Mouse Freezing

Grim Dawn General Discussion
1

Hello - sorry if this is somewhere else on the forum. I searched and didn’t find this specific thing. I just got a new computer with Win 11 and AMD Ryzen 12 physical core processor. I plalyed GD previously on a Win 10 computer with Intel processor – thousands of hours.

After downloading and installing the game in Steam I quickly noticed that my mouse would freeze in game. It would just all of a sudden stop taking any input – buttons won’t work, character won’t move – nothing. Keyboard inputs would work - so spacebar evade and the movement skill that I have mapped to 5. If I bring up the character using ‘C’ on the keyboard and then escape out that will typically free the mouse up. Then it behaves okay for awhile and then freezes again. Rinse. Repeat.

It seems to do most of the freezing in town after dialog interraction. Out in the world it happens typically after interraction with a chest or similar. Sometimes if the character stands in one place for a while it will freeze.

Over the past couple of days I have tried most everything the internet suggests:

  1. Update/verify drivers.
  2. Remove precision pointing on mouse
  3. Try my old mouse from my old computer
  4. Change USB port for mouse
  5. Run GD repair utility
  6. Edit options.txt file for maxResourceThreads to match number of physical cores on processor.
  7. Run GD in windowed mode - borderless and with border.
  8. Run GD at a lower resolution
  9. Run GD in previous version of windows compatibility mode
  10. Run GD with full screen optimization turned off
  11. Delete/readd mouse driver
  12. Verify graphics card driver
  13. Steam and GD cloud saves are off
  14. Tried turning off Steam overlay - no difference
    GDLogSep9.txt (13.6 KB)

None of this worked. I am at a complete loss what this could be. The mouse works fine in everything else on the computer. I have no other games installed on this new computer because I pretty much play GD exclusively. So I don’t know if this situation is occurring with other similar games on my computer. I am really hoping that someone has experienced something similar and that there is a setting somewhere that will make this disappear. It doesn’t make the game entirely unplayable but it is a definite annoyance. Thanks.

I have attached the latest log file – maybe something there is meaningful to someone. I don’t know what it means – looks kind of like rainbow filter tag type stuff. I do have rainbow filter but that is the only utility I am running – no mods.

2

I see you updated your drivers, but did you verify the game files? Also do you have a game controller of any kind plugged in? If so, try unplugging that.

3

Thanks for responding. I have verified the game files – twice. No game controller.

4

Additional to the above I have just uninstalled and reinstalled the game. No impact. Mouse still freezes as described in op.

Log from attempt after reinstalling game if this is even germane.

GDLogSep10.txt (13.6 KB)

5

Did you ever fix your issue? I was just passing by and thought perhaps it can be related to power settings in Windows. Just a wild guess - I don’t know. OK bye.

6

No. Not fixed. Sometimes the problem is much worse and other times it isn’t. But it is always there. I can pretty much predict when the mouse freezes — out in the world it is much more likely to occur when I pick something up. Auto-pickup items don’t have an impact but clicking or using hot key to pick something up will almost always freeze the mouse afterwards. Clicking ‘I’ or ‘C’ on the keyboard then immediately getting out will generally free the mouse up – at least briefly.

What do you recommend for Windows power settings? I have actually gone into task manager while GD was running to tell the computer to use only 1 processor core thinking that was the issue. Didn’t work - and the graphics quality diminished noticibly – so doing that DID have an impact. I also spoke with technical support where I bought the computer - the guy suggested using an older version of the Nvidia driver. But that requires booting into safe mode and I ran into a brick wall trying to do that. So I have been suffering through it. My great hope is that Nvidia has some sort of driver problem and that it’ll get fixed at some point. Looks like they put out driver updates pretty frequently.

My other hope is there is something that can be done from a GD options.txt setting. I was also thinking about using WASD movement if and when that is available – but that probably won’t work because the mouse buttons will still freeze if this doesn’t get resolved in the mean time.

7

There is a setting called ‘USB selective suspend’ in ‘advanced settings’ in ‘power options’. Disabling this may help but it is kinda hit or miss.
I don’t know about W11 but in Windows 10 it would be found at: Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings, then click advanced power settings /USB settings /USB selective suspend setting (enable to disable).

Also in Device manager / Mice and pointing devices / right click ‘mouse name’ /Power management / uncheck allow computer to turn off this device to save power.

This is Windows 10 you might to search for the right path for W11 like I said earlier but them settings must be there some where.

Also consider if you’re using mouse keyboard software that that might be an issue as well.

Ok, bye.

8

I found the USB selective suspend in Win 11 - similar location. Disabled – still hit and miss like you said because it still freezes but maybe not so much? Don’t want to get ahead of myself because I have seen this behavior before - did the entirety of Arkhovian undercity without a single freeze. But then did the Pine Barren quests and literally had dozens of freezes – almost unplayable. Just did the Fort Ikon armory/Black Legion/Loghorrean quests after disabling USB selective suspend and maybe had 10 freezes altogether in those quests. That is livable. Of course never having it happen at all would be optimal. Appreciate the suggestions sir.

9

I don’t want to jinx myself but I found something that seems to work – not 100% though but the mouse freezes much less now. Turns out Nvidia has 2 kinds of drivers – Game Ready driver and Studio driver for GPU. I of course was working with Game Ready driver. I went ahead and switched to Studio driver because I was at my wit’s end with the freezing. And this other driver reduced the freezing by about 90% over the past couple of days – so much better. I am curious if anyone else has had similar issue with Nvidia drivers. Might only be a coincidence too – not a clue at this point. Hoping that some future driver update eliminates the issue altogether.

10

Okay, you win the weird mouse issue crown. Solved mine finally by finding out my issue was the left ctrl key >_<

Anyhow, my suggestions for you is this:

  • Try running the game in admin mode, it is more crash prone though in prior testing and you have to use a shortcut on you desktop because steam stops admin mode from working for some reason :upside_down_face:

  • As per usual with Grim Dawn, it always pays to turn your antivirus file shields off, because it will eventually crash the game and given how weird this is, this might even solve it.

  • Check windows event logs, because if this is as esoteric as it suggests it might be, it may very well some USB I/O fuckery at play. Usually that stuff runs smoothly, as MS and the USB standards people put a lot of work into plug and play compatibility. But as always with computers, what can go wrong, may possibly go wrong, no matter how unlikely it.

  • Also, try a different keyboard and uninstall and/or disable via device manager any mice associated with it. Because when I was mucking around with my mouse left/right not working, I noticed lazy keyboard makers use emulated mice

  • And as for Nvidia’s side of things, use DDU to uninstall the drivers and grab the December release and install that, if you have a 4000 or older card that is. Because they completely fucked up the drivers released along side the 5000 series and, last I knew, that resulted in degraded performance in older games. Along with weirdly making OpenGL games run far worse. So far the December drivers have performed fine and not stopped never games from running. Yet.

If the Dec driver release solves this I wont be entirely surprised, mainly pissed over Nvidia keep pushing drivers with major issues. If you do have a 5000 series one though, you have my eternal pity for buy the biggest waste of sand Nvidia’s ever released.

11

Thanks for the suggestions.

  1. Tried admin mode - no impact. In general it freezes much more in town - trying to experiment and see what in general seems to impact the freezing. In the world it likes to freeze when I pick up something (not autopickup items) especially if I use the pickup hot key - clicking with mouse generally is better. Also in the world I have learned not to use the movement ability. Spacebar evade is okay but hotkey movement ability (in this case the Bysmiel leap) almost always causes it to freeze. Strangely enough when it freezes a combination of spacebar evade then hotkey leap will usually unfreeze it. If not, then going into character menu then esc out always unfreezes it – I have to hit esc twice because the cursor always changes to the target shape when the mouse freezes… esc 1 chances the cursor back to finger pointing shape, esc 2 gets rid of the character menu. Then mouse is okay. Until the next freeze of course.
  2. I don’t use antivirus - just the intrinsic windows 11 thing. Antivirus (McAfee and Norton) only ever caused me problems on my old computer. Trying without on this new one.
  3. Nothing in event logs from recent days including just now when I had a ton of freezes.
  4. Keyboard mouse associations? Sorry for my ignorance but how can I tell if that is what is happening? Each device is plugged into its own USB port on back of computer. But in device manager under ‘mice and other pointing devices’ there are 2 entries for ‘HID compliant mouse’ (?) and under ‘keyboards’ there are 4 entries for ‘HID keyboard device’ (??). I assure you that I have one and only one mouse and one and only one keyboard so that seems kind of strange.
  5. Nvidia driver - I spoke with support from the vendor where I purchased the computer and they suggested the same exact thing - use DDU to uninstall driver and load in an older driver from July of this year. But they insisted that I do all of that in safe mode on my computer. I tried that and failed because the computer didn’t recognize the unlock password in safe mode and it wouldn’t allow me to go to internet (microsoft) to unlock the computer – so that was a brick wall.
  6. Unfortunately I have Nvidia Geforce RTX 5090 so apparently a waste of sand. I guess I am curious why it is a waste of silicon?.

I got this computer mainly because my old computer (which runs GD fine) is Win 10 and I have had it for 5 years. I play GD almost exclusively and the only issue I ever had with the older computer is on some SR shards with lots of enemies the video would slow way down into a kind of strobe light mode. So I wanted this new computer to be able to handle that particular situation. Old GPU was an Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 super.

12

Right, that’s a lot to work through. I’ll address the rest once I’m caffeinated.

1 thing though, you don’t need to use safe mode to install a driver, no idea why anyone would ever say that if they had the slightest tech knowledge. But it’s fine to install stuff outside of safe mode. Always has been expect for some very niche stuff or windows install damage/dealing with certain malware. As for not being able to access safe mode, MS likely did something stupid, you’ll need to hit google for the solution, since I only have win 10 and I am not shifting from it if I can help it.

And on the 5090 being a waste of sand, it basically has at best a 5% uplift over the 4090 in terms of raw rasterisation and RT performance. But costs you more and frame generation produces visual artifacts on top because it’s not ready for prime time in any bloody way. And Nvidia screwed up the drivers on top. All because riding the LLM bubble into the ground is far more important to them.

13

Bah, whelp, at least that’s one thing we know isn’t an issue, as that rules out windows file and folder permission issues.

Windows Defender still counts, and I’ve had it crash GD when I’ve forgotten to turn it off while doing multiple SR runs. But yeah, McAfee/Norton are utterly horrible and should be banned for crimes against computing. Fortunately MS recognised that they could do something good and gave us Windows Defender.

Anyhow, try running GD with WD’s active file shield off.

That’s some good news actually, as this (mostly) rules out some really, deeply annoyingly esoteric IRQ stuff. As on very, very, very rare occasions USB PnP can break and you’ll get errors showing up in the windows log. Which USB’s whole reason for creation was to avoid such utter bs :stuck_out_tongue:

Now as for the keyboard stuff - sometimes to provide other features, keyboard makers will use an emulated mouse. It’s lazy, because modern windows allows keyboards to do that stuff anyhow, but sometimes it can create conflicts it seems. Didn’t drill into that since I found even if I used a SS mouse I still had L/R fail to work on the mouse. All because I was hitting left Crtl accidentality :upside_down_face:

Right, don’t suppose you have the old GPU? Because that would allow for some useful A/B testing to rule out the GPU. Also you could sell the 5090 and get a 4090 then :stuck_out_tongue:

Otherwise follow my previous advice, I’d also recommend trying each older driver, because as there is a difference between the Studio and Game drivers with this issue there may very well be a solution. Or at least a confirmation the drivers are at fault for some bizarre fucking reason. Seriously, if it is the drivers (how I know not) I’m going to be even more annoyed with Nvidia, because this is yet another fuck up by them, on top of the general driver state at present and a never fixed stability issue in 200-1000 series cards that caused the driver to crash hard.

Oh and now there’s a coffee in me, a thought occurs. Don’t suppose you’ve got a XBox 360+ or PS5 controller on hand? Otherwise they’re bloody cheap 2nd hand vis the Xbox ones and GD is fully set up to use controllers, provided you use your brain of course [insert 'Mess’s grumblings about stupid controllers-don’t-work GD reviews here]. Though I don’t use a controller because I oft make builds that use the whole skill bar… But it may help narrow this down further.

And finally, thanks, nice to deal with some who’s actively engaged in solving their issue :slight_smile: Instead of blaming everyone else for it and expecting the devs to magically fix it for them.

But of course I must also suggest further sources of help, because an age old source of windows associated help for me as been the WindowsSeven forum and it’s sibling:

Seriously, before the rise of reddit these were the go to places, but google buries results from these forums these days. So most people wont find them unless they go looking or someone tells them. Anyhow, place is full of people who have mountains of knowledge on weird windows issues and they may be able to provide better help than I can.

Also, finally looking at google results vis reddit for mouse freezing up and Oh Voy, does it happen a lot. Though one thing that’s turning up highly ranked is that the control software for the mouse is at fault. So what mouse are you using and what software have you installed for it? And if so, have you tried uninstalling it?

Because all modern mice store their settings on the mouse and so you only need the software for changing things or updating drivers/firmware. And in the case of some of them (hello Corsair, ASUS) they’re bloatware that can and will cause issues.

Also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/10e0t9q/comment/lwey14h/ - Namely re-seat your monitor cables, because that can also be a cause :upside_down_face:

Plus:
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/qwo4fr/comment/hl4lg04/ - Those steps should reset all USB IRQ assignations, and doing so would rule out IRQ level issues even more than previous stuff you’ve done. And doesn’t involve spending any money either.

Lastly, the only other way to test this would be a different motherboard, because this could be some truly weird I/O issue at the motherboard level that windows can’t detect. But I’d file that under “final steps to take”.

14

I will try with windows defender turned off. I had a rotten time attempting in admin mode - for some reason the freezing was much more there – go figure. I did several farming runs yesterday after the admin mode attempt and it was pretty well behaved for the most part. I did do a GPU driver reset after the admin mode test – windows-ctr-shift-b. Again in town is where the freezing is more prevalent but it can happen in the world mostly in circumstances I already described. The longer I play the more the chance of freezing so it appears to correlate with the heating/taxation on the system.

I do in fact have an xbox controller. Never tried GD using a controller. Might be interesting but I am fearful that controller might limit the kind of characters that are playable because I like to use a lot of keyboard skills – not quite piano build but curious how it would work with controller. Again — never even tried.

I still have the ‘old’ computer. I kept it for my wife to use. If worse comes to worse I can use that computer for GD if this mouse issue doesn’t get resolved. I guess I would have to be content with the occasional deep SR strobe effect that I am convinced is due to the old GPU. That would make me feel kind of foolish buying this new computer with capabilities that I thought would allow for smoother running of this game in computer taxing situations.

Are you suggesting physically moving the GPU from ‘old’ to ‘new’ computer? Don’t know if I want to tackle something like that. My old computer was built by my son (at 14 years old). This new one was pre built because I didn’t want to mess with all of that. I am kind of a two left thumbs technical capability. Suffice to say that everything worked okay on old computer except strobe effect (if that can even be considered a problem because it happened so extremely rarely).

I tried my ‘old’ mouse on the new computer and it froze as well. The ‘old’ mouse is a Redragon mouse – probably basic because I bought a mouse/keyboard combination at the time (2020) for like 40 dollars. The ‘new’ mouse is Razer Basilisk v3. In both cases I am using the basic windows mouse driver. Haven’t tried downloading driver from Razer. Maybe I will try that today if I run into bad freezing. Like I said before, it was pretty playable all day yesterday with freezes definitely occurring but rare and sporadic.

The keyboard driver(s) are the basic MS windows intrinsic drivers (like the mice). The keyboard is Corsair K70 RGB Core Mechanical Gaming Keyboard. No driver downloaded from Corsair site. Haven’t really had problems with keyboard. You said something about emulated mouse in keyboard. Not quite sure what to look for regarding that. Internet search explained to me why there might be several ‘drivers’ in device manager for a single device (mouse or keyboard). Related to additional functionality or similar. I actually wiped out the drivers last week for the mouse and keyboard with my 2 left thumbs and had to lean on the computer power button to shut the thing down. When it restarted the drivers (multiple for each device) happily loaded back in.

My gratitude to you for your valuable suggestions. Thanks so much.

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15

I just tried with windows defender off. Didn’t work. I put defender back on and tried and it was definitely better. ???.

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16

I remember a setting in W11 that could cause similar issues. Have you tried disabling “Scroll inactive windows when hovering over them”? I also had these issues when I had a bluetooth mouse. Switching to wired was the only fix for me.

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17

Thanks for suggestion – will try. I actually have a wired mouse. Some more detail: the mouse doesn’t entirely freeze – it is just that the buttons completely stop registering. The pointer still works and it even accurately registers in the game because when the buttons don’t work at all (in town for example) I can move the pointer around and the game tells me what/who the mouse is hovering over. Sometimes (usually) the pointer itself changes shape to be the target shape. I can do keyboard commands such as evade (spacebar) and movement ability which is mapped to a keyboard key. Sometimes that stuff even will unfreeze the mouse buttons – just sometimes as explained previously. Going to C character menu then ESC back out is guaranteed to free the mouse buttons.

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18

Right, you didn’t realise it when you posted this, but you just provided a key for dealing with this :wink: Because I just worked out something due to the claim about potentially overheating and while Nvidia’s made it more annoying to do, it’s still a lot easier than you’d think :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyhow, open up the Nvidia app, not Nvidia Control Panel, look for Grim Dawn, click on it and scroll down to Driver Settings. You’ll see an option to set max frame rates and you can click on that to set a frame limit for GD only. Set this to 60fps and try out the game.

Also, might be an idea to look at GPU temperatures when FPS limit is off, because that will tell us more about what might be going on. Might also point to issues with air supply in the case. Which is partly why my case is currently open :upside_down_face: Because a front fan died and worsened ADHD + depression = I’m a dysfunctional mess. Who still needs to also install the new fans, and a 8TB HDD…

Now as for swapping out the GPU’s, truth is it’s still pretty easy to do, you just need a flat head screwdriver to pressed the lever, because modern GPU’s are so damn huge getting a finger in is “fun”. Main issue though with Nvidia ones is the power connectors, because the 12V is “temperamental” and must be fully seated and given some slack. Which in retrospect I should have thought of yesterday, because it does present a barrier if you’re not used to messing around with PC guts. My apologies for that.

Anyhow, assuming the FPS limit works, swapping them out isn’t needed. However, in saying this, it’s worth learning how to do it yourself, because it’s the easiest way to dust-bust a GPU as those thin heatsink fins are massive dust magnets. Also allows you to be more comfortable with generally working with your own PC, which a) saves you money and b) doesn’t mean you have to ask your son etc to help :stuck_out_tongue:

Lastly, thanks! It’s lovely to work with someone like you, because usually tech support is a nightmare of grumpy users who expect you to magically fix their PC and refuse sometimes to recognise the problem is on their end.

[Insert more tales from the trenches here about tech support horror here]

Right then, I’ll cya tomorrow and hopefully this works.

19

Okay I tried both disabling ‘scroll inactive windows’ option and the 60 fps option in Nvidia app. Still had the buttons freeze. I don’t really care about the scroll inactive windows so I will just leave that disabled. Before I go into Nvidia app and change the frame limit back to presumably unlimited I am curious what I gain/lose by having that value limited. The one thing I noticed with the 60 fps is that sometimes when I land on a rift gate there is a delay before the totems in range show up. But maybe that is my eyes and that is the way it always is.

The freezing wasn’t really bad at all with these options – maybe the same as yesterday at least early in a given session. I didn’t really try long enough to heat things up in the computer this time so I don’t know if the 60 fps limit would improve that. That is part of the reason I will leave it like that for now until I hear otherwise from you (thanks by the way for all of these suggestions – so many different settings and options is tremendously complicated in my mind).

There is a definite pattern to the buttons freezing – as mentioned in town seems to be the worst. Especially when the computer is taxed/long into a playing session – at least seemingly. In the world it happens mostly when I do the movement ability (not evade) and even there it happens more in certain areas than others. I get freezes far more often in the Asterkarn Valley riftgate area when farming the Savage Totem that is there. This could be because my farming routine has that area as last in a given session so it could be back to computer taxation issue. But I am not seeing any increase in the area right before that – certainly this is not scientific.

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20

Hey, sorry, forgot to fully subscribe to this thread so missed your post.

Anyhow, bollocks, I was hoping that might have helped. Of course, my brain’s come up with yet another thing to try.

Namely it’s time to use windows task manager, press Alt Crtl Del and go to the details tab and start Grim Dawn. Once it’s loaded, alt tab out and sort details by memory or working set and right click on grimdawn.exe and set it’s priority to high and once you’ve done that click on set affinity and move Grim Dawn off cores 0 and 1. And then test.

Might also be an idea to kill any programs that you don’t need.

What this does is ensure Grim Dawn has priority access to memory/CPU and also avoids some of the still present windows CPU core scheduling fun that’s been an issue ever since multiple core CPU’s emerged. This probably wont solve it fully, as I suspect it’s very much a GPU driver issue, but in theory it should help, perhaps enough this becomes a minor annoyance instead of the current regular game stopper.

Oh and now that I finally hunted down what CPU you choose, bloody good choice my good sir and you’ll still likely be using it in 8+ years :stuck_out_tongue: Alas I only have a mere AMD Ryzen 3800, but I plan to get a 5800X3D next year, somehow. But being stuck on welfare it’ll do.

And thanks, this stuff takes time to learn about :slight_smile: Been mucking around with windows stuff and game settings etc since ~2000 when my dad brought me a computer. With one big electrical short in the intervening decades lawl plus a small pile of dead hardware. But if no one shows you about it you’re not going to learn or gain the confidence to deal with this stuff on your own. Thus I’m happy to help, the best I can.

Though I’d prefer to have your computer in front of me, then I can do all sorts of more detailed things stress testing it and getting into the more esoteric gubbins chasing this issue with autistic hyperfocus :stuck_out_tongue:

Right, back to the dank XCOM:EW - The Long War mines, I art badly hooked on it’s grognard hardness.