Frequent CTD's - Expert Advice?

centaurianalpha

Since the Anniversary/Season 12, my game is crashing to desktop more than ever, often without even changing maps or playing through a combat instance. I initially thought it might be that my Intel integrated graphics was now insufficient, or had out-of-date drivers, so I installed a GeForce 1050 Ti graphics card (7GHz core clock, 4 Gb DDR5 memory). If anything, the CTD's have gotten worse, and I am getting to the point where I have to restart the game multiple times per hour just to run my character's daily rounds. Sometimes, the Cryptic error handler reports something like this: D3D - DXGI_error_device_removed while flushing GPU (#101726772). BTW - I am using reduced file streaming...

I really can't stand the look of the 2.0 lighting, so my GFX settings are these (running on Win7 Pro 32-bit on i3 3.4GHz CPU w/4Gb active system memory):

D3D 11; Aspect ratio - auto; Brightness 85%; Scale - 1.0; Anisotropic aliasing - TXAA 4x; Postprocessing - off; Bloom - low; SS Occlusion - off; Underwater view - off; Max. Physics particles - 250; Detail (all) - high; Reflections - low; Max lights - 4; Shadows - medium; Lighting - high; Dynamic shading - on; Lighting 2.0 - off; Limit inactive CPU usage - on; Framerate stabilization - on; Framerate auto - on; MC - on.

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!

jaguarskx

Disable "Reduced File Streaming".

You only have 4GB of physical RAM of which only around 3.4GB is usable because the remaining RAM is used to address the hardware in the PC. The purpose of "Reduced File Streaming" is to keep as much game data in physical RAM as possible. Windows and STO must share that approximate 3.4GB of RAM. Forcing the game to store as much as possible with very little RAM likely causes the game to crash when there is no more RAM available.

centaurianalpha

Well, the graphics card has 4Gb of memory, as well, but perhaps the game engine is not sharing that much data with the GPU. In any case, I have since discovered that if I revert my graphics settings to <default>, the game rarely crashes, even at ESD & Qo'nos, which were a guaranteed CTD before. Apparently, the memory/reduced file streaming is not the only thing contributing to frequent crashes. Sadly, I have to put up with horrid overlighting & oversaturation on some maps, until I can do some more refined trial & error with the graphics settings.

I'm planning an upgrade to Win10 Pro 64-bit, and then I'll alos get the full use of the 8Gb RAM already on the mobo, and that will hopefully solve the remaining issues (at least until Cryptic's next release of bugs...).

thunderfoot

When was the last time you conducted a Force Verify of the game files? Takes about a half hour or less. Every time a new Season or Patch somes out, it is one of the first things I do. Another thing I do is defragment my hard drive about once a month. My laptop will place STO game files into any open space it can find where the game file will fit. Regardless of where this is. Lastly, I use the Task Manager to shut down any and all things not needed which running in the background whenever I am playing STO.

I realize all of the above are pretty obvious to most people and you may have already done them. But sometimes someone needs to hear the same advice given in a different tone of voice for it to make sense.

centaurianalpha

When I was having a crash multiple times per day, I would usually start with a force-verify; when the crash happens again upon changing maps, it's obviously not the files causing the crash. My computer is set to defrag automatically every week, so that is also not an issue. Once I left the graphics set to default (maximum), I could run pretty much any STF without crashing, and even made a complete cycle through ESD without a crash. I just hope I can correct the harsh glare of Lighting 2.0 without going back to such an unstable game...