Game Crash - PC Restart - No BSOD, No Eventlog, No warning.

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Hmm, interesting. To confirm, when you ran the game on the other machine that had identical specs, did it experience the same crash?


Same crash. Same zones and same immediate shutdown & restart. Almost as though the machine loses power.

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Drakier wrote:
Also, rather than swapping hard drives, can you just attempt to install Path of Exile onto the secondary machine's own hard drive and see if it has the same issues. Swapping hard drives might eliminate some of the hardware causes, but it doesn't eliminate any of the software causes.


Yes, I'll try doing this tomorrow night after work.
Interesting topic, and as I am struggling with this same problem, I thought dropping in my experience will help in solving this.
I had this very same error in The Coves and in the Chamber of Sins in July, but the the huge 2 GB patch solved this issue and I could play for a while.
Now I am wrestling with the Battlefront, as my computer simply restarts after a few seconds entering there.

As I don't have an up-to-date machine, that also can be the case, but another guess would be:

Could it be that some art asset (that has not been reworked in the 2 GB patch) causing this error or crashing with some other program (for example Outpost firewall or antivirus program)?
If I'm not mistaken only the first 2 act was reworked in the patch and the reworked 3rd act will be deployed in October with the release of the game.

Hope it will help solving the technical difficulty!
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Blooreagrd wrote:
Interesting topic, and as I am struggling with this same problem, I thought dropping in my experience will help in solving this.
I had this very same error in The Coves and in the Chamber of Sins in July, but the the huge 2 GB patch solved this issue and I could play for a while.
Now I am wrestling with the Battlefront, as my computer simply restarts after a few seconds entering there.

As I don't have an up-to-date machine, that also can be the case, but another guess would be:

Could it be that some art asset (that has not been reworked in the 2 GB patch) causing this error or crashing with some other program (for example Outpost firewall or antivirus program)?
If I'm not mistaken only the first 2 act was reworked in the patch and the reworked 3rd act will be deployed in October with the release of the game.

Hope it will help solving the technical difficulty!



Are you running with the -gc 2 argument on your shortcut?
I already had a long email conversation with GGG about this, I had this issues started early August after I deleted my Shader Cache folder. Not sure if there is an connection but it was the only thing I changed. After that, PoE went mad and crashed/froze my entire PC. No Bluescreen, no warnings, no event logs. Only thing that you can do there is set into windows if it restarts the PC after such a freeze or not (this is a windows error feature so the restart itself is basicly an optional "feature"). If auto-restart after a fatal error is disabled, PC just freezes.
It seems it was not an TDR, I had also a TDR in PoE while the music was keep playing and did not looped. However, PoE never had these issues before I deleted the damn Shader Cache (was over 7000 files, I just wanted to speed up loading). So I'm sure it is an PoE Problem and not a driver/PC problem. I monitored my entire PC, Voltages/temperatures, everything from CPU/GPU, Power device... all normal and ONLY (!) PoE crashes my PC and my PC usualy NEVER crashes...never sicne 4 Years! (I swear) Of course programs can crash but they are not freeze the entire PC to death.

OK, to make it short, I guess it went better. Things I did was to completely deinstall the NVidia driver from my GTX460 Card and re-installed it, note that I now use the 314.22 Diver, the last recommended Driver you should use for the GeForce 400series, newer dirvers are just cuasing trouble. I did not installed the 3D Vision Drivers, do not install this if you don't need it!
Next step is to set up PoE to not use any power saving stuff, there is an option in the Driver profiles that let programs run without GPU Power saving enabled.
Also run PoE as Admin, just to be sure, use the "-GC 2" argument and also disable desktop decoration stuff from within the compatibility tab of PoE Desktop Link. Oh, deleted shader cache again to be sure no "dirty" stuff was written in.
It's also a good idea to check the CPU powersave features. TDR & Co. can be caused by timing issues between GPU/CPU. My CPU can go to 5% minimum power, I increased this to 10% minimum power, just to feel better. No guarantee that this changes everything.
There also is an MS Patch that increases the TDR recovery time to give the GPU more time to recover if TDR happens. Default is 2 seconds, maybe to short, try 4 or 8 seconds, here is an auto fix:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946/en-us

Attention, this just increases the time of the TDR to (maybe) recover the GFX Card from hiatus, it does not eliminate TDRs at all.

I didn't played much PoE since but so far I havn't had any more crashes. I hope GGG really trys to check and fix this serious stuff, it's not an overheating issue (also had these crashes after 2 mins of play or in town where nothing actualy happend on screen) and because it's only releated to POE mostly also not an driver(only) issue. However, it must be something that directly influences the hardware, maybe faulty written shaders or whatever.

Locations where it crashed so far: Docks (group) but fine solo. Solaris 3 (2x so far) Lunaris 2 (also 2x so far) always in a fight except hte one time in town AFTER a fight. I was farming docks, heavy action, all fine. Went back to town, nothing there, walked to the merchant, freeze. So much for the "heating" issue. ;)

Last edited by Fusion_Power on Sep 17, 2013, 1:24:21 PM
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Drakier wrote:



Are you running with the -gc 2 argument on your shortcut?


Thanks for the tip, I have been using that but sadly without any success. And unfortunately as far as I know it became obsolete after the big patch. :(

Also the driver issue in Fusion_Power's post may not be the case as I have an ATI Radeon 3450 card. Yeah it is an old one, so the real puzzle is why booneexile and others have this issue as he has a really massive hardware described in OP and he and Fusion also tried several drivers.
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Blooreagrd wrote:
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Drakier wrote:



Are you running with the -gc 2 argument on your shortcut?


Thanks for the tip, I have been using that but sadly without any success. And unfortunately as far as I know it became obsolete after the big patch. :(

Also the driver issue in Fusion_Power's post may not be the case as I have an ATI Radeon 3450 card. Yeah it is an old one, so the real puzzle is why booneexile and others have this issue as he has a really massive hardware described in OP and he and Fusion also tried several drivers.


-gc 2 isn't obsolete. It might not be necessary for a lot of the people who used to use it as the reduction in art asset size helped a lot with the memory issues which are what the -gc 2 is for. -gc 2 basically tells the garbage collection system to remove items from memory more quickly than normal. This allows it to free that memory sooner, but at the cost of sometimes having to load stuff back in again. It still works properly... just doesn't solve all problems.

As for the issues with restarting.. PC restarts can pretty much only happen because of really bad faults in hardware or their drivers. I haven't seen any instances of a pc restart that was caused purely by a program crashing. There are protections against this kind of stuff for obvious reasons. As for the "no bsod" type stuff... that is commonly the case when the settings are set to "automatically reboot" as Fusion described. Using a program like BlueScreenView can often show that there was, in fact, a BSOD. It just happened so quickly and rebooted that the user didn't see it, but it was captured anyway. Perhaps that is also the case for you.

I'm not saying that software can't trigger a PC reboot as well, but in almost every case I've seen, it was due to poking at something in the drivers or hardware that were already having problems, and it is no more the fault of the software "causing" the reboot as it is the bad hardware or drivers in the first place. I think of it like if you broke your rib and I came up and poked it. Sure I'm the one causing the pain at the time, and exposing the weak spot, but the rib was already broken, I didn't cause that.

Make sense? Hoepfully BlueScreenView or EventLogViewer will give you some insight to the crash and then if so, you can post the details and we can look for solutions (if there are any known).
I have a bluescreen viever, these tools usualy read out the "minidump" directory of windows where memory dumps/bluescreen are stored. However, it's empty, also no logs into the windows event viewer.
It may be driver related, the driver talks to the hardware but the game talks to the driver, who knows what's cause and what's effect here. I forgot to mention that my older driver was the Nvidia 310.90, worked well since a long time and from start of PoE open beta to august I never had any issues with that. However, this driver was one in a long series of just over-installed drivers without a real fresh clean install. It may be caused some trouble then in PoE because of that, who knows. After a fresh install of the newer 314.22 driver it sems to be more stable, however I still have some TDRs here and there bud so far only on desktop (youtube) andn ot ingame.

Even with ATI Graphics Cards it may be an idea to check the driver settings for possible energy management modes and disable them (per game) if ever possible.

I hope there will be more optimizing for PoE itself in the near future, performance, stability and of course lag issues.
Update:

1) Second PC with fresh install - same crash behavior.
2) Formatted primary machine and installed only Win7, Antivirus, and PoE - same crash behavior.
3) There are no minidumps to view. The machine powers down before there's time to write anything. It's quite literally an immediate loss of power & reboot.
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booneexile wrote:
Update:

1) Second PC with fresh install - same crash behavior.
2) Formatted primary machine and installed only Win7, Antivirus, and PoE - same crash behavior.
3) There are no minidumps to view. The machine powers down before there's time to write anything. It's quite literally an immediate loss of power & reboot.


I would ask you to set the antivirus to lowest settings, then remove it from the system and see if it still has issues. Then it's just a base Win7 install with Path of Exile.
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Drakier wrote:
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booneexile wrote:
Update:

1) Second PC with fresh install - same crash behavior.
2) Formatted primary machine and installed only Win7, Antivirus, and PoE - same crash behavior.
3) There are no minidumps to view. The machine powers down before there's time to write anything. It's quite literally an immediate loss of power & reboot.


I would ask you to set the antivirus to lowest settings, then remove it from the system and see if it still has issues. Then it's just a base Win7 install with Path of Exile.


Antivirus removed. Same crash. :(

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