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Having crashes to desktop? Please read, developers too, for possible workaround.
kthang
Member Posts: 172 Arc User
EDIT:
nVidia users see if you can use the GeForce 320.18 Driver as it may fix a lot of the crashes for you (http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/62791/en-us)
AMD users, try the 13.4 drivers (http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%20Vista%20-%2064&rev=13.4 64-bit Vista/Win7/Win8 drivers)
Before everyone gets their hope up, know that there are extremely many different setups for a computer. Some are desktop, some are laptop, some have integrated Intel-cards, some have nVidia, some have AMD and so on and so forth. What is described here may not work for every imaginable crash to desktop, as it is directed to a very specific one that is caused by graphics drives in connection to how this game handles them. If your crash is not connected to this, then your solution may not be here.
First of all, this is my current system specs:
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 SP1
CPU: Intel® Core i7-3770K
Mainboard: MSI Z77A-GD65, Socket-1155
RAM: Crucial DDR3 BallistiX Tactical 32GB (2x16 @ 1600MHz)
Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 GHz 3GB GDDR5 "VAPOR-X GHz Edition"
Harddrive 1: Samsung SSD 840 PROSeries 128GB
Harddrive 2: Western Digital® Desktop Black 1TB
Power Supply: Corsair HX 850W PSU
Second of all, I have been researching these crashes, or CTDs, for a very long time. Well almost a year. At first it started with a crash after exiting the client. Now, that's not usually something you worry about since you were going offline anyhow. Then, late fall last year it started to CTD in missions. First one I personally experienced it in was the last Elachi alert. Then Borg Disconnected became worse, and in the end other places were affected like Bug Hunt and the Voth Ground zone. In Event Log the Exception code always was/is: 0xc0000374
Today I almost gave up and resigned, but a friend and fleetmate said he had no issues and we have a somewhat similar system. I asked him what drivers he used, and he was still on 2013-drivers. Now, I do not update drivers too often unless they fix something or improve something in software I use. I had just updated to AMD Catalyst 14.12 drivers, the ones I had installed before were the 14.4. The ones before that was the 13.4 ones. I know the history of this because I always keep a folder with the three last driver versions I use.
I decided to give it a shot, removed the current drivers and downgraded to the 13.4 ones and started the game. Now, prior to this I CTD'd in *every* *single* match I played unless I had settings at bare minium (off, min and 0) at which I CTD'd every fith match or so but the game looked absolutely terrible as well and it always crashed.
As said, installed the Catalyst 13.4 drivers (the Vista/Win7/Win8 package, not the Win7/Win8 package as there are two) and I had no crashes for hours. I played several different characters, several different ships, powers and setups. Borg Disconnected and Bug Hunt as those always crashed. No crash, at all.
Now, what does this mean? Well, at some point after the 13.4 drivers AMD changed, upgraded or include features most likely and it conflicts with STO in a way that only the developers on both side can figure out and tell us. There has been some major revisions to the AMD driver, especially with the latest 14.12 one. And the 14.12 crashes more frequent than the 14.4.
What if you do not have AMD card and still experience crashes in, specifically, Borg Disconnected and Bug Hunt? Card manufacturers always want to have and include the same features as their competition. If AMD has it, nVidia wants it and the other way around. If you have a nVidia card try downgrading to drivers around February/March 2013.
If you have Intel onboard graphics I would consider doing the same, but I have very little experience with Intel. If you have newer graphics card that do not have drivers from the first quarter of 2013 then try the oldest one you can find. If not then you might be out of luck until Cryptic, AMD and nVidia figures this one out together.
Because, as I said earlier, the latest drivers since then do fix a lot of other things for other games that many of us play. So downgrading to 2013-drivers is at best a temporary workaround.
If you are going to reply to this topic about something not working still then please be specific and not just 'Still not working' or 'Still having crashes'. It is better to say you're not a techie and try to describe what you are experiencing than saying very little at all. Try to find out your computer specifications, write them down here. Tell us what missions have bugs, how often they crash and as much information as you can.
I am not an employee here, I do all this on my free time as a player because I like to play STO. With little informative feedback I can not help much, nor can anyone else that know something about computers.
If Crypticfrost is reading this, and I reckon he will at some point, and if this helps some people then perhaps consider making it a sticky. Also, as others have said before, it is very frustrating for people to not be able to play the game because of CTDs like this. And it is not intuitive or customary to have to revert to two year old drivers to have a temp-fix. Please keep us in the loop on progress on this one.
When it is fixed, please have a specific entry in the patch-logs so we know if we can upgrade to latest drivers again. Not just crash X is fixed, but rather Crash X was fixed and current drivers from manufacturer Y and Z does now work with the game and affected systems again.
Thank you for taking the time to read all this, hope it helps people.
nVidia users see if you can use the GeForce 320.18 Driver as it may fix a lot of the crashes for you (http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/62791/en-us)
AMD users, try the 13.4 drivers (http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%20Vista%20-%2064&rev=13.4 64-bit Vista/Win7/Win8 drivers)
Before everyone gets their hope up, know that there are extremely many different setups for a computer. Some are desktop, some are laptop, some have integrated Intel-cards, some have nVidia, some have AMD and so on and so forth. What is described here may not work for every imaginable crash to desktop, as it is directed to a very specific one that is caused by graphics drives in connection to how this game handles them. If your crash is not connected to this, then your solution may not be here.
First of all, this is my current system specs:
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 SP1
CPU: Intel® Core i7-3770K
Mainboard: MSI Z77A-GD65, Socket-1155
RAM: Crucial DDR3 BallistiX Tactical 32GB (2x16 @ 1600MHz)
Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 GHz 3GB GDDR5 "VAPOR-X GHz Edition"
Harddrive 1: Samsung SSD 840 PROSeries 128GB
Harddrive 2: Western Digital® Desktop Black 1TB
Power Supply: Corsair HX 850W PSU
Second of all, I have been researching these crashes, or CTDs, for a very long time. Well almost a year. At first it started with a crash after exiting the client. Now, that's not usually something you worry about since you were going offline anyhow. Then, late fall last year it started to CTD in missions. First one I personally experienced it in was the last Elachi alert. Then Borg Disconnected became worse, and in the end other places were affected like Bug Hunt and the Voth Ground zone. In Event Log the Exception code always was/is: 0xc0000374
Today I almost gave up and resigned, but a friend and fleetmate said he had no issues and we have a somewhat similar system. I asked him what drivers he used, and he was still on 2013-drivers. Now, I do not update drivers too often unless they fix something or improve something in software I use. I had just updated to AMD Catalyst 14.12 drivers, the ones I had installed before were the 14.4. The ones before that was the 13.4 ones. I know the history of this because I always keep a folder with the three last driver versions I use.
I decided to give it a shot, removed the current drivers and downgraded to the 13.4 ones and started the game. Now, prior to this I CTD'd in *every* *single* match I played unless I had settings at bare minium (off, min and 0) at which I CTD'd every fith match or so but the game looked absolutely terrible as well and it always crashed.
As said, installed the Catalyst 13.4 drivers (the Vista/Win7/Win8 package, not the Win7/Win8 package as there are two) and I had no crashes for hours. I played several different characters, several different ships, powers and setups. Borg Disconnected and Bug Hunt as those always crashed. No crash, at all.
Now, what does this mean? Well, at some point after the 13.4 drivers AMD changed, upgraded or include features most likely and it conflicts with STO in a way that only the developers on both side can figure out and tell us. There has been some major revisions to the AMD driver, especially with the latest 14.12 one. And the 14.12 crashes more frequent than the 14.4.
What if you do not have AMD card and still experience crashes in, specifically, Borg Disconnected and Bug Hunt? Card manufacturers always want to have and include the same features as their competition. If AMD has it, nVidia wants it and the other way around. If you have a nVidia card try downgrading to drivers around February/March 2013.
If you have Intel onboard graphics I would consider doing the same, but I have very little experience with Intel. If you have newer graphics card that do not have drivers from the first quarter of 2013 then try the oldest one you can find. If not then you might be out of luck until Cryptic, AMD and nVidia figures this one out together.
Because, as I said earlier, the latest drivers since then do fix a lot of other things for other games that many of us play. So downgrading to 2013-drivers is at best a temporary workaround.
If you are going to reply to this topic about something not working still then please be specific and not just 'Still not working' or 'Still having crashes'. It is better to say you're not a techie and try to describe what you are experiencing than saying very little at all. Try to find out your computer specifications, write them down here. Tell us what missions have bugs, how often they crash and as much information as you can.
I am not an employee here, I do all this on my free time as a player because I like to play STO. With little informative feedback I can not help much, nor can anyone else that know something about computers.
If Crypticfrost is reading this, and I reckon he will at some point, and if this helps some people then perhaps consider making it a sticky. Also, as others have said before, it is very frustrating for people to not be able to play the game because of CTDs like this. And it is not intuitive or customary to have to revert to two year old drivers to have a temp-fix. Please keep us in the loop on progress on this one.
When it is fixed, please have a specific entry in the patch-logs so we know if we can upgrade to latest drivers again. Not just crash X is fixed, but rather Crash X was fixed and current drivers from manufacturer Y and Z does now work with the game and affected systems again.
Thank you for taking the time to read all this, hope it helps people.
Post edited by kthang on
0
Comments
I am running Nvidia card.
The issue, for me, started with one of the two patches just before Christmas. I think it was the one prior to the "server stability" one.
Before that I have had no issue with the game at all.
There was a massive post about this issue but somebody merged it with the server outage on Dec 31st.
I cant believe they have not sorted that out
I'm very disappointed
I reckon you may have read my whole post, or not. Not sure either how often nVidia rolls out drivers but, or how new your card is. What I'd do if I where you is to go back to a driver around march/april 2013 and install that one. If that one works, then use that and be happy or move slowly onward to newer drivers until you find where it stopped working.
This is, with high certainty, a driver <-> STO issue. It is *not* easy and fast for developers to fix because they need to pinpoint what it is about driver instructions and whatnot that conflicts with STO. Fixes like this needs cooperation between driver developers and game developers, communication between the two. If the STO devs can point at one driver that works and the next version did not then they are that much closer to weed it out.
So, in summary and essence for nVidia owners. Downgrade, if possible for your card, to drivers March/April 2013. If your card is so new it does not have these old drivers, go back to the earliest ones you can find after March/April 2013 and work your way forward.
Yes, it does require participation from the community but some times we have to do so to speed things up. I can not say this clearly enough, this is not something that is easy to pinpoint and fix for the developers.
For people that have ready this, if you have been successful after doing this please post as well. It would be nice if we could help each other sort this out, and in doing so help the developers fix this as well.
After I did this, and went back to an earlier driver, I have not experienced any issues at all. All just happy gaming.
Since I built my PC I have been running it with the drivers that have been up to date on the day I've installed OS (July).
As I mentioned before, the issue started exactly on Thursday evening just after the patch have been installed.
Surprisingly I can play the game, get CtD (randomly or during any "combat") if I log back in I can be in game for hours without any issue. After restarting the game, everything starts from scratch.
It has to be something connected to that patch.
I will try to test this on other PC's I have available to me as soon as I'll have some spare time.
I did not have lots of issues either until late last fall, and yes some patch did break something and it is driver related as well. One affects the other.
Since you just say July, I reckon you mean July 2014? You build computers as well, thus I reckon you are comfortable with installing and removing software as well.
Some times when something break, going back to previous drivers is a workaround. This is not the only game that has had that, many over the years. Why older drivers may work and newer may not, well while I have been doing hardware for over 30 years my software experience is limited.
It seems you are reluctant to try to revert, but that is the only advise I can give you at the moment. It worked on AMD. AMD and nVidia has the same crash, described in the same way, from users with the same exception code. Most likely AMD and nVidia included some new instructions in their driver and these conflict with the game. AMD and nVidia both want to have the same functionality and obscure enough compatibility the other has, so they follow each other usually on the same time or one driver after the other is released.
As you know, removing one set of driver and trying others is just two reboots away. Not too much hassle when considering it may be beneficial. If your card, not knowing how new the generation of it is, has drivers that are old enough and work in the same way.
Important, for nVidia users see if you can use the GeForce 320.18 Driver as it may fix a lot of the crashes for you (http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/62791/en-us).
http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/59641/en-us
that was the last stable one before they destabilized it to the point you're getting crashes and even blue screens from time to time.
to my knowledge they still didn't fix it over 2 years later. sounds familiar.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
See this thread for part of the fix that helped me. It seems some people have trouble with running MSAA in full screen mode, and disabling that reduces crashes too.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1272031
Or the other way around. I had issues with Dx9, but Dx11 helped. But reverting to older drivers seems to be the most important thing.
Now, if only a Cryptic representative could give us a nod it would be very nice. I really do hope they can work together with nVidia and AMD to find out what went "wrong" in which driver version.
now if there are multiple games broken by new drivers across multiple hardware configs then that is a nvidia/ati problem. if one or only a few older games are broken then that's something the developers of those games are going to have to address. technology marches inexorably forward and backwards compatibility has limits.
nvidia/ati and every other hardware/driver producer has to keep up with the technology, backwards compatibility is not primary in that design process. there is little incentive to make sure everything made can run older software when their profits are based around newer technology which supports newer software.
short form, cryptic needs to talk to amd/nvidia to figure out how they can adapt sto to continue bug free on newer drivers and hardware...at least bug free from driver issues.
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
Also don't forget the Mac client also suffers from constant CTDs too... it's completely unplayable on my new 15" Retina MacBook Pro...
Captain Ariel Trueheart Department of Temporal Investigations
U.S.S. Valkyrie - NCC 991701
=/\= ================================= =/\=
Thank you for doing so, I am quite certain this will be a long leap towards fixing CTDs for a whole range of people if you/amd/nvidia can figure out what happened along the way.
Same goes for Mac I reckon, check your graphics driver version/date and downgrade to one from around April 2013.
Did you try this fix btw? We all want to know how the fix affects everyone. I reckon you read the thread in its entirety ? ;-)
For the Nvidia users:
In one of the other crash threads I stated I was on 320.18 but I'm actually on 332.21 on GTX 770. The old computer was 320.18.
I actually crash less than on the old computer on 320.18 but the old computer was running on a 250 GTS so it wasn't surprising.
One of the things that I found made the 332.21 not crash was:
- Running in Windowed Mode. Majority of the crashes happened to me when alt-tabbing from Full Screen mode.
- Don't use TXAA. TXAA made the clients not only crash after map changes, but I knew something was off on 332.21 due to rendering artifacts. I also have bloom turned off (both quality and the slider). In both MSAA and TXAA modes, playing with the bloom settings made the client crash after changing those settings.
I use DX11 mode and it works fine.
I personally experienced the 0xc0000374 error as I was attacking the temple in "Dust to Dust" on my laptop after my desktop (with it's 6GB GTX780 on 344.48 drivers) previously had the crash at the start of the trench run in that mission (though it got through the space combat okay).
Edit @ 10:40am AEDT:
I've tried to install the 320.18 Nvidia drivers, but the installer keeps spitting back at me saying "This graphics driver could not find compatible hardware", when I try running it. I'm going to attempt to force it to run by clearing out my 344.48 drivers (providing DSR and such on 700-series GPUs), but I worry that might not make the 320.18 drivers work either.
Edit @ 11:05am AEDT:
Seems the 320.18 Nvidia drivers just will NOT work with a GTX 700-series GPU, 337.88 seems to be the earliest set of drivers one can install and use with these cards.
Edit @ 11:30am AEDT:
freshly installed the 337.88 drivers for my GTX780, loaded up STO, and C2D when fighting the Vaadwaur at the start of the trench run in the mission I mentioned before. -.-;
Oh yea, and I now have this:
STO_SLI_overlay_32018.png
Some weird SLI overlay thing is now covering a part of my screen. WHAT IS THIS @#%$^*!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :mad::mad::mad:
EDIT: Found it out. Now, will continue play-testing with the two-year-old driver.
YOU HEAR THAT, CRYPTIC? PLAY-TESTING. MAYBE TRY IT SOME TIME BEFORE RELEASING NEW CONTENT. IT MIGHT RESULT IN A HAPPIER PLAYER-BASE.
WHAT'S THAT? I'M SHOUTING REALLY LOUDLY? Oh, sorry. Wasn't sure you guys could hear me over the screams of other players raging over the latest buggy minigame.
EDIT2: Driver rollback no go. Crashed to desktop during Undine Battlezone Planet Killer event after 30 minutes of paying. Bloom effects high with MSAA x4. Will disable both for next test.
EDIT3: Crashed once again after 3 hours, after completion of Dust to Dust, trying to transwarp to ESD. Bloom effects off. Antialising off. All other GFX settings max.
That would be the thread i created. I remember it because when i saw it was merged, my first thought was "wtf??!!, why merge a crash thread with a server outage thread for? They not even related and it didnt solve the problem for the crashes "
A couple of months later we are having the same issues again:rolleyes:
Two things....
1) Those drivers are ancient, and one should have somewhat updated drivers. :rolleyes:
2) Game worked for me until anniversary patch, then all hell broke lose.
So I wonder what they did in anniversary patch.....
A test server is supposed to be used to properly test patches before patching anything....
I have the same problem since the anniversary patch. There is no official announcement yet, isn't it? And I have my main toon stuck in a loading screen and I can't do anything from this anniversary, what it's a shame, since I have been in the game since the beginning.
Oh I am fully aware these are from the early medieval times, but the only way to avoid crashes so far for many.
These are compound issues, a new thing on top makes it worse. I had issues that just escalated until one day it started crashing.
Point of the exercise to revert to drivers this old was to direct attention to a point where compatibility between the drivers and game just started getting problematic. This is by no means a permanent fix as I play other games and if it comes down to playing Star Trek Online with 3 year old drivers and having other games that do not play well then I'm just going to say byebye to STO at some point as it is not the only game I or others play. Be it single- or multi-player.
That is the fifth PVE queue today that I have started, CTD'ed out of, restarted the game, reentered the mission, only to discover that the mission is over, and i missed the reward.
MISSED. THE. REWARD.
AND THIS HAPPENS. OVER. AND OVER. AND OVER.
EPIC FAIL. FOREVER.
Been on STO for three hours today and I've had three crashes so far. One was instance switching. One was panning the camera around in system space. Don't remember what triggered the other one.
Win7 Ultimate x64
Intel i7 4820k
32gb RAM
nVidia GTX 770 4gb x2 in SLI (v347.09 driver)
Running game with DX11 in windowed maximized mode
time for cryptic to fix this problem, as i am sure some of us are sick of it crashing all the time.
Edit :
So, since rolling my drivers back didnt work, i reinstalled the latest drivers. As i was doing that, i remember some time ago reading in a forum somewhere, that the 3D controller driver and the 3D driver for Nvidia were causing problems, so, upon remembering this, as i was doing the reinstall of my drivers, i done a custom install, (as i always do because i dont use geforce experience as that also caused me problems a while back, again read that in a forum somewhere too, uninstalled it, fixed problem), so all i was actually installing this time was the video drivers, and audio drivers.
Since doing this a few hours ago, not one crash. So, if you have 3D controller and 3D drivers installed, might be worth a try in getting rid of them.
OR cryptic looks into why our 3D drivers and game client are clashing.
Sounds strange this might be the cause tho, as i dont play the game in 3D or in simulated 3D.
And best of all, you still get the cool down for the mission. :P
A test server is supposed to be used to properly test patches before patching anything....