For all the people getting DirectX 11 crashes on NVIDIA cards

[FromTheInternetz]

TLDR: Use Afterburner or any other GPU overclocking tool to downclock your core. Start with about -100 MHz and decrease further in 50 MHz steps if it still crashes.

Hey,

there seem to be a lot of people suffering from frequent DirectX 11 crashes since Shadowbringers came out. These crashes have actually existed since the DirectX 11 client was first introduced.

For me, they have started when I wanted to return to the game for Stormblood. I had tried basically everything back then, reinstalling the game, using different drivers, reinstalling Windows – all to no avail. And I'm running a very clean setup, the PC is purely for gaming (I use a different machine for work) and I have only the things installed that I actually need, no bloat at all.

I thought I had found a fix, but it turned out the game still kept crashing (even though I was able to run the benchmark – which had also been crashing regularly for me – without issues 16 hours straight) and I ultimately stopped playing.

Seeing the very positive Shadowbringers reviews, I wanted to give the game another try, thinking that the issues might have been fixed in the meantime; either by Square Enix or on NVIDIA's side with a newer driver. But nope, the game was still crashing for me.

Since I didn't just want to give up again, I decided to do some more research and came across a few Reddit posts mentioning that downclocking the GPU has helped them.

The thing is, most NVIDIA GPU's you can buy these days will come with a vendor overclock out of the box and also boost far higher than they are "rated" for. This seems to be fine for most games/engines, but for some reason, these overclocks can apparently become unstable and produce errors in FFXIV, ultimately leading to the crashes you are experiencing.

So, I gave the suggestions a try, downclocking my 1080 Ti by 100 MHz using Afterburner. This meant the GPU would no longer boost to 2075 MHz (like it did before), but peak somewhere around 19xx MHz instead. The -100 MHz don't seem to be 100% linear, but it certainly makes a difference to the peak frequency.

After that, I was able to play for around 8 hours before finally experiencing a crash (where before the game would crash every 10 to 30 minutes).

I increased the downclock to -150 MHz and was able to play for 11 hours before crashing this time. I'm now down to -200 MHz and haven't crashed so far (in about 5 hours). I am quite optimistic that the game will stop crashing altogether with a high enough downclock.

If you decide to give this a try, let me know how it works for you. Also, if you're running an AMD card, this fix/workaround might also apply, but you'll need to use a different tool, as Afterburner only works for NVIDIA cards (iirc, you can adjust clock directly in the Radeon control panel these days).

@Support Team: Please, try to figure out a solution for this; let the developers know about it (if they do not already) and work with NVIDIA and AMD. I can't believe that this error still is a thing after so many years. Yes, GPU boost/overclock seems to be the issue (or at least one of the possible issues), but there's no other game/engine (even far more demanding ones) I'm aware of that experiences these problems.

[P_Wing]

The fix for me is to re-seat my GPU on my MB. I guess it might be a bit out of place so sometimes this introduce lag in the GPU process and cause the game to crash (it is not visible to eye though).

I think the cause of my problem is similar to yours: even a flicker of GPU lag/freeze and FFXIV crashes, so clocking down helps to make it work at less load and reduce GPU lag/freeze.

[TheExodude]

This was one of the first things I tried after ShB's launch. Unfortunately, while it definitely seemed to reduce the frequency of my crashes, it didn't stop them entirely.

[FromTheInternetz]

@P_Wing:

Interesting. I‘m using a GPU stand myself to prevent the GPU from sagging and I‘m pretty positive it‘s properly seated in my case. But I might try to extend the length of the stand a bit to prop up the GPU even more and see if that makes a difference.

I work in a computer science field as well, but a very different and arguably less exciting one (web development), so I don‘t have too much insight here, but I could imagine the following is happening from a more technical POV:

The game engine makes a call to the DirectX API. Whenever the GPU is taking a bit longer than usual to process, DirectX might return an error (or the call might time out and the engine never gets a return value). Other game engines probably just drop the respective frame and/or call again in such a case to prevent a crash. This failsafe might be what‘s missing in FFXIV‘s engine (or at least in some instances for specific calls).

This would also explain why other games are fine with „unstable overclocks“; the errors probably still occur, but they simply „ignore“ them and continue without crashing and with minimal impact (dropped frames).

Pure speculation, but I think that might not be too far off the mark.

This was one of the first things I tried after ShB's launch. Unfortunately, while it definitely seemed to reduce the frequency of my crashes, it didn't stop them entirely.

Thank you for the feedback. If you still remember, could you tell us which GPU you are running, how far you attempted to downclock and how long you would be able to play without crashing? Also, did you find another solution that worked in your case?

[TheExodude]

Thank you for the feedback. If you still remember, could you tell us which GPU you are running, how far you attempted to downclock and how long you would be able to play without crashing? Also, did you find another solution that worked in your case?

GTX 1080, downclocked to an experimental extreme of -400 MHZ. Time between crashes ranged from around 8 hours of uninterrupted play the first time to 2 hours the second. Still haven't found a solution, but crashes seem much more common in Shadowbringers content.

[MiniTofu]

GTX 1080 Max-Q is overclocked +200-250mhz... no crash.

:/

I know I am not helping.

[FromTheInternetz]

GTX 1080 Max-Q is overclocked +200-250mhz... no crash.

:/

I know I am not helping.

Well, glad it's working for you.

I've had a 1080 before as well with a very high overclock and had no crashes on that one either.

But I've had them on both my current 1080 Ti, my RMA'd 1080 Ti (which I had RMA'd for fan control issues) and my old 980 Ti (which I swapped in for testing). In both my old system and the new one I've just built at the end of last year.