Black Screen (Not Responding) On Launch

[AvengerXZ]

Thank you for the response!

I had noticed that in NVIDA GeForce Experience settings (under the "Games" tab), the "Automatically optimize newly added games" setting was enabled. The issue mentioned in the prior post has not yet occurred since disabling this feature. I will continue to monitor it.

Notable also is that I have recently purchased and installed the Shadowbringers expansion. The black screen issue was observed only with the base game.

Thank you again for your feedback.

Automatically optimize new games just will apply the geforce experience recommended graphic settings to your game.. I am not sure if it will be the cause of the black screens.

All I know is I experienced black screen after updating to August drivers. Rolling back to July release I had zero issues.

[Packetdancer]

All I know is I experienced black screen after updating to August drivers. Rolling back to July release I had zero issues.

There is an issue in the August drivers which seems to (sometimes) cause a conflict between various overlays which did not previously conflict, notably including Nvidia's own GeForce Experience overlay. So running Discord with overlay active + GeForce Experience active could be a black screeen, or running GeForce Experience and a ReShade variant (separate from Nvidia's own 'Freestyle' branch of ReShade), etc.

As several overlays use the full path of a given process to determine if it's one that it should hook—so that, for instance C:\Games\Foobar Studios\Bazgame\engine.exe and C:\Games\Twiddlefizz\Ubertoot\engine.exe show up as two separate things, rather than two instances of 'engine.exe'—renaming the path that something lives in can make various programs lose any overlay settings (and thus stop enabling an overlay).

Given that changing the directory name fixes the original poster's issue, I sort of wonder if that's what happening here. The real question would be if they had the problem prior to the August release of the Nvidia drivers.

[BabaGhanouj]

There is an issue in the August drivers which seems to (sometimes) cause a conflict between various overlays which did not previously conflict, notably including Nvidia's own GeForce Experience overlay. So running Discord with overlay active + GeForce Experience active could be a black screeen, or running GeForce Experience and a ReShade variant (separate from Nvidia's own 'Freestyle' branch of ReShade), etc.

As several overlays use the full path of a given process to determine if it's one that it should hook—so that, for instance C:\Games\Foobar Studios\Bazgame\engine.exe and C:\Games\Twiddlefizz\Ubertoot\engine.exe show up as two separate things, rather than two instances of 'engine.exe'—renaming the path that something lives in can make various programs lose any overlay settings (and thus stop enabling an overlay).

Given that changing the directory name fixes the original poster's issue, I sort of wonder if that's what happening here. The real question would be if they had the problem prior to the August release of the Nvidia drivers.

I think it's a very good theory that this could have been due to an overlay of some kind. The fact that the problem was temporarily alleviated by renaming the directory led me to believe that it had to be related to interference from some sort of third party software. I have yet to encounter the issue again after disabling the GeForce Experience auto-optimize setting. I am uncertain if this was due to invalid graphics settings being applied, overlays being re-enabled, or some other interaction. Renaming the directory / changing the path may have caused it to lose track of the game temporarily (preventing it from being auto-optimized). I have no definitive proof that this was the true root cause, but those were my observations/conjectures.

I started playing a few weeks ago (in September), so I can say with absolute certainty that I haven't tested using any drivers prior to the August release. It is also worth mentioning that I've only experienced this issue with the base game (ARR and HW). I have since installed the latest expansions and have yet to encounter the issue.

Thank you very much for your input and suggestions!