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Game Crashing, Graphics Driver Crash

Nar Yneitred shared this bug ago

Won't Fix

What is going on? Been trying to play a solo game all day today and the game keeps crashing with an error message about graphics driving crashing. Maybe helpful to know that sun light is bleeding through the planet creating this glowing effect on trees and terrain as well as a very bright red spot light that blinds you for a split second (mainly happens when flying and it flashes through the terrain, couldn't get a screen shot of it since it was to fast and random).

Crashes when? Randomly, could be 5 seconds after loading or 30 minutes. The screen will sometimes stutter. If I shake the camera violently when it stutters it is a sure way to cause it to crash. Sometimes I am just jet packing straight, opening control panel, or building. Happens at all times of the in-game day.

Hardware and OS? Window 10, Intel i9-9900K, RTX 4090 (not OC), 16GB DDR4 RAM, NVME drive.

Last time you played without crashing? I was able to play for over an hour with and without mods earlier in the week and played on Thursday for over an hour with a friend using mods

Original save file was a modded single player game with experimental turned on. I created two test save files where I performed various attempts to fix the crashing using community posts. These saves where also used to find a cause.

What I have tried (in various orders and multiple times):

Remove all mods.
Turn off post processing.
Validate files.
Restart pc.
Reinstall game.
Delete "SpaceEngineers.cfg".
Start a new game.
Update graphics driver.

NOTE: There was nothing in the cache and ShaderCache2 folder. There was no ShaderCache folder.

I saved a copy of the game on steam which Dan2D3D (Developer) has tested and it appears to run fine on his end.

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I have the same bug

Replies (12)

Nar Yneitred ●

I have tried a few more things and it still doesn't work.

Started a new game. No mods. System, earthlike planet start. Medium default settings, FOV set to default. (Crash no error message, had to force quit)
Started a new game. No mods. System, earthlike planet start. High default settings, FOV set to default. (Crash no error message, had to force quit)

Took about 15 to 30 minutes to crash. This was the first time that I didn't get a crash error nor a window to submit log. Had to force quit the application. Checked event viewer and got this error "The description for Event ID 0 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer." twice, followed by this warning "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." (Event ID 4101). These three events happened in 3 seconds.

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Nar Yneitred ●

This is the log file from another clean uninstall. I am posting this one because the parameters are as default as you can get and in the log under crash info at the end IsGPU is false and IsTask is true, which is different from the first log of IsGPU true and IsTask false.

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Keen SWH QA Agent 2 ●

Hello, Nar!

Thank you for writing to us.

Upon inspecting the shared log file, we found several SharpDX.SharpDXException: HRESULT: [0x887A0005], Module: [SharpDX.DXGI], ApiCode [DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED/DeviceRemoved] errors. This error generally indicates that the video/graphics card is not properly set and/or connected at a hardware level.

Please review this discussion about the same issue and try the suggested workarounds, such as checking if the GPU/system is overclocked or removing, cleaning, and reseating the GPU and its connections.

Once you have tried the mentioned workarounds from the discussion, please launch the game again and check if the issue persists. If it does, send us the new log file and the complete error text from the event viewer.

Kind Regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Nar Yneitred ●

Hi QAD

From the provided link

Check GPU/system temps/voltages with something like HWMonitor Temps are fine for all systems. No irregularities in voltage either.
If temperature issues, check GPU and system fans are clean and running Not an issue, but cleaned them all anyway.
Switch GPU driver settings to high-performance (i.e. not quality/high quality) Not sure where this is. GPU power management mode is set to prefer maximum performance (changing between normal and prefer max perf did nothing).
Update to latest GPU drivers (clean install) Clean install of latest driver.
If the GPU/system is over-clocked, revert to stock clock speeds Not over-clocked
Remove, clean and re-seat the GPU and connections Removed video card, cleaned PCIe slot, checked all power connectors, both ends.

The crash still occurs. Attached are the game log and event viewer logs.

I should note that I am able to play other games just fine. 1440p and high to ultra settings. Temperatures hardly go over 50C in the GPU.

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Nar Yneitred ●

Update: I did two more experiments.

Join a multiplayer game.
Create a private game (instead of offline). Also turned off Autosave (will need to try a private game with autosave on).

Both of these games worked so far. I have played about an hour in each and not so much as a stutter. Note that I would only be able to play about 30 min of the game and then it would crash, so playing for an hour is a milestone. This isn't definitive proof that it is working since I would need to try again in a different environment. Both these games were in the snow area with no grass, so will need to try it out in grassland areas.

BUT this is a major step forward and it allows me to play the game. Not sure why offline and/or autosave is breaking the game, if that is what is breaking the game.

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Keen SWH QA Agent 2 ●

Hello, Nar!

Thank you for sharing additional information.

We are pleased to hear that you can now play the game, though we understand it still crashes occasionally. From the event viewer log, we have noticed an issue with your Nvidia drivers. This could be due to several factors, such as a broken update or corrupted files.

To resolve this, please perform a clean installation of your Nvidia drivers using the Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) tool, then reinstall the latest driver version from this page.

After the clean installation, please check the following:

From the main menu, go to Options > Display.
Ensure that your Nvidia GPU is selected in the Video Adapter section. If it is not, select it and save the changes.

Please let us know if this resolves your issue.

Kind regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Nar Yneitred ●

QAD,

I have done that already before reinstalling the game for a second time. I can attempt again and get a fresh log for you using it (if it doesn't resolve the issue).

I understand that the log keeps saying it is a driver issue, but I am still at odds with that since it does fine with all other games and multiplayer sessions work just fine.

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Nar Yneitred ●

I tried two more experiments. Note, I have not performed a clean install since QAD's last comment about performing it.

TLDR: Disable autosave, should fix the problem. Autosave may be doing something that causes the GPU driver to crash.

I created two more new games.

Private game with Autosave enabled.
Offline game with Autosave disabled.

Game 1 crashed about 10min in, shortly after the autosave activated.

Game 2 did not crash and played for about 30min.

I went back and looked at a few logs, including the ones submitted and there is a pattern of the GPU crashing during or just after the autosave kicks in. There is typically, in the logs, about 5 GPU calls between autosaves. During the second or third autosave it crashes either that second or within a minute of that event. The next event is typically the GPU call I mentioned before and shown here:

2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  STATISTICS LEGEND,time,ReceivedPerSecond,SentPerSecond,PeakReceivedPerSecond,PeakSentPerSecond,OverallReceived,OverallSent,CPULoadSmooth,ThreadLoadSmooth,GetOnlinePlayerCount,Ping,GCMemoryUsed,ProcessMemory,PCUBuilt,PCU,GridsCount,RenderCPULoadSmooth,RenderGPULoadSmooth,HardwareCPULoad,HardwareAvailableMemory,FrameTime,LowSimQuality,FrameTimeLimit,FrameTimeCPU,FrameTimeGPU,CPULoadLimit,TrackedMemory,GCMemoryAllocated,PersistedEncounters,EncounterEntities, DRS
2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  STATISTICS,540.15,0,0,0,0,0,0,14.25329,134.6475,1,0,1532.624,10933.81,1446,98937,2,34.87098,42.68973,0.1726301,5856,8.270879,0,16.66667,2.884136,3.530816,100,8150235530,1532.624,0,0,-1
2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  MEMORY LEGEND,Srv,Uav,Read,Debug,Index,Audio,SrvUav,Vertex,Buffers,Physics,Planets,Systems,Textures,Indirect,Constant,RwTextures,Dx11Render,MeshBuffers,FileTextures,DepthStencil,TileTextures,Voxels-Native,CustomTextures,HeightmapFaces,Mesh GPU Buffers,BitStreamBuffers,GeneratedTextures,FileArrayTextures,NativeDictionaries,CubemapDataBuffers,HeightDetailTexture,MyDeviceWriteBuffers,ShadowCascadesStatsBuffers,AI_PathFinding,EpicOnlineServices,EpicOnlineServicesWrapper
2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  MEMORY VALUES,2,1,0,1,12,854,140,1393,1639,88,849,7772,3502,0,0,196,5141,0,1345,28,0,79,28,384,69,0,0,1647,758,456,8,20,0,0,0,0

This leads me to strongly believe there is something going on during the autosave that causes the GPU driver to crash. This could be something that occurs during the autosave that puts an intense load on the GPU for a split second which could also cause these types of crashes.

I tried two more experiments. Note, I have not performed a clean install since QAD's last comment about performing it.

TLDR: Disable autosave, should fix the problem. Autosave may be doing something that causes the GPU driver to crash.

I created two more new games.

Private game with Autosave enabled.
Offline game with Autosave disabled.

Game 1 crashed about 10min in, shortly after the autosave activated.

Game 2 did not crash and played for about 30min.

2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  STATISTICS LEGEND,time,ReceivedPerSecond,SentPerSecond,PeakReceivedPerSecond,PeakSentPerSecond,OverallReceived,OverallSent,CPULoadSmooth,ThreadLoadSmooth,GetOnlinePlayerCount,Ping,GCMemoryUsed,ProcessMemory,PCUBuilt,PCU,GridsCount,RenderCPULoadSmooth,RenderGPULoadSmooth,HardwareCPULoad,HardwareAvailableMemory,FrameTime,LowSimQuality,FrameTimeLimit,FrameTimeCPU,FrameTimeGPU,CPULoadLimit,TrackedMemory,GCMemoryAllocated,PersistedEncounters,EncounterEntities, DRS
2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  STATISTICS,540.15,0,0,0,0,0,0,14.25329,134.6475,1,0,1532.624,10933.81,1446,98937,2,34.87098,42.68973,0.1726301,5856,8.270879,0,16.66667,2.884136,3.530816,100,8150235530,1532.624,0,0,-1
2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  MEMORY LEGEND,Srv,Uav,Read,Debug,Index,Audio,SrvUav,Vertex,Buffers,Physics,Planets,Systems,Textures,Indirect,Constant,RwTextures,Dx11Render,MeshBuffers,FileTextures,DepthStencil,TileTextures,Voxels-Native,CustomTextures,HeightmapFaces,Mesh GPU Buffers,BitStreamBuffers,GeneratedTextures,FileArrayTextures,NativeDictionaries,CubemapDataBuffers,HeightDetailTexture,MyDeviceWriteBuffers,ShadowCascadesStatsBuffers,AI_PathFinding,EpicOnlineServices,EpicOnlineServicesWrapper
2024-05-20 11:10:37.938 - Thread:   1 ->  MEMORY VALUES,2,1,0,1,12,854,140,1393,1639,88,849,7772,3502,0,0,196,5141,0,1345,28,0,79,28,384,69,0,0,1647,758,456,8,20,0,0,0,0

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Nar Yneitred ●

Game still crashes from time to time even with the afore mentioned "fixes" I posted. Game keeps crashing after playing "fine" the last two days.

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Keen SWH QA Agent 2 ●

Hello, Nar!

We are sorry to hear that the issue still persists for you.

Since you mentioned that the issue continues even after disabling autosave, we recommend performing a clean reinstall of your Nvidia drivers using the Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) tool. The previous Windows event logs indicate that there may be issues with your Nvidia drivers.

If the issue continues after performing a clean installation of the drivers, please send us the latest game and Windows Event Viewer logs.

Kind Regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Nar Yneitred ●

Used DDU to clear the drivers. Did a fresh clean install of the latest GPU driver from Nvidia for the RTX 4090. Crashed. See log attached.

I would like you guys to look past a driver issue on my end being the case. I have tried 3 different drivers so far. All using DDU to clean up the old drivers and then performing a clean install of them. I have done probably everything mentioned on this forum, reddit, steam, and probably other random forums. I have done generic GPU crash fixes for the event viewer error. I have run 3DMARK benchmarks and stress test without issues. I don't know what else to do and I really want to play this game. I want to enjoy it without worrying about it crashing for no reason.

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Keen SWH QA Agent 2 ●

Hello, Nar!

We are sorry to hear that a clean installation of your graphics driver did not resolve the issue. To further resolve this issue, please try the following steps:

Update your OS.
Reinstall the Visual Studio redistributable: Download the latest version from the official Microsoft website (x86: vc_redist.x86.exe OR x64: vc_redist.x64.exe).
Run the game as a different user (a corrupt Windows user profile can also cause such errors).

Additionally, some players have resolved similar issues with the following workaround:

Add -skipintro to the game launch options.
Rename or delete the folder located at \Steam\SteamApps\common\SpaceEngineers\Content\Videos.
Delete the directory at \AppData\Roaming\SpaceEngineers\Promo. You can access this by typing %appdata% into your Windows search bar, navigating to the Roaming folder, and then to SpaceEngineers.

We hope one of these solutions will work for you. Please let us know if the issue persists.

Kind Regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Nar Yneitred ●

Update your OS. Have done this with previous attempt. Will try it again.
Reinstall the Visual Studio redistributable: Download the latest version from the official Microsoft website (x86: vc_redist.x86.exe OR x64: vc_redist.x64.exe). Have done this with previous attempt. Will try it again.
Run the game as a different user (a corrupt Windows user profile can also cause such errors) Have not tried this, but why would it affect only SE not any other part of my job, gaming, or tasks? Can try this over the weekend, but I have my doubts.

I have noticed that the following fixes were for startup crashes not for in-game crashes, but I will try them anyway. I do not have any faith that these would work since this would only affect the initial launch of the game. Something really wrong with the game would have to take place for the splash and main menu to be running while in the middle of a session. Also these workarounds shouldn't be needed, fixes should be implemented for this.

Add -skipintro to the game launch options. Will try out.
Rename or delete the folder located at \Steam\SteamApps\common\SpaceEngineers\Content\Videos. Deleted and will try out.
Delete the directory at \AppData\Roaming\SpaceEngineers\Promo. You can access this by typing %appdata% into your Windows search bar, navigating to the Roaming folder, and then to SpaceEngineers. Deleted and will try out.

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Nar Yneitred ●

Have tried everything above except the create new windows profile. Still crashing.

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Ronald Bess ●

Hey there Nar Yneitred! I am new(ish) to the game (just over 280hrs) and up to about the 200 hour mark my game would constantly crash with the same errors on average about every 10 to 15 minutes (sometimes within 2-10minutes) of gameplay when all of my other games (well over 150) over the years have never had this issue. I use i9-10900, RTX 4090, 64Gb Ram, running on an M.2 drive all water cooled and never gets over 50c on heavy load. Like you I tried every fix I could find and nothing worked except turning down the shader settings in the menu and lowering waaaaay down the grass and tree spawn distance and even then would crash in less than an hour of play. I finally found something that made a significant change to this. I loaded up the Nvidia Control Panel and went to Manage 3D settings and scrolled down to the "Power management mode" option and chose the "Prefer maximum performance" option. that seemed to do the trick for me so I cranked up all the graphics settings in the game to max (I mean come on man I got a bangin' system) and so far it works far better than it did before. Still crash every now and then but can get many hours at a time in now without a crash. I turned down the shaders a bit and lowered the grass and tree spawning quite a ways and can go a really long time now without a crash. Hope this helps you out!!

p.s: By the way I am older guy and have been building customer computers for over 20 years and have worked in the computer industry a long time and have built hundreds of computers...never did get into the programming side though regretfully.

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Nar Yneitred ●

Thanks Ronald,

I have tried the power management mode to "Prefer maximum performance" early on. It was suggested on a different post or different forum. I can try to lower the shader, grass and trees to see if that helps. The crashing recently has been so random that I could play 5 min or all day without a crash. Something that I have noticed is that the higher end systems, specifically those with 4090s seems to be the main posters for these crashes recently. But correlation doesn't mean causation, could be a coincidence.

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Nar Yneitred ●

Hey QAD,

Tried with a new windows profile. It crashed, see log.

What thing shall we try next? I am starting to feel like I am a part of the QA department.

Files:

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Nar Yneitred ●

QAD,

I would really like you to start looking into this more seriously. I have been looking through the forum to find similar threads to this one. Specifically crashing mid game with an RTX 4090. Tried to limit the search to the last year. All if not most of these never got truly resolved. On the Keen Forum, one has been turned to 'won't fix' and another is 'investigating'. I have given these posts my upvote as well for having a similar issue.

Keen Forum

"Graphics device driver crashed" - 2mo ago
"Game crash consistently with GPU Overheated" - 10mo ago (This one is describing pretty much like how I am crashing.)
"Random GPU Suspended Crashes" - 3mo ago

Steam Forum

"GPU driver crashes since last update" - 13mo ago (In addition, has recent post as of 2mo ago with similar issue)
"Graphics device driver has crashed" - 13mo ago
"GPU Suspended crashes" - 4mo ago

"Consistent crashing" - 12mo ago

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Nar Yneitred ●

Any word on what could be the problem?

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Keen SWH QA Agent 2 ●

Hello, Nar Yneitred!

Thank you for pointing out that the issue you and others with the same graphics card have been experiencing could be related. We will further investigate this lead to determine if these issues are indeed related to specific graphics cards.

Meanwhile, could you please try the following workarounds that might resolve the issue for you?

Lower In-Game Graphics Settings:

Temporarily lower some of the in-game graphics settings such as shadows, textures, and post-processing effects to see if this stabilizes the game.

Disable Background Overlays:

Disable any overlays from applications such as GeForce Experience, Discord, or Steam, as these can sometimes cause conflicts.

Please let us know if this changes anything on your end.

Kind Regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Nar Yneitred ●

Thanks for the reply. I didn't get a notification sent to my email for this, so I am only now seeing it. I was wondering if I was ghosted, good to know that I was not.

I will try the two options out in the next few days, but I would like to note that lowering the in-game graphics settings shouldn't be a long or even short term solution. I didn't get an RTX4090 just to play games on low settings. If it helps isolate the problem I will gladly provide any results I get.

Thanks again.

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Nar Yneitred ●

I could not get the game to crash on the lowest or medium graphics settings. It is playable, but it causes micro stuttering that was headache inducing. This was very apparent in the lowest setting where things appeared and disappeared while looking around. The render distance felt like it was at arms reach. Medium settings were better, but still noticeable.

I disabled the background overlay and it didn't crash, but I haven't tested on the high graphics settings.

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QA KeenSWH ●

Hello, Nar,

thank you for your reply.

Do I understand it correctly, that the game is no more crashing for you after disabling the background overlay? Is the game working for you as expected?

Thank you in advance for any update of the situation on you side.

Kind regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Keen SWH QA Agent 2 ●

Hello Nar,

as there has been no reply to this thread in some time, we will close it. If you're experiencing this issue, please create a new thread.

Kind regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Nar Yneitred ●

Removing the overlays didn't work either. Log files attached. This is for completion of this thread.

Files:

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Carter Madsen ●

Hey,

I recently started getting back into the game after not playing it for a while, and now I'm having the same bug described here. It worked fine 2 days ago when I was hosting a private world, but since last night(still on the same world) it has started crashing after 10-30 minutes with either a message saying my graphics card has overheated and what-not, or no crash message at all.

I've tried everything I can think of as well as everything I've found so far online. I've ran the game as an administrator, updating my drivers (w/ clean install), re-installing the game, made sure windows was updated, changing and tweaking the graphics settings, and literally everything else previously said in this thread. Nothing has worked so far. I'm using a Intel I7-13700K, a RTX 3080, 64Gb ddr4 ram, with a m.2. Never had problems with the game before, this suddenly came out of nowhere. It'd be nice to actually be able to play without losing my progress every 10 minutes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Nar Yneitred ●

Hi Carter, this post no longer is active. Please see my other post with a very similar name and add any comments to that if you can. Thanks

The temporary fix I found so far was to turn grass density and draw distance to 0 and lowest it could go (49m), respectively. It sucks to play without grass, but I would take a look into it.

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