Blue Screen of Death with some sound cards

Oh, I didn't notice my post had it wrong - I am well aware of the need for 2 dashes and I most certainly had/have them in the shortcut properties.

Playing with --nosound I didn't have any problems; then I tried disabling my Creative Card and using Realtek HD onboard sound and removed the --nosound. Things went ok but then I died and made a new character and the very first area had strange corrupted lighting effects (yellow near light sources). I have seen some black/dark textures in some areas before. I quit the game and immmediately bluscreened - the bluscreen says the problem was with ati something (goes away before I could write it down) which is exactly what I have gotten before and made me think it was video rather than audio problem, but maybe it is some wierd interaction that is really caused by audio?

When I submit error report to microsoft it bings up a page titled "Stop (blue screen) error caused by a device or driver" and indicates a video driver.

I am going to continue to try various combinations of sound/nosound/video drivers to see if I can help the developers figure this out (and hoepfully enable me to play with uncorrupted graphics and good sound).

Here's a good one. New to the game and I'm getting crashes. BUT... It only seems to crash when I play audio from Pandora or the Spotify desktop client. If I just listen to the game audio, I can play for hours without interruption. Play Pandora via the web, crash within 20-30 minutes. Play Spotify desktop client, same thing. I'm going to try a different player like VLC as well as the command line switches but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents to the thread. I'm totally loving this game, but if I can't rock my own music while playing, it's going to seriously deter me from wanting to play.

Hi, I just wanted to add I had this problem yesterday as well. (My first time with PoE since the early beta)

To solve it, I downloaded and installed the Windows 8 specific driver update for my Auzentech X-Fi Forte and closed Spotify before opening the game. I haven't determined exactly which has solved the problem but I have my money on it being the driver update.

Will check tonight with Spotify running to see if I BSOD again.

This is happening with my system, I'm running an ASUS Xonar D2X and the --softwareaudio workaround doesn't help at all. I've noticed if I have something running in the background it will crash faster than just the game running.

I'm updating my ATI drivers also, or downgrading from 13.11 beta to 13.9.

OS: windows 7 64bit fully updated

Hi everyone!

I just started the game yesterday (Steam version) and it looks very nice!

But I too am struck with the known bug (BSOD portcls.sys blah...). My rig is absolutely stable in all other applications and games.

Setup:
AMD Phenom2 Platform with AMD HD6950
Win7 64
Creative X-fi Titanium (most recent driver, DolbyDigitalEncoder activated)

The --softwareaudio commandlineswitch does change the situation. I do now hear no sound at all.

Could this be related to the Creative Dolby Digital Encoder?
This is used by people like me that conned their X-fi via TOSlink to a AV-Receiver which understands DolbDigital (there is a version for DTS too). This way, surround-gamesound (EAX etc.) gets encoded as a DolbyDigital signal and the AV-Receiver can decode it so surround sound can be heared instead of only Stereo over TOSlink.

Using --swa does not work at all. Then sound can be heard and the BSOD comes right back.

I will try to disable DolbyDigital Encoder. If this doesn't help I will resort to an USB-Headset.


Update:
I used the Registry Hack (DisableXRAM) and this seem to work!
Warning: The Entry is a DWORD32 and not a String as stated somewhere here on the forum. Just look on the net after "DisableXRAM", there are numerous Guides on how to set this (do not forget to reboot afterwards).

This is very annoying since many players have X-fi soundcards, they are just superb for gaming...

2nd Update:
People, if you encounter these BSoD then do not provoke them again and again by just restarting and playing over and over. I had to revert to a system restore point since the 4 crashes I had with PoE ultimatively killed my soundcardconfig/driver.

And devs... DO SOMETHING, PLEASE!

Getting the same Problems with X-FI Music ... (latest drivers bla bla bla) :-(

Yea this has been an issue since early EARLY beta and they have known about it since then. I doubt they will ever fix it and with creative adding their sound card tech to some high end motherboards it will lower the game base over time. From the best I can figure it has to do with how they encode the audio which no one else uses. It confuses the card and causes the drivers to freak out since it is a format that, in my experience, only this company uses so far.

They should speak to Creative as creative labs has been helpful with several small companies in finding out what is going on, as long as they agree to put creative logo's on the site. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out what is going on and how to set it to automatically use software audio instead of trying to use the ram and sound processor chip.

I've got same issue, but with an Hercule Theater XP sound card (with Cirrus Logic chip). So it is not just a Creative cards problem. But this is the only game which occurs this exception, on my computer... maybe it comes from corrupted files. A 4 Go installation by the net is a long loading... I didn't have same md5sum of Content.ggpk file at each installation.