Crashing within 5 Minutes of Playing - nVidia GTX 970

[barefootmatthew]

Crashing within 5 Minutes of Playing - nVidia GTX 970

As noted in the title, the game hard crashes my machine after a few minutes of playing. I've not been able to leave the bedroom with Yennifer. The sound continues but the computer becomes totally unresponsive with a black screen and I have to hard reset the machine with the power button. I've seen this identical crash with other games and tried to work with EVGA, including clean installs of the graphics drivers, monitoring temperatures etc. but to no avail - funnily enough plenty of high-performance games like Crysis 3, AC:Unity and GTA 5 all run flawlessly for hours without crashing, so it's not a hardware problem or if it is, it's a particular use of the hardware, though my guess would be it's some sort of corruption in the driver somewhere, and not all games access this the same way, so some are fine while others are unplayable. Add Witcher 3 to the list of unplayable games.The worst part of this is, I bought a 970 primarily because of the offer to get a free copy of Witcher 3 when I purchased...pretty sad that I can't actually play the game I got with this video card. I hope CD Projekt can finally prod nVidia to fix their broken drivers or get them to issue recalls for the bad cards.

 

[P7T3B]

NOT TRYING TO STEAL YOUR THREAD.. SUNUDS LIKE WE HAVE "SIMILAR" PROB!? I got threw the intro & was trying to change the grafx settings (Ultra just for giggles) & when I tried to go to play all I get is a BLACK/BLANK screen.. no sound, nothing!? I too, had to restart my system.. would not respond to anything I tried. After restarting the game all it would do is load the blank/black screen & I again, had to restart the game.. so, I tried to uninstall & re-install (BAD IDEA!) the game, that's when I found it re-downloading (26+GB) the game again!?!? HELP!! lolNote: I did install the nVidia Game ready driver for the game this morning, I didn't do a "clean" install (was no option?) & I'm wondering if that was the cause?PS. I know my system won't run the game maxed out.. just wanted to see how it looked!? lolThanks for the help, Phil B.SYSTEM SPECS:CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K.Cooling: Cooler Master Hyper N520.Motherboard: MSI Z77MA-G45.SSD: OCZ Vertex 4 256GB= Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.HDD: WD VelociRaptor 300GB= Storage/Backup.Memory:Crucial Ballistix Tactical LP DDR3 1600 8GB (2X4GB).VGA: EVGA GTX 960 SSC W/Backplate.Audio: Creative SB X-Fi Titanium Custom Backplate.Optical: ASUS DRW-24B1ST.Case: Custom Modded ROSEWILL LINE M.PSU: EVGA SUPERNOVA NEX650G.Monitor: ASUA PB238Q.Mouse: Logitech G602.Keyboard: Generic Dell.

 

[=Axton=]

Not after 5 minutes but I still get the freeze/crashing, most recently after reloading a save, then it was less than 5min later. I too bought a 970 for this and GTAV with gta running for many hours at a time no problem.
And yes I've got the new driver isntalled.

 

[spookypuppy]

Same problem here. Think we should reinstall the GTA 5 driver?

 

[Guest]

Same problem here. Think we should reinstall the GTA 5 driver?

you can try; but I have had those random freezes or BSODs even with the gta drivers installed. ruined the entire evening for me. unplayable as hell.

 

[May17th]

I have MSI GeForce 970 GTX with the latest NVIDIA driver.
The problems I've had was "screen freeze" but sound works and the game, just buttons stop function.
Buttons won't react, but this happen 4 times only.

2 of times I had flipped to Windows and back in the game and then it happen.

If you go to http://www.twitch.tv/may17th in a minute, you'll see my experience.

 

[Schitzo]

Same problem here. I get a black screen, sound continous running. I have a rather old system with an i5-2500 @ 3,3ghz with a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 560 Ti. For example, GTA V is running very good with nice graphic settings for hours without crashing.
I was able to play the witcher when i changed all of the graphic settings to low AND (and this is the worst part) change the resolution to 1360x..... I do not play the game for the graphics, but i think something is broken. The latest driver is installed, of course.
If someone need further information in order to solve the problem, please contact me.

Best wishes!

 

[Markytheoz]

Like so many in here, been running my 970gtx on GTA V just fine. But this constant video freezing with the sound still going every 5 - 10 minutes in the witcher is just derailing the hype so badly. Tried the power to max fix, no change for me.

 

[Schitzo]

Tried to solve the problem as suggested in this forum. Change the graohic card settings, change the ingame settings from full screen to "with boarder", run the game through steam without gog galaxy, but nothing helped so far. Can`t play longer than 10 minutes, then the game minimize, i see the desktop, the sound is running and the game (with task manager) not responding

 

[erxv]

i had the same screen freezing, i turned off hairworks and put it to borderless windowed and the crashes/freezes stopped... hope this helps

 

[Schitzo]

i had the same screen freezing, i turned off hairworks and put it to borderless windowed and the crashes/freezes stopped... hope this helps

No this doesn`t helped for me, but thanks for the tip, maybe it is the solution for someone else

Update: Also the rollback to version 350.12 doesn`t helped, game still crashes after a few minutes of playing

---------- Updated at 09:12 AM ----------

sorry for bumping, but maybe it is better if everyone with this problem will post in this thread and also possible solutions

 

[HaydenZammit]

There's a few threads about this, but this one seems like the largest. Just want to add that it's happening for me too. Game crashes every 10 mins or so at random - doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing at the time. Sound continues playing. Have to end task it. With the latest nvidia drivers it was locking up my whole PC, forcing me to do a hard reset. On the GTA V nvidia drivers it lets me end task it though.

It's weird though. I didn't get a single crash for at least the first hour and a half.

Using a GTX 980. Tried all the suggestions I've seen on the forums and nothing makes a difference. The game itself looks like a masterpiece, but this just killed my excitement altogether.

 

[daneel53]

Same as everybody : game freeze or game screen gone in upper left corner of the desktop with sound going on and game not responsive after few minutes (less than five this morning). Obviouly this problem is almost general and nobody found a good turnaround so a patch is needed very soon.

GTX 970 with latest Nvidia driver (18 May), windows 8.1.

 

[HaydenZammit]

I'm going to try the oldest one on the Nvidia beta drivers list thing, see if that makes a difference. Someone on gamefaqs said that worked, but who knows.

 

[xy-maps]

I got the same problem. After 2 hours of playing, the game crashes over 10 times! ( I stopped counting...)
Mostly in the area (village) of whitegarden, maybe this is the problem?

Maybe my Pc is too old, but the game runs stable on High and Medium settings at 30 fps.
My Specs:
Windows 7
Intel Xeon 8x3,2Ghz
24 GB Ram
Nvidia GTX 580 1,5 GB VRAM -> Nvidea Game Ready Driver from yesterday

 

[spacehamsterZH]

I'd say run a memtest. I had problems like this a while back, also only with one specific game (Borderlands 2), and there were also people having the same issue. Memtest turned up that my RAM was damaged and BL2 must've just used it in a specific way that caused the crashes. I replaced the RAM and everything's been fine ever since.

 

[Guest 3816827]

Same problem here. The crash happens only in dialogues, I believe. Black screen, sound still plays, but the game doesn't respond anymore. Installation via GOG Galaxy, GTX 960 with latest 352.86 driver, Core i5-2500k, 8GB RAM, Win7 64 SP1

I'd say run a memtest.

This is not a hardware problem. Here and on reddit hundreds of people report these crashes.

 

[HaydenZammit]

I'd say run a memtest. I had problems like this a while back, also only with one specific game (Borderlands 2), and there were also people having the same issue. Memtest turned up that my RAM was damaged and BL2 must've just used it in a specific way that caused the crashes. I replaced the RAM and everything's been fine ever since.

Nah, too many people are having this issue for it to be bad ram for everyone.

I'm using the oldest nvidia drivers. 344.11. So far I've been playing for about 15 mins with no freeze. I'll report back if I can get to 45 mins or something.

 

[May17th]

Game never crash, only freezes.
Freezes when reading a book in the inventory or watching a cutscene.

 

[daneel53]

I agree: this is a screen freeze or game screen disappearance but the game keeps on turning.
And generally coming back to previous drivers does not suppress the bug.
Is this bug only with Nvidia graphic boards ?