Intermittently during gameplay, I'm getting a crash or freeze where the screen goes a solid color with vertical lines. Audio keeps playing, either normal music continuing, or a loop. No response to Alt-Tab, Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Del or anything short of the reset or power button.

 

Not getting any crashes or artifacting in any other games or stress tests like Prime95, IBT, Furmark, 3DMark, Unigine Heaven, I have to assume this is not a hardware issue. Temperatures are also not an issue.

 

Hardware specs:

Core i5-3450

Asrock Z75 Pro3

2x4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 CL9

MSI Radeon R9 270

Corsair GS600

 

Running 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, and with Pillars installed on a 256GB Crucial MX100 (less than half full). Latest release GPU driver, AMD Catalyst 14.12.

 

I've attached an output log from the latest crash.

 

output_log.txt

Bump. Still getting these crashes from time to time.

More crashing. Changed to the Catalyst 15.4 beta driver, no discernible difference.

A few month back I bought an MSI Radeon R9 290x card and I had a lot of weird issues with it. I am on an i7 (Haswell chipset). I am now using a GTX 970 card and being quite happy.

 

But back on your issue...

 

If you are brave enough, you could try forcing a rendering mode for the Unity Engine.

 

Right click on Pillars -> Properties -> Set launch options

 

add -force-d3d11 parameter.

Keep in mind that it's not very officially supported...

 

There are also other parameters when looking inside the EXE. But I don't know what are these..

 

force-d3d9-ref  force-gles30    force-gles20    force-d3d11 force-opengl    force-d3d9  force-gfx-mt    force-gfx-st    force-gfx-direct

Edited April 19, 201510 yr by eLPuSHeR

The -force-d3d11 parameter seems to reduce or eliminate the crashing. Thanks for the tip.

 

The in-game map has some glitchy graphics, but I can live with that.

Glad to see it's working better for you.

 

Best regards.

Still does crash sometimes, just a little less often.

Overheating could be one cause - try installing MSI Afterburner and use it to graph your GPU temperatures. If they go above 80°C then the GPU needs to be better cooled (MSI Afterburner can handle this also, by letting you modify the fan profile so the fan(s) spin faster at set temperatures).

I'm already running MSI Afterburner, the card doesn't even reach 70C in any game I've tried.

Try running a DirectX diagnostic and post the results in your next post (see the MUST READ... thread for instructions on this).

It sounds like a GPU issue to me. What's the highest temp your GPU hits while playing PoE? Have you tried using OpenGL as the rendering API instead of DirectX? AFAIK, this is the easiest way to force OpenGL: http://sfx.thelazy.net/downloads/ (reshade + sweetfx, the topmost download. When it's installed, it'll force opengl rendering.)

...AFAIK, this is the easiest way to force OpenGL: http://sfx.thelazy.net/downloads/ (reshade + sweetfx, the topmost download...

Modifying the shortcut used to launch Pillars by adding the -force-opengl parameter would be quicker - see Unity3D Manual: Command line arguments for other options.

 

Temperatures seem unlikely to be the cause given the previous reply given - more system information (which the DirectX diagnostic should provide) is needed at this stage.

There's no replacement for knowing what the actual temperature is during operation, regardless of historical data. The OP's symptoms are classic GPU overheating or bad vRAM.

GPU temperatures are not an issue:

 

 

CPU temperatures are in the 40s.

 

DxDiag attached.

DxDiag.txt

What you could to is configure the host for a CTRL+SCRL_LCK+SCRL_LCK to generate a memory dump when it crashes. Then debug it. A !analyze -v using Windbg might be good enough, or even try whocrashed (bing it!)

 

- I'm a Microsoft employee, not available in all areas, thoughts my own, etc.

Your Realtek drivers are slightly on the old side (2012 vintage) so updating them might be worth doing. Aside from that, I'd suggest using MSI Afterburner to underclock your GPU to see if that makes a difference.