Freeze/Crash & BSOD issues

[Astrolia]

This should have been closed with a disclaimer a long time ago

User mode software will NOT freeze or bsod a computer that is operating in a stable configuration.

These issues occur when the system is operating in an unstable state, either through the use of problematic drivers or faulty and/or misconfigured hardware combinations or pieces of hardware, and at times even a faulty Core operating system kernel mode driver.

Square Enix cannot resolve these issues as they require individual assessment and corrective measures for each affected users individual system.


For users on PS3's,
This would be an issue for Square to investigate as the ps3 version operates on level closer to machine code.

You are an idiot.

[Squa11_Leonhart]

You are an idiot.

No sir, I am a computer repair specialist with a background in software technical support and resolutions.

Unless an application is passing ring0 commands to a computer (which this game does not, and is nigh impossible without interacting directly with the kernel mode drivers) It cannot possibly crash, freeze or lockup a system in the ways reported in this thread so long as the computer is not already operating in a state of borderline stability.

This real and actual causes for most issues reported in this thread for the PC version dial down to

1. End user installable drivers (Display, audio, Storage drivers, network and potentially even usb drivers) - This has a medium chance of possibility
2. Kernel Mode Drivers (The windows kernel drivers itself, incl ntos kernel mode driver, ntfs driver, stor.sys, etc) - Less Likely
3. Hardware itself - This is the most likely conclusion when users with exactly the same hardware on exactly the same driver(s) are not having issues, whereas you are.

This game is one of very few that actually maxes out a quad core cpu, putting strain on the memory and IO interfaces more so then many other games in the industry.

This exact topic was played out in exactly the same way with Guildwars 2, Rift, as well as many non mmo games, but there is always the head stuck i nthe sand group of people (indicating yourself) that do not understand that Windows for the most part does not allow directly communicating with the hardware from user mode applications, it must be done via windows api's and ring3 filters, which are only going to be as stable as the underlying system the computer is made up of.

The biggest mistake someone made is mixing software crashes and 'soft freezes' in with BSODS and system lockups - these should be kept completely seperate so long as the software crash was not accompanied with the '(ec116) display driver has crashed and recovered' messages, which would still indicate bad drivers or hardware.

[KisaiTenshi]

No sir, I am a computer repair specialist with a background in software technical support and resolutions.

That doesn't automatically make you qualified to solve problems here, only that you have experience with it. Every game is different, and neither of us are developers on this game.

This game is one of very few that actually maxes out a quad core cpu, putting strain on the memory and IO interfaces more so then many other games in the industry.

Hardly, watch the CPU meters on a second monitor and you will see it uses little more than one cpu core, and that is almost entirely DX9's fault.

This exact topic was played out in exactly the same way with Guildwars 2, Rift, as well as many non mmo games, but there is always the head stuck i nthe sand group of people (indicating yourself) that do not understand that Windows for the most part does not allow directly communicating with the hardware from user mode applications, it must be done via windows api's and ring3 filters, which are only going to be as stable as the underlying system the computer is made up of.

Shader programs are sent directly to the video card. OpenCL (which this game doesn't use) and DirectCompute(not in DX9) do send programs to run on the GPU hardware.

But as you said, and I said, and a few other people have demonstrated, the BSOD problems are most likely Bad Hardware and/or Bad drivers. I have not been able to get the game to BSOD under any condition, and can only get it to crash under conditions where something was injected into the rendering process (RivaTuner Statistics Server combined with the video capture or screen capture hotkey)

[Squa11_Leonhart]

That doesn't make you qualified to solve problems here, only that you have experience with it. Every game is different.

Applications built using toolsets provided and designed to work on Windows will inherently include preventative measures to prevent the compilation of code(such as hand written SSE assembly) that may cause the cpu to enter deadlock states (and compiler optimisations won't generate ones that can anyway)

Hardly, watch the CPU meters on a second monitor and you will see it uses little more than one cpu core, and that is almost entirely DX9's fault.

I will let the following image respond to this.


This is a i7 920 with HT enabled, clocked at 3.8Ghz ftr.
Not quite quad core optimised, but close..... you should see the FPS drop in la noscea if i restrict the game to 2 cores via task manager.

Shader programs are sent directly to the video card. OpenCL (which this game doesn't use) and DirectCompute(not in DX9) do send programs to run on the GPU hardware.

No they aren't, Every object and shader is processed via DirectX on the systems cpu before being sent to the video card. This is the primary cause of bottleneck in D3D9, which was rectified in 10 and then expanded to allow for deffered display lists and multithreaded rendering in 11.

But as you said, and I said, and a few other people have demonstrated, the BSOD problems are most likely Bad Hardware and/or Bad drivers. I have not been able to get the game to BSOD under any condition, and can only get it to crash under conditions where something was injected into the rendering process (RivaTuner Statistics Server combined with the video capture or screen capture hotkey)

I have only experienced a Runtime exception on a few occasions, and all of them were when my net connection failed.