat out of my control. I have access to several RX 580 and 1080ti video cards from a local mining farm that I can trade, but that will only resolve my issue if the animation issue with brazier/explosions is causing an issue with my very particular video card. I've read of other players experiencing the same behavior on other video cards from AMD. It's frustrating because, at this point, I'd love to blame a piece of my hardware for being faulty or failing. That would give me something to replace and put a solution into effect. Unfortunately, multiple benchmark and stress tests as well as my own tests haven't given me any sort of indication that there's anything wrong with my hardware. In fact, here's a screenshot of my Task Manager when playing PoE II in a zone with no issues on the highest graphical settings while I play Witcher 3 at the same time:

I think the other user was correct about the braziers. I've been playing along fine in a smaller windowed mode until a certain area with lots of unstable gunpowder barrels. The moment I popped the barrels and an explosion resulted in a hard reset.

That's good info, Nitrium. In another thread, someone suggested that this was happening when braziers were on the screen. He specifically mentioned a zone that was troublesome for me and how he moved the camera out of line of sight of the braziers to solve the issue. Glad the smaller windowed mode trick works for you, but I thought I'd share some additional information.

Same here! I never thought the braziers to be the source of the problem. I'd hate to tell you how much I spent troubleshooting, reinstalling my OS, etc. I happened to work around the issue by setting my graphics settings to a windowed mode lower than my maximum resolution and turning all graphics options off. Glad to hear you found the root cause, and here's to hoping Oblivion will implement a fix.

Gotcha. Thanks for the info, Arsene. Hopefully the answers and feedback we've provided can lead to a fix in the future.

I agree, FlyingFox. I'm curious, though. Does this workaround fix your problem as well? Also, FlyingFox and Zemlynin, to satisfy another curiosity, is PoE II installed on your primary Windows partition? For what it's worth, here's a link to my crashes: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ihsq2br0i99buft/2018-05-12_161558.zip?dl=0. I highly doubt any of them contain data that's directly pertinent to the hard restart, as I don't think there's time to write any sort of crash output. Also, the crash folders that were created line up almost perfectly with crashes I experienced on zone change. None of those caused a hard restart of my computer.

Right, thedarkbird. That could play a factor in the crashes/restarts, but I doubt it's the whole or root cause. Just to continue testing the stability of the workaround that worked for me, I left PoE II open all night in the zone that has historically caused me issues and did some dailies this morning in ESO while PoE II was still running I'm not a huge fan of non-fullscreen windowed mode, but at least it seems to work for now.

Hi FlyingFox, This issue sounds very similar to one I've been experiencing. I reinstalled my OS, performed a number of troubleshooting steps, and found that nothing seemed to work. However, the fix below is what ultimately worked for me (I posted it on Steam as well). Fingers crossed that it works for you. Note that even when switching the graphics options to low you may still have to manually un-check some of the options. Final resolution: running the game with graphics options turned to low, vsync turned off, max frame rate capped at 60, and windowed mode at 1280x720 @60Hz seems to make the game stable in zones that historically caused system restarts. I've played through an encounter a few times in a questionable zone just to verify this workaround. Hopefully this will be resolved in a future patch, but I'm happy to have a working fix for now.

All right, as my final test for the night, I went ahead and played through the same fight and zone on windowed 1280x720 @ 60Hz, low graphic options, and vsync turned off just to satisfy my curiosity and help prove that my initial experience wasn't a fluke. Running the game at windowed 1280x720 @ 60Hz with the graphics on high and vsync both on and off caused a system restart. The current setup seems to be fairly stable as I've been alt-tabbed with the game running and no issues. I also had a YouTube video playing while I went through the encounter for added strain on my system, but it didn't seem to have an impact. As I write this, the game is still running and in one of the zones that's caused me issues. For what it's worth, here are my specs: CPU - Intel i7-4790K (was overclocked before troubleshooting this issue) RAM - 16GB DDR3 GPU - NVidia 1080ti 11GB OS - Windows 10 (64-bit) Pro, 1803 Drive - 2x1TB Samsung 850 Pro Drives in RAID-0 Hopefully this helps anyone else facing this issue. Again, I'm happy to provide any necessary information and save files to the devs to help isolate the issue, but at least I've found a workaround until a fix is developed.

Okay, as I suspected, the game crashed almost instantly after setting my resolution back to windows 1920x1080 @ 60Hz and loading my save in a zone that has always caused problems. This leads me to believe that updating my video card drivers and reverting to the live version of PoE II did not help with game stability. It appears that changing the resolution to something outside of my max resolution for the monitor has resulted in more stability. My next test is to crank my graphic options back up to high and test the zone at windowed 1280x720 @ 60Hz. If that proves to be stable, my guess is that there's some sort of weird issue with certain zones/game flags/characters and my system.

All right, so I'm feeling less defeated than yesterday, and I'm back to troubleshooting this problem further. I made the following changes and the zone that used to continually crash on me seems to be stable (I got through a long fight in the zone and just ran around for a few minutes before and after the fight): Updated video card drivers to the latest version (had been running the version prior to troubleshoot, but I don't think this is significant and doesn't affect your situation as you use an ATI card) Reverted from the beta patches to the live version of the game (again, doesn't affect your situation) Ran the game with low graphics options, vsync off, MSAA set to 4, frame rate max at 60, and resolution set to windowed and 1280x720 @ 60Hz (this may be the big change) Just to ensure that the first two changes aren't significantly affecting the stability of the zone on my system, I'm going to set my resolution back to windowed 1920x1080 @ 60Hz and see if my system restarts. If so, I'll probably test more resolutions as well as bumping the graphics quality options back up. I'm not sure why the above workaround seems to be working given that my system handles much more demanding games without any issues, but if it at least buys me some playability until a fix is released, I'll be happy.