0.7.6 - Screen goes black. Have to Reboot

As the title suggests, Farthest Frontier crashes when I am playing it. It’s like GFX card disconnects and my monitor goes to sleep. I can hear the game volume for a minute or so, then stops. I’m attaching dxdiag info.
DxDiag.txt (101.1 KB)

Also here is the crashdump file from appdata/local/crashdump: Microsoft OneDrive - Access files anywhere. Create docs with free Office Online.

edit: I play a heavily modded Cities: Skylines for hours with no issues, so I don’t think it’s my CPU/GPU/PSU dying.

As long as the computer hasn’t hard-crashed (locked up/frozen) and it is still recognizing keyboard inputs you can get out of a black screen without having to do a hard shutdown.

  1. Shift + Ctrl + Esc is the keybind to call up Task Manager. Open it now.

  2. In Windows 11 you will go into settings and enable the Always on top option. On Windows 10 this setting can be accessed and enabled from the drop down context menus at the top of the application. Do so.

  1. The next time you get a black screen that you think you can’t escape from simply press Shift + Ctrl + Esc to call up Task Manager. The Always on top option enables it to override this blackscreen and access it, and thus be able to more safely shut the game down without needing to do a hard reboot/shutdown.

Thanks man, I’ll give this a go. It’s weird that Alt+TAB wasn’t working.

No prob. The persistent black screen issue has been a problem for some games (and GD) since Windows 10 I think. I don’t recall ever getting them in this fashion on any Windows prior to 10.

There are other workarounds that can also get you out of this issue but this one is by far the best option. A random poster on Steam dropped the hint about it some years ago and it’s worth its weight in gold, as they say.

As for why this is occurring to you, I dunno. Possibly a memory leak building up and and taking over all your RAM after so long? There are tools that can periodically flush your memory cache to prevent such an issue, if you manage to determine if the game is using all your available RAM prior to one of these black screens.

I’ll connect a second monitor up and do some testing.

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I am also on Win 11 and I would note that a week or so ago I had left GD running for a good while and when I came back to it and started playing I was noticing some issues so I checked in Windows Performance Monitor and was actually a bit surprised to discover that GD was gobbling up nearly all 16 gigs of my RAM.

I never saw GD do that before (back on Win10) but I went ahead and redownloaded a tool that I use when I’m running any games that may have memory leak problems.

http://www.pcwintech.com/cleanmem

As a test, could you try disabling V-Sync, ensuring that your super sampling is set to 100% and set your refresh rate to 60Hz? I’d be curious to see if that helps your issue.

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