Unable to detect DirectX device, 540M, no answer yet

[Stjevne]

My girlfriend and I have been up and down the internet for the past 6 hours or so trying to solve this issue. Nobody seems to have a clear cut solution, and a lot of the threads are old and outdated. She's using an Acer laptop, Intel i3, and the NVidia 540M (This seems to be a problematic card, but it's not isolated to the 500M series or even NVidia)

Her drivers are all up to date, on everything, directx, intel, nvidia, you name it and we've updated it. She's playing in Windowed, it's not the Fullscreen error. No other programs are taking priority. We've tried disabling onboard video, forcing GPU/CPU, her cards aren't overheating, her settings are turned way down.

She can't make it through the opening Ul'dah quest, skipping the cinematic or not. She just had it crash while loading up the character screen.

In case the issue isn't clear enough, she gets into the game, and anywhere between 1 and 5 minutes, an error message comes up with "Unable to detect DirectX device, Final Fantasy XIV must close" or something to that effect.

Nothing has remedied this problem. Has anyone come up with a fix for this yet?

[Ventus]

You are among friends on this one =/. I myself have been searching for hours on a fix and I am in the same boat as you as far as having up to date drivers etc etc. SO one alternative I never thought of that could help is someone said that sometimes during installation certain files can possibly not be applied properly so I'd say you have nothing to lose with trying out a fresh re-install.

Other potential solution is you can "whitelist" the game under the nvidia control panel. Here is a video to help with that =). Don't worry that it's not your computer he's talking about, it applies to others as well =).

Anyways I'll try to help as much as I can but I'm stuck as well so hopefully we can figure this out =(.

[PrettyPrincess]

You need Direct X 9 installed

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=35

See if this helps

[Coldfire]

Sounds like the usual nvidia optimus issue. I don't think theres any reliable workaround yet. You can try changing settings in the nv control panel to not use optimus while ffxiv is running.

Edit: The problem seems to be the way optimus uses to copy the video data to the IGP. Look if there is an option in bios to change this feature or try loading default settings.

[Ventus]

hey just popping in with a new suggestion. Someone on forums suggested to turn off this program called aero on your computer as a possible fix.

Here's the how to on it:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

anyways if you have vista or windows 7 you can go to a more basic setting and it may help for time being. As of now it seems people with optimus technology in their computers are largely suffering from directx error =(

[Stjevne]

hey just popping in with a new suggestion. Someone on forums suggested to turn off this program called aero on your computer as a possible fix.

Here's the how to on it:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

anyways if you have vista or windows 7 you can go to a more basic setting and it may help for time being. As of now it seems people with optimus technology in their computers are largely suffering from directx error =(

Interestingly enough, turning off Aero fixed her issue. This seems to be one of those umbrella problems that tons of things can affect. Thanks for the tip and good luck to anyone else with this issue!

[origamikitsune]

Interesting. That's a good find. I wouldn't have thought that something that is such a basic function of Windows would cause a problem. Definitely adding that into my bag of tricks with the Optimus cards though.

[Ventus]

it helped for me but now I occasionally get the unable to detect directx device error so not sure why that's happening