Crashing, lack of good tech info

Out of all the games i have played, ff seems to be the only one where if you have a problem the only answers I could find was reinstalling the whole game or nothing at all.

also, why does it crash in the most random of places? was going good, then after leaving a random cutscene into a fight...crash.

PS:I have no hate for this game, i love it a ton. but its annoying trying to play when your know your pc can play games like ff (played a lot of graphic intensive games no problem). but this is the only one that crashes on me randomly and has no answers.

any kind of error message might be helpful

i wish i could, but it doesnt give me one. it crashes/force closes loading from cutscene to scenerio in a feast of lies.

went to see if i could see anything on event viewer, nothing. so i was like ok lets see if i have event veiwer up when it crashes if anything pops up. Cutscene plays....and scenerio loads and goes on like normal...no crash.

I dont understand this game at all.

What you can try is logging out, going to Documents\My Games\Final Fantasy XIV - A Realm Reborn and moving the FFXIV_CHR folder to your desktop. That will back it up and a new one will be created, resetting your HUD, your hotbars and all of your settings. It's possible one of these files is corrupt and crashing the game. You can restore it by dragging the folder back from the desktop.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

What you can try is logging out, going to Documents\My Games\Final Fantasy XIV - A Realm Reborn and moving the FFXIV_CHR folder to your desktop. That will back it up and a new one will be created, resetting your HUD, your hotbars and all of your settings. It's possible one of these files is corrupt and crashing the game. You can restore it by dragging the folder back from the desktop.

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Hey, would this mean that if I create a new character, and the game generates a new folder for it, there should not be any corrupt new file in there, and the game won't crash any longer when I play that new character? I'm asking because I have the same problem the OP is describing, and haven't been able to figure out what is wrong with my installation either.

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Originally Posted by Brennus

Hey, would this mean that if I create a new character, and the game generates a new folder for it, there should not be any corrupt new file in there, and the game won't crash any longer when I play that new character? I'm asking because I have the same problem the OP is describing, and haven't been able to figure out what is wrong with my installation either.

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Yes, that would cause new files to be created and it frequently explains why a crash happens on one character but not others.

Try playing with the graphics settings, lower them see if you still crash. if not try installing the game on a different hard drive. Alternatively it could be a graphics card driver update, makes sure your video card drivers are updated.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Yes, that would cause new files to be created and it frequently explains why a crash happens on one character but not others.

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Fantastic. I'm going to try this out tonight, thanks for the tip.

Now - how would I go about restoring my settings on the first character? Do I copy and paste in each individual old (possibly corrupt) setting file, from the backup folder to the new one? It would be nice not to lose all UI settings for example, I'm sure we all work hard to get them just the way we want, it'd be regrettable to have to redo the whole thing over again.

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Originally Posted by Brennus

Fantastic. I'm going to try this out tonight, thanks for the tip.

Now - how would I go about restoring my settings on the first character? Do I copy and paste in each individual old (possibly corrupt) setting file, from the backup folder to the new one? It would be nice not to lose all UI settings for example, I'm sure we all work hard to get them just the way we want, it'd be regrettable to have to redo the whole thing over again.

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Yes, that's what I would do. When the crash starts happening then you have identified the one responsible.

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Originally Posted by Guntank81

Try playing with the graphics settings, lower them see if you still crash. if not try installing the game on a different hard drive. Alternatively it could be a graphics card driver update, makes sure your video card drivers are updated.

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Have repeatedly tweaked my graphics settings, downward from the "optimal" levels my NVIDIA GeForce Experience game wizard recommends.

And I only have crashes in FFXIV, not in any other games I have on my rig. I know it has the muscle for the game, but I'm just baffled - and annoyed, especially when on a duty - when the thing crashes.

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Originally Posted by Guntank81

Try playing with the graphics settings, lower them see if you still crash. if not try installing the game on a different hard drive. Alternatively it could be a graphics card driver update, makes sure your video card drivers are updated.

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I've done several downward tweaks to the optimal settings my NVIDIA GeForce game wizard recommends, to no noticeable effect. :-(

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Originally Posted by Bd09live

i wish i could, but it doesnt give me one. it crashes/force closes loading from cutscene to scenerio in a feast of lies.

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Got an AMD card by chance there was a bug with a specific driver that did this years ago.

Depending on the type of crash, IE: closing w/o warning and no error vs a DX11 crash or some other error related crash I would suggest turning off any and all overlays you might have for gaming.

Lack of documentation aside, one of the most common causes of a crash in XIV is if you try to switch sound sources. It's been a known problem since 2.0 has launched that XIV just can't handle a graceful hot swap of sound output. It managed to cause my 3080 Ti to choke and die the last time I forgot about the problem.

You will not get an error message, usually. The FPS will just drop to miserable levels and the sound will abrubtly shut off.

Since the OP's issue is happening really randomly, this probably isn't it, but I'm just tossing this in here because it's caused me to crash many times, and other people too.

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Originally Posted by Minsue

Got an AMD card by chance there was a bug with a specific driver that did this years ago.

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dont have any overlays, it crashed on a clean boot (nothing else running).

drivers are updated, didnt change it.

have a 1080 ti nvadia.

It took me a while to realize that FPS was the cause of my crashes. I have a 2k [21:9] monitor, and increasing FPS above 60 will cause FFXIV to crash. I can run the game without any problems at max graphics settings with FPS capped at 60.

Despite the fact that the benchmark says I have an average of 115 FPS and a minimum of 61 FPS at max settings, I think FFXIV is actually more demanding than what the benchmark says. It could also be due to the fact that the benchmark does not run on true [21:9].

My hardware
GPU: EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Ftw3 Ultra, Overclocked, 11GB GDDR6.
CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K, stock

fps is capped.
Running stress test to see if anything is wrong with the card. nothing so far (no overheating, no artifacting, nothing seems out of place). Removed my graphics driver and reinstalled cause im not 100% sure i tried that yet (i know i updated it with latest drivers, not sure if i completely removed it before reinstalling though).

Crashed on mt.gulag before doing that reinstall.

I am wondering if it is graphics at all.

I played EvE several years back and I would get a crash to desktop randomly, I traced it back to sound drivers. have you tried making sure those are up to date or at least disabling (if thats even possible)

idk how i can trace it down to sound drivers. but ill make sure they are updated. game freezes for a sec, sound stops. then game force closes.

Try this:

1. Uninstall the .exe nvidia driver setup file (the file that installs your nvidia driver)
2. Go into Device manager (use windows search)
3. Find your nvidia GPU there and "uninstall" (do not disable), it might ask you if you want to uninstall the driver and check it.
4. Restart computer
5. Go to nvidia site to download the .exe driver setup file

This solved it for me a few days ago.

did those step still crashing.

Yeah at this point I would do a full game reinstall. As painful as it is-it's the only way to really rule out corrupt files. It definitely doesn't sound like it's a GPU related issue.

Question, do you overclock your RAM? An unstable RAM overclock can cause a lot of processing issues when running games.

nope, and ive reinstalled 3 times so far dealing with crashes. If its corrupt files then i want to know whats corrupting them so i dont have to keep reinstalling the game.

interesting. Ok do this, when you're playing the game have your task manager open and see what your % usage is like for CPU, RAM, GPU, etc. Kinda hard to keep track if you don't have a second monitor though.

If you don't have a second monitor I recommend downloading MSI Afterburner which lets you see track things such as CPU, RAM, and GPU usage. My guess is that you're hitting some kind of RAM cap or storage cap usage cap.

Furthermore, check your windows power settings and make sure it's set to "High performance."
Also in your nvidia control panel you might want to set your power option there to high performance under "3D settings"

i thought it was capping or overheating so i had task manager up on my 2nd screen to see what happens when it crashes. %s werent that high, temp was fine. everything seemed normal. GPU did spike right as crash happened, going to test out later if thats cause it was full screened and it was force closing or what caused that spike as it crashed. (going to try borderless windows later, cause im tired of running the entire mt. gulg to see if it works...so taking a break)

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Originally Posted by Bd09live

Out of all the games i have played, ff seems to be the only one where if you have a problem the only answers I could find was reinstalling the whole game or nothing at all.

also, why does it crash in the most random of places? was going good, then after leaving a random cutscene into a fight...crash.

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If your drivers are up to date and your CPU and graphics card fall within the supported specs, my guess is that your computer is overheating. I don't know what kind of set up you have, but this could be due to clogged vents and fans. If my computer were overheating like this, I would open it up and blow canned air through all its fans in an area where I don't mind blowing a ton of dust. I would even remove the graphics card to make sure I could thoroughly dust it.

Sounds good. It all has the hallmarks of a GPU driver issue at the end of the day. When you're back to your truobleshooting I would unistall the GPU driver again, restart computer and install an older driver, maybe even 3-4 months old driver. Sometimes there are just some weird/specific issues which nvidia hasn't accounted for yet in their latest drivers.

Another thing I would try is closing as many applications/programs as possible to rule out conflicts there.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

If your drivers are up to date and your CPU and graphics card fall within the supported specs, my guess is that your computer is overheating. I don't know what kind of set up you have, but this could be due to clogged vents and fans. If my computer were overheating like this, I would open it up and blow canned air through all its fans in an area where I don't mind blowing a ton of dust. I would even remove the graphics card to make sure I could thoroughly dust it.

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Good suggestion as well; definitely worth downloading MSI afterburner or HWMonitor to keep track of temps while in full screen.

so got past that fustrating final boss crash. still not sure what was causing it, could of been dx11, full screen or something graphical. didnt want to test anything by itself, will do if i crash somewhere were its not annoying to get back to. but i lowered my settings by one (standard desktop), turned dx 11 off and went boarderless window. Got past that boss, and able to move on with MSQ

Downloaded MSI afterburner, and everything seemed stable while i was doing dungeon. Thanks though for all the suggestions, from both you guys and from my guild who was also trying to figure this out.

You're welcome! Enjoy the game; another thing I suggest is googling DX11 (click on the microsoft result) and see if you it lets you install a new version. Either way for now enjoy the game, hopefully nvidia solves that problem with a new update.

I use the Nvidia GeForce Experience app to keep my drivers up to date. They update at least once a month, so I find it worthwhile. You can download it from Nvidia here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce...ence/download/

my dxdiag says i have dx 12