Black screens & other oddities in quest transitions

[LoveGOG]

Black screens & other oddities in quest transitions

Hi.

Loving the game on PC. I'm soon finished with Act I, but lately I've encountered issues that forced me to Ctrl + Alt + delete my way out through Windows. A simple restart helps, but I'm here to figure out why it happens in the first place, and at this point I'm blaming the game and not my system.

First of; Early in the game in Act I you will find Triss waiting outside that will lead you to Cedric (?). The transition between that door went completely black on me. The game ran in the background because I heard sounds, but for some reasons it wouldn't render the outside world.

Second; In late Act I you are supposed to follow Zoltan to Iorveth from the Inn. Zolatan for some reason refused to go/run, so I ran out the door first, but guess what... That back screen happened again. At this point I almost see a pattern. It always has to do with an escort or a follow quest. And again, a simple restart helped and now he walked like he should... But wait.

Third; When I was done following Zoltan and the cut-scene was done, before you go down to that pit, I was preparing a swallow potion, but now the animation - when drinking - refused to play, so I was stuck in this menu. I could move my cursor and the game ran just fine in the background, but Exit didn't work. At this point I gave up and start writing this.


So does anyone know these symptoms? What is the cause of these oddities that's forcing me to reset the game?

Here's my system specifications, which runs the game on ultra with Ubersample OFF at 1920x1080p with good 60 frames per second:

Intel i5 3570K - 4 processors @ 3.4 Ghz
DDR3 HyperX 1600 Mhz 8GB RAM
MSI Geforce GTX 680 OC GDDR5 2GB VRAM 'Twin Frozr III'
Intel SSD 330 Series 120 GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Any help are appreciated.

Forgot to mention that the game was downloaded through GOG, fully patched (Enhanced Edition) and I have all the latest updates.

 

[Licaon_Kter]

ummm, somehow the first step should always be "disable and quit every running application before running the game" ?

 

[LoveGOG]

Do you mean other programs that's not related to this game? Well, I don't see why other applications in the background should interfere with the game when I clearly have enough memory & RAM to run them. I don't even use programs that can overlay the game, so why would they interfere? If so this is the first game I've experienced where I need to turn off everything before even playing. I might aswell try the next time, but again, I don't see the connections.

However I did retry before this and it was working like a charm and I got past Act I, but because of paranoia I didn't use any potions, so that boss fight at the end took me forever to complete. But I'm not really looking for a workaround, I found that already and it's easy, I'm looking in to what's the cause of them.

Is it because I don't run the game as admin? Or are they rare issues with the game combined with my "luck"? Or maybe it's indeed the programs? Who knows. At this point I believe it could be that since I don't run the game as admin the game doesn't get all the information packages it needs, so some updates that's applied doesn't work correctly. That's my guess.

 

[GuyNwah]

Running as admin vs. not shouldn't be a problem. I've never once run the game as admin. I even run with virtual machines doing other work in the background; this has a nasty impact on loading times, though, and I don't want to say that it's any kind of good idea.

Licaon_Kter still has a point that you need to take seriously. The first action in any well-thought-out course of troubleshooting has to be this: Prove that the problem is caused by the thing you're troubleshooting, and not by anything else. The easiest way to deceive yourself is to take your own word for it that something else couldn't be the cause. Don't assume anything; prove it.

But this game will find holes in your computer's stability like no other. Stability problems are most likely to show up on a mode switch: when a cutscene plays, when you open inventory, events like that. At those points, your GPU is doing a mode switch, and your CPU may be also. Power and clock are being changed, cells and cores are being switched on or off or in or out of "turbo mode", and all it takes is one instruction being run while the voltage is too low for the current frequency to cause a black screen or a BSOD.

Proprietary-built computers that don't allow you to defeat power-saving kludges like EIST or Cool'n'Quiet are major offenders. So are some motherboards, even high-performance ASUS models (the motherboard is responsible for CPU power), and many GPUs.

Make sure EIST (SpeedStep) and enhanced C1E are disabled (the settings will be under the Windows power settings, and you may also have to make settings in the BIOS).

Try reducing the clocks on your GPU to stock settings, even though it is factory overclocked.