Not a feedback, but help needed on frequent game crashes

Grim Dawn Bug Reporting
1

Good evening,

Should this post be placed in an incorrect sub-forum, mod team, please transfer it to the respective place. My post isn’t perhaps about a game issue, but an issue I face while attempting to play the game. Given no other sub-forum suits the topic, hence placing it here.

I have a Radeon 7800XT, I follow all the default settings prescribed by AMD Adrenaline, but off late [past few months], when I play Grim Dawn [mins or an hour or so into the game], this happens,

Scenario A: Monitor shuts down with the gaming running. I know it, because the speakers keep relaying the background music of the game. However, the monitor doesn’t turn back on. I eventually have to restart my machine through pressing the power button.
Scenario B: The computer completely switches off.

Every turn I return from these incidents, that occur while I’m playing GD, my machine doesn’t recognize my GPU. It only sees, what I believe, the default graphics of my CPU. I then have to uninstall AMD Adrenaline, then install from a local downloaded file. Only then, after another restart, does my machine return to normalcy.

Note that, I play very few games, and my only game besides D2R that has >1,500 hours of playtime is GD. The system crashing only happens with GD, and not with D2R, AOE, TQ2, or Plague Inc.

I am not expecting a solution here, though getting one would be super. Has anyone else faced this? If so, how have you managed it?

2

Possible Solution #1: Try to lower your graphic settings of Grim Dawn to lowest (in some cases “off”) and see, if the troubles persists. If so → #2
Possible Solution #2: Can Grim Dawn be played by your internal graphic card? If not → #3
Possible Solution #3: Buy new and replace your graphic card. The behaviour you are describing would make me think the card is at the end of its lifecycle.

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3

Thank you for your response, Sir_Mac. I’ve currently adjusted my desktop to use Integrated Graphics instead of my GPU, as the computer shutdown continues, sadly. Even a local engineer, sent by the store from where I purchased the assembled machine, couldn’t diagnose the issue as nothing happened in front of him!

He stress-tested the GPU and the PSU [MSI] and nothing adverse occurred. In fact, the pins are alright, there is absence of moisture, and the temperature spikes aren’t out of the ordinary.

I recently played the game, again, on the lowest setting with the aforementioned integrated graphic option, and though the game looked dull understandably, it ran comfortably for about 30 mins before I shut it down as I had to go and cook dinner.

Is it perhaps the GPU only, I wonder. If so, I’ll need to check the warranty timeline on that product line later tonight.

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4

IIRC, people found overclocking their cpu / gpu caused such issues.

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5

There could be another possible trouble or coeffcient factor. If I remeber correctly, Grim Dawn is processed only by one thread of the processor (thread #0), maybe this unbalanced, unequal “threading situation” is behind all this.

Maybe ask the local engineer to come again, and if you know how long you have to play Grim Dawn before the issue occurs, try to demonstrate it in front of him.

Purchasing new (or exchanging) the GPU should help. Or play it on the integrated graphic card, if the game has tolerable visual qualities.

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@The_Mess any insights on this particular one?

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7

…Frankly, I’m a bit bewildered, because this is weird as hell, and the GPU should not be lost by windows post reboot either, which suggests something’s going very odd with the GPU itself. Oh and powering off on it’s own is usually an overheating protection thing too.

Anyhow, best bet for OP at this point is to use Adrenaline to restrict Grim Dawn to 60fps, after using DDU to do a complete fresh reinstall and also factory reset the GPU. Why? Because sometimes issues happen with GPU drivers/firmware settings and also GD is a known good stressor of GPU’s that can reveal loads of issues with them and the set up they’re in.

And also might be an idea to log the GPU’s temperatures when playing any 3D intensive game or running stress tests.

For more help though, time for OP to hit up the AMD forums or the subreddit and get some help from those with the knowledge. Because ironically, despite being on team red for most of my PC life, I’ve got more knowledge about Nvidia issues due to AMD usually being much better, but also having less of an install base. Only real issue AMD had historically was a a QA issue with a specific resistor, never mind the usual physical issues with unsupported GPU’s damaging the PCB etc. Although I haven’t been keeping up with the full details sadly on AMD unfun :confused:

Plus Nvidia has this really annoying 3D clock stability issue still with the 200-2000 series GPU’s that will cause the driver to hard crash on any 3D app. Including browsers lawl. Nvidia never fixed it and blocked the better fix, which was a tiny over volt on the GPU for fuck knows what reason, leaving only downclocking affect GPU’s by 100 Hertz as the only option for a total fix. Though reducing settings and/or fps limiting could also help for one specific game. Like Grim Dawn for example, though the downclock frankly is the better option as it’s fire and forget and universal, while the impact to real world performance is only visible in quantitative testing, not gameplay.

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8

Thank you, everyone, for taking some of your time out and replying to this thread. Temperature-related issues were checked and ruled out. PSU also appears to be working alright. So far, I’ve resorted to playing at 31-40 FPS via the Integrated Graphics option for the game, just so I do a fresh run with a new toon before the expansion drops [3 hours from now, I’m late as-is].

The card is luckily under warranty. What is most unfortunate, and painful, is that the card’s box may have been misplaced or lost during a home shifting I’d done with my family around 10 months ago. If that is indeed the case, there goes my opportunity to get the card fixed or replaced by the team at Taiwan; is that a fair assumption, and if so, anyway to mitigate the situation?

In fact, GPU does seem to be the problem, considering that I’ve gamed for 2 whole days [almost] while being on the integrated graphics option and nothing adverse occurred.

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I do not know how to OC, iBugsy. I doubt that can be a cause here. Thank you for stopping by and helping, though.

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I would try to change the card for another one, if possible. I mean - going to the store with as much documents, proving the purchase and ask for another card. No money loss, no money return, just a new card.

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11

some cards come with a factory overclock,
on certain cards, for whatever reason, GD doesn’t like that, and the solution is then to underclock the card down a lil (100mhz?) from the factory oc

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12

You don’t need the box it came with, only the sale receipt/evidence and a box that’s safe to send it in, like say that of another GPU of a similar size :wink:

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13

The behavior you’re describing is very similar to the experience I’ve had trying to play the game today after the update landed. I use my PC all day and have played a lot of other games on it and haven’t experienced anything like this. I think it’s pretty unlikely we both have graphics cards that have decided to die when we booted up Grim Dawn. It’s much more likely that there is some weird interaction between our machines and Grim Dawn happening here that’s leading to the shutdowns/freezes.

I would recommend following the instructions in the pinned thread in this forum and post a DXDiag of your machine in this thread so if a dev sees it, they can compare across our cases and potentially find something in common.

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Thank you, The_Mess. I figured that out last night, and after it, I heaved a sigh of relief.

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15

Had the exact same issue a few years back. The cause was that my card was overclocked by the manufacturer. I had to underclock it a bit for GD and everything was solved. I used MSI Afterburner to do that.

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Please don’t return your card, it’s almost definitely not your card!

I was able to play for several hours last night without issues after experiencing very similar things to what you report here. When you mentioned lowering your graphical settings to minimum in the game, you also mentioned that you switched to your integrated graphics. But did you try playing on the lowest settings with your non-integrated card? In my case, I’m pretty sure there is some graphical setting in the new update that is interacting badly with my card and causing my machine to crash. I reset my graphical settings to their defaults and then bumped them up one by one over a multi-hour play session. So far it’s been stable with zero crashes. I suspect one of the settings I haven’t bumped up yet to be the culprit in my case.

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I appreciate your willingness to help, but in tech support there’s a certain Iron Rule you need to follow, namely to check all the symptoms against what you’ve encountered to see if they match. Because driver/hardware issues can look similar from a brief glance, but when you check the details it can become very apparent you’re dealing with different causes based on the symptoms.

Case in point, I had a BSoD yesterday hinting at GPU hardware fun, but I know for a fact Nvidia’s latest drivers are kinda shit and having updated in the hope they weren’t. So I know for a fact it was the drivers, fortunately they seems to be otherwise stable game wise, but I need to be careful when running youtube vids lawl. Wouldn’t mind tearing metaphorical strips of whoever decided to vibe code the drivers though, because it’s been a year+ of unneeded bullshit.

Anyhow, in this particularly case, the fact the GPU is lost by windows post reboot, hints to a much bigger issue than Grim Dawn settings. Now, possibly capping fps or reducing settings or even running in DX9 mode would help, but frankly it’s a bandaide on a what appears to be a bigger issue. One that also was present before Fangs of Asterkarn rolled out…

Also, this is an issue that probably needs real stress testing in Furmark etc to further illuminate it, because some of the synthetic tests can and will push GPU’s far harder than others.

And sorry if this is blunt, I was up all night on FoA release so my sleep patterns are FUBAR, I haven’t had a coffee yet and it’s nearly 3pm NZ time :upside_down_face: But mess by name, mess by nature I guess :stuck_out_tongue:

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If you had read what I wrote, you’d see that I also described my driver getting hosed after one of the early crashes. That happening does not strictly indicate your card is dying or that you need to RMA it.

Anyway, I said my piece to the person. It’s their perogative to RMA their card if that’s what they want to do. It’s almost certainly unnecessary though.

19

Thank you, all. I could finally play a little of the FoA expansion, and while I am irritatingly stuck at the level where I need to get the last Kurn Shrine cleansed while also attempting to help the 3 skalds, I have an update on the machine issue.

I took the suggestion given by The_Mess 4d ago [that I couldn’t understand early on, so Googled about it], and made the game work on the GPU but used Radeon’s Chill approach to cap the FPS at 60 to play. The game worked smooth for the few hours I played, however, there were,
i. Instances of a horizontal screen blur, like a 1-inch barrel that spans the screen’s whole width, that used to roll from the top to the bottom every now and then. Pardon, as I can’t explain this in a better manner currently.
ii. A 1-sec screen blackout that occurred every hour or so.
iii. Parts of the ground were black frames, as if they were missing. I read one of the other forum posts and upped my graphic settings to high for fixing it, and it worked.

While I now regret wanting to play the game w/o a GPU should I send it for checking or replacement [a 10-15 working day process], do you all still think that this is indeed a GPU issue? I understand the consensus is mixed, and I appreciate the folks who’ve taken time to give detailed replies per their work or personal experiences [who does that these days?]. Asking this rather silly question only as a gamer and lover of this game, as the selfish part of me wishes to play on, however it is going on now, and not wait a month to play it again. Stupid of me, I guess, but if this leads to the card getting cooked, then of course I need to be patient.