New NVidia Drivers cause crashes

[SADEBRETH]

I have been trying for a couple of months now to get the game to work with new nvidia drivers. I cannot use any drivers past 528.49. If I do install new drivers the game crashes as soon as it gets past the cyberpunk 2077 logo. I can see the CD Projekt Red logo start to stutter really bad and a few seconds later the game crashes. No error. Just crash to desktop. I have done everything below to try and fix this.

I edited the above a little because I found out Cyberengine Tweaks still loads even with mods off. I got it unloaded.

1. Turn off all Overlays - Nothing
2. Turn off all Mods - Nothing
3. Run the game as administrator - Nothing
4. Delete the settings json file - Nothing
5. Reinstalling Cyberpunk on steam - Nothing
6. Tried reinstalling windows 11 - Nothing
7. etc...

Nothing seems to help except reverting back to the old nvidia drivers. I will note that this isn't the only game that starts doing it when I update the drivers. It is literally just about any gen12 game I have. I realize that it is the nvidia drivers but if I can get this game to work then I might be able to get the others to work as well and I am getting no support from nvidia themselves. Specs for the laptop are below.

MSI GE66 Raider –Light'em Up

GE66 Raider is a portable gaming laptop packed with up to 10th Gen. Intel® Core™ i9 processor and the NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3080 graphics, cooled by cooler boost 5 for extreme performance. Mystic light, Wi-Fi 6E and the 99.9Whr large battery are best-suite

us.msi.com

It isn't a link with a virus or anything but it has everything this laptop has in it. It is more than capable of running any gen12 game on high or ultra that I have.

P.S. The description for the link is wrong. It actually has a RTX 3070 and not a 3080

 

[bauerkn]

If you don't get any error from Cyberpunk and it happens to other games, I'd recommend you take your problems to the Nvidia forums.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/

 

[SADEBRETH]

and I am getting no support from nvidia themselves.

There you go. I am trying to see if anyone else is having this same issue here and may know what might be causing it besides just saying “It’s the drivers”

 

[Milaal]

Have you tried rolling back the drivers maybe even back to match when the game was on 1.61?

 

[LeKill3rFou]

2. Turn off all Mods - Nothing
5. Reinstalling Cyberpunk on steam - Nothing

Ok, disabling mods and reinstalling the game on Steam won't fix anything if it's mod related.
First, I highly recommand to perform a clean install and try if it work or not (with the very last drivers version obviously).

How do I perform a clean install of the game? — Cyberpunk 2077 | Technical Support — CD PROJEKT RED

Welcome to CD PROJEKT RED Technical Support! Here you will find help regarding our games and services, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.

support.cdprojektred.com

 

[bauerkn]

There you go. I am trying to see if anyone else is having this same issue here and may know what might be causing it besides just saying “It’s the drivers”

Well, since you reinstalled Windows, we probably can rule out all sorts of installation issues, because you did a clean install on everything after that, right? No backups, no in-place, no appdata..

If Nvidia won't help you, go to MSI support. I think this issue is not related to Cyberpunk or it's mods.. they don't care about driver versions

 

[Guest 4561861]

Are you playing on the laptop screen or using an external monitor?
Have you tried driver 531.68? They have game CTD's listed as a bug fix.
Do you hear the cooling fans spin up when you start the game? Maybe the cooling slots need cleaning.
If you get MSI afterburner and Riva tuner installed, you can display the temps and cpu and gpu utilization and temps. That info helps.
Good luck. I know how frustrating this can be.

 

[devivre]

Did you uninstall your GPU drivers before installing a different driver version, as explained here?

I want to report a visual issue — Cyberpunk 2077 | Technical Support — CD PROJEKT RED

Welcome to CD PROJEKT RED Technical Support! Here you will find help regarding our games and services, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.

support.cdprojektred.com

 

[Milaal]

In the process of uninstalling via DDU, I personally would triple check myself on details and steps with both the NVidia Forums plus DDU as well. Also, if you’re going so far as to uninstall Graphics Drivers, I highly recommend clean uninstalling the game first and the reinstalling after the clean install of the Graphics Drivers. Hell, I don’t play that many games with GOG (just Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk) so I uninstalled GOG Galaxy as well.

 

[SADEBRETH]

Thanks everyone for all the feedback and help. This gives me more to try.

I can likely answer all your questions by saying this. I have tried every driver version past 528.49 but after that version every gen 12 game I have just crashes to desktop on startup. Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk, Baldur’s Gate 3, and there are a couple of others but if I revert back to 528.49 everything works fine. I use NVCleanInstall to reinstall the drivers. I haven’t tried studio drivers since I really don’t know what the difference is between those and game ready.

I was just hoping someone here might have experienced the same issues but it seems this is all going to be on NVidia or Microsoft to fix because this deals specifically with the nvidia drivers crashing directx.

I don’t use GOG to play any of these games. It is all steam.

Thanks everyone for all the help. I will end it here.

 

[R001c]

A bit of a hail Mary this but have you tried installing with your driver with your antivirus software off? Occasionally drivers can trip heuristic virus checkers which then can, silently, not install the bit it deems offensive. Not heard of this happening in a while but the fact that it won't take a driver beyond a certain revision reminded me of it.

 

[SADEBRETH]

Are you playing on the laptop screen or using an external monitor?
Have you tried driver 531.68? They have game CTD's listed as a bug fix.
Do you hear the cooling fans spin up when you start the game? Maybe the cooling slots need cleaning.
If you get MSI afterburner and Riva tuner installed, you can display the temps and cpu and gpu utilization and temps. That info helps.
Good luck. I know how frustrating this can be.

Thank you for this suggestion. I have somewhat fixed the issue by just installing MSI Afterburner and applying the default settings that it showed. The game still crashed a couple of times but I noticed it was getting further. After 3 or so tries it finally got passed the CD Projekt Red logo and let me in the game. I turned off Afterburner and it is now working. I am still testing but it apparently unstuck what was stuck in the card. Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I knew this was the right place to come.

 

[iCake]

Nothing like that happens with me. Latest drivers and games work just fine without any crashing.

If I were you I'd do this:

- kill off any overclock, even XMP on ram if I had any

if that does not help, I'd use MSI afterburner to undeclock my card and/or powerlimit it to see if that helps.

What really trips me off is that you are having problems with any new game like Hogwarts legacy and such. Can you try running Dxweb setup to find and install any Dx libraries you might be missing? It's not about Dx12 but who knows if it can help

Download DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer from Official Microsoft Download Center

www.microsoft.com

 

[SADEBRETH]

Nothing like that happens with me. Latest drivers and games work just fine without any crashing.

If I were you I'd do this:

- kill off any overclock, even XMP on ram if I had any

if that does not help, I'd use MSI afterburner to undeclock my card and/or powerlimit it to see if that helps.

What really trips me off is that you are having problems with any new game like Hogwarts legacy and such. Can you try running Dxweb setup to find and install any Dx libraries you might be missing? It's not about Dx12 but who knows if it can help

Download DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer from Official Microsoft Download Center

www.microsoft.com

I have already tried all of this. I will say this does not happen with my alienware desktop but it has a 3090. This is only happening with my laptop. it is supposed to be a gaming laptop but of course it uses a laptop gpu so different drivers. I don't overclock anything. I used to back when I was younger and gung ho about getting all the fps i could out of a game but I found that more times than not overclocking causes more issues than it helps.

On a side note, i did more testing after another full wipe and clean install of the OS and it seems the game still crashes on startup but it can, sometimes, get passed the logo and let me in the game but as soon as I go to the inventory screen it starts to lock up again and then just freezes so it isn't fixed after all. Seems to have just introduced more lockups. I am going to install the old drivers again. If doing a full wipe of the OS and having nothing on the system but steam and cyberpunk still causes the crashes then it is the drivers themselves wreaking havoc on the video card of this laptop. This system also has 2 gpus in it. The intel one is only for desktop applications and it switches to the nvidia one while playing a game. I put it in discrete mode and it is only using the 3070 now but it still didn't help a thing. Seems to only crash faster.

 

[bauerkn]

Maybe there is some other incompatibility with your drivers.. You can try disabling some stuff you don't need. And in general, you should not just install what Nvidia (or any other vendor for that matter) publishes when you are playing on a Laptop. Go with what is recommended for your laptop. You can find the recommended driver on MSI support page for your specific notebook.

 

[SADEBRETH]

Maybe there is some other incompatibility with your drivers.. You can try disabling some stuff you don't need. And in general, you should not just install what Nvidia (or any other vendor for that matter) publishes when you are playing on a Laptop. Go with what is recommended for your laptop. You can find the recommended driver on MSI support page for your specific notebook.

They still have 465.89 from May of 2021. No thank you.

 

[SADEBRETH]

I am sorry to resurrect this thread but may have found a fix for my issue. TdrDelay registry key setting. It allows you to set how long the computer should wait for the GPU to respond. I set it to 10 and I am consistently able to get in the game without crashes and play for long periods on my laptop. I am still testing but it looks promising and may be the fix I needed.

 

[Tokenn77]

I'll just add that I have found that NVidia 'game-ready' drivers frequently aren't game-ready at all, and it takes 2 or 3 driver updates for NVidia to get it right. As long as I've played CP77 I've experienced the game crashing periodically [fortunately not frequently] particularly if I launch the game after watching YouTube videos for a while. I found that a pro-active system reboot helped a lot...something about the drivers or video play was causing the game to choke. Currently I'm on the latest driver [536.40] and have experienced ZERO crashes, no reboot necessary to get the game to play for hours.

I suggest using a freeware app called NVCleanstall to do a clean install of your Nvidia drivers. It deletes and reinstalls all in one step, and does a clean install of GeForce Experience if you use that [I do]. It will also allow you to easily roll back to earlier drivers if that's your desire. It's worth a try before digging into your registry settings...always a risky process IMO.

 

[SADEBRETH]

I use NVCleanInstall. It is how I have done all of my testing over the past 4 or 5 months. If I update the graphics driver on my laptop past 528.49 every gen 12 game I have crashes on startup. Cyberpunk crashes at the cd projekt red logo, Hogwarts legacy gets to character selection and crashes, both spider-man games (remastered and miles) crash randomly, Gotham knights crashes randomly but mostly at startup. It has happened with every driver after the one I stated and even the newest. The fix I mentioned is the ONLY thing I have tried that has worked. In cyberpunk I still get a little stuttering when going to the inventory but that I can handle. At least I am able to play the game now. Everything works on my desktop so nvidia is just neglecting laptop gpus and don’t seem to care. They even sent out marketing 2 days ago for everyone to update their graphics cards. Kind of hard for a laptop.

 

[zzzfrofzzz]

I'll just add that I have found that NVidia 'game-ready' drivers frequently aren't game-ready at all, and it takes 2 or 3 driver updates for NVidia to get it right. As long as I've played CP77 I've experienced the game crashing periodically [fortunately not frequently] particularly if I launch the game after watching YouTube videos for a while. I found that a pro-active system reboot helped a lot...something about the drivers or video play was causing the game to choke. Currently I'm on the latest driver [536.40] and have experienced ZERO crashes, no reboot necessary to get the game to play for hours.

I suggest using a freeware app called NVCleanstall to do a clean install of your Nvidia drivers. It deletes and reinstalls all in one step, and does a clean install of GeForce Experience if you use that [I do]. It will also allow you to easily roll back to earlier drivers if that's your desire. It's worth a try before digging into your registry settings...always a risky process IMO.

game-ready feature , is more for a new release of a game . so indeed we get on the app the best balance setting graphics to get both good fps and graphics but players need to understands each new drivers "game" ready can be conflict for other games .
if a player play only one or games , pick the game ready ndvia drivers
if a player play a lot of game at the same time , its better to pick the "stable" ndvia studio drivers ( but player won't get the max performance )

by experience , now i just turn off experience game ready app , overlay stuff from ndvia . just pick the drivers and tweak setting on ndvia control panel and in-game setting graphics to avoid crash