BSOD on Windows 10

[RafaelVGA]

BSOD on Windows 10

I've been wanting to play The Witcher in the last days. At first, it didn't work, it crashed hard. The game would load, open the title screen and not be able to create a saved game.
Then, suddenly, it was working. I believed it was Steam's fault for installing the DirectX 9 incorrectly, as the problems involved some weird stuff when "loading". I forced install on Directx 9 and vcredist . Steam kinda reinstalled dx each time I played the game when it began to work, but, hey, as long it was working I thought it was ok. The game was perfoming beautifully and I was running at 1080p on a beautiful new monitor. It thought it was going to be awesome.

I played the prologue and messed around act I, but then it was crashing again, new game or loading my saves. Possibly the same problems I faced before. Like, hard crashing and leaving me really pissed. As it was time to format my HDD, I restored Windows 10 and decided to try again. The same problems again, BSOD describing some sort of video failure, not always the same kind. I am really sad because I was getting engaged to the gameplay. I'm willing to go back to Windows 8, but I'm afraid it won't work yet again. I'm using a dell notebook, i5 processor (don't remember exactly the number), geforce 740M 2gb, 8gb ram, fitting to the requirements of the game.

Should I try in Windows 8? Or my GOG version? Or both?

Also, I'm building a PC this month. It's going to be powerful (gtx 970, 16gb ram, etc.). Should I expect more of this problems? My intent was to play the Witcher 1 for now so I could engaged in playing the entire trilogy, as I want to start over Witcher 3 when I finish building this PC and play for the first time 1 and 2.

 

[dragonbird]

BSOD on any Windows OS since around the year 2000 means a low-level hardware or driver failure, so you probably need to get more details on exactly what it's saying and get the detailed error messages. Can you get a dxdiag on Win 10? It definitely needs a lot more information for anyone to advise you on this. (And, while there may be people able to help here, you may be better off somewhere like tomshardware - this is unlikely to be directly related to the game).

 

[RafaelVGA]

Thanks for the response! Thing is: most of the first times, it wasn't BSODing. It just froze everything. I think it did BSOD some of the times I tried to run it.

Now it is BSODing, and related to driver failures (the errors are different, but related. one of them is the video_scheduler_internal_ error, another is some trouble with nvidia.sys or whatnot), but what I fail to grasp is how can I still be playing perfectly games like MGS V and even the texture-unoptimized Fallout 4 without issues whatsoever, but with a seven year old game be getting hardware or drive failures. Wasn't it supposed to be less demanding? If the issue is the newer OS, I believe I've played games that are even older with it.

I'll exec dxdiag when I get home and post more details. Could it be possible that it is conflicting drivers because of Windows 10? Or maybe even faulty drivers that are launched EVERY SINGLE WEEK by nVidia?

 

[GuyNwah]

The game was written for a Windows driver model that is obsolete and several generations out of date. So problems from current operating system and drivers that have been developed well beyond what the game launched with are not exactly unprecedented. I have been conscientiously avoiding Windows 10 but will set up a system to try and reproduce your problem.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

A workaround for that can be running the game in Wine, since it can reproduce Windows XP environment.

 

[RafaelVGA]

Ok, so I've restored my pc to Windows 10, just to see what would happen, and it crashed again. I reverted back to Windows 8, as it was my intention, and now it works (with its flaws of stuttering, but working). I'm still afraid of some shenanigans happening, so I don't intend to update my graphics card drivers, let it be the one that is in the factory settings. Guess the problem was Windows 10 after all, probably related to drivers that Windows 10 automatically update. Let's see if it works now!
Thanks for the attention, guys!

 

[GuyNwah]

Runs fine on Windows 10, no BSODs on my setup. I arrived at this Windows 10 via an upgrade from 8.1 and then installed DirectX 9 from the Redistributables. Graphics card is a rather old AMD 6670, driver is Catalyst 15.201. Maybe nVidia drivers are still a problem on Windows 10. But it's not a fault in the game.

 

[daneel53]

Same as GuyNwah : arrive to Windows 10 by an upgrade from 8.1 on my laptop, an Acer Aspire. Before I had downloaded all the drivers dedicated to Windows 10 from Acer site, so just after the upgrade I updated the BIOS to latest version (recommended by Acer for Windows 10), installed all the Windows 10 drivers from Acer (Lan, audio, WiFi, Bluetooth, video Intel HD...) and finally drivers 359.06 from Nvidia for my 840M graphic chip (after Windows 10 update, the Nvidia graphic drivers were back to 353.54).

I already installed DirectX 9 on my new laptop under 8.1 to play The Witcher (from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8109 ), so no need to reinstall it after the upgrade in 10. Now everything works fine and The Witcher runs as well as before under 8.1.

Be careful that the graphic drivers are reverted to an older release during the upgrade so it's better to get the latest drivers from AMD or Nvidia after the upgrade and install them.