DDO crashing (random / ALT+TABbing - Win7/Win8) [SOLVED]

[Marc]

Greetings all!

I'm a DDO player since its launch and never had crashing issues with it. Until now.

I'll give full details, but this "fix" may solve the issues for some and may not for others.

So, I had DDO running in my PC with no crashing. Then I decided to move to Win8 (full clean install, no upgrade). DDO worked fine for a couple weeks... then it started crashing. Especially when ALT+TABbing - getting blue screens every time I switched back to game.

Note: it happened only with DX11. No issues at all when set to DX9 or DX10. But then again, I never had a single crash before with DX11.

Later on, it started to give me some random crashes as well. And to crash when closing DDO.

Then... googling around it went to me that my VGA had a new AMD BIOS that could fix some crashing issues regarding DX11 by raising a bit the VGA's VCore. I got the official BIOS update and then... it failed. To give you the short version, for some reason my VGA card didn't work with the new BIOS; luckily it's a dual-BIOS card so no losses - switched back to BIOS 2, saved it, rewrote BIOS 1 and it was all fine again with the video card.

Tried then to improve manually the VGA Vcore - still crashing.

I went mad. Used Acronis True Image to create a snapshot of my system, formatted the SSD then installed Win7 all over again. Installed video card driver, sound drivers and basic stuff. Ran DDO and... CRASH (within 5 minutes of game)!

Theeeen... I remembered I have a brain and then put use of it. Then I recalled updating video drivers.

I was running Catalyst 13.1. Rolled back to 12.8. Still crashing.

Tried Catalyst 12.6 and... YAY! No crashes in 4 hours of game. ALT+TAB working fine. But I was on Win7, and was not satisfied since I bought Win8 and wanted to use it (yes it has issues, but it's blazing fast especially if you run it from a SSD).

So, create another system snapshot, and went back to my previous Win8 install... rolled back Catalyst drivers there from 13.1 to 12.8, and... YAY again!

Played for 3 days. No slowdowns, no crashes at all. DDO running fine with all graphics maxed out and DX11 enabled on Win8 Pro and Win7 Ultimate.

I hope this help someone that may be having same issues.

To put it short:

ISSUES:
- DDO crashing when DX11 enabled (DX9/DX10 running fine)
- Random crashes
- Always crashing when ALT+TAB out of game and going back (blue screen)

FIX:
- No matter if running Win7 or Win8 (tried both): rolling back to AMD Catalyst 12.6 fixed all crashes I was having. Versions 12.8 and 13.1 will cause crashes. Didn't test other versions.

MY RIG:
- CPU: Intel I7 2600k 3.4 GHz(no overclock)
- 16 GB DDR3 Crucial 1666 MHz
- VGA: HIS Radeon 7950 3GB DDR5 384 bits (no overclock)
- Motherboard ASUS P68Z Deluxe
- OS: Windows 8 x64 Pro and Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

Sorry for my bad english. I hope it helps other people. Let me know if someone need further information.

Cheers!

[sebastianosmith]

I can report similar findings using the Catalyst 13.01, 12.11 BETA, 12.10 and 12.08 drivers with a Sapphire HD 7770. Running DX9 or 10 works flawlessly. DX11 generates random yet sometimes repeatable game freezes. I spent several hours troubleshooting the issue and arrived at your conclusion.

I highly suspect it has something to do with the Radeon 7000 series cards, DX11 shadows/stenciling and DDO. My wife's machine is almost identical to mine with the exception that it sports a Radeon 6770. It has no difficultly running DDO or any other game with full DX11 support using the latest Catalyst release.

Thanks for taking the time to bring this issue to light.

[Marc]

Update: tested Catalyst 13.2. Still causing crashes in DDO with DX11 enabled.

[FreudoBaggins]

I've had a similar but not identical experience. I have an AMD Radeon HD7700 card, AMD Phenom II X4 965 (not overclocked) at 3.4Ghz, DirecxtX 11 and Windows 7 Home Premium.

About the same time as the OP (after running well, but not flawlessly, since putting this rig together in August - clean install of Windows and DDO), I started to get serious crashes. I do not recall updating any drivers within a few days of this problem. First few crashes froze the game and said "fatal DirectX issue - game error 128" and I was able to restart the game for a few minutes; after that I had to reboot the entire computer. Performance was better under DirectX 9, but not great. I tried to run the VGA without overclocking, but not much better. I also tried rolling the driver back (to 12.8 maybe?), also, not any better. [LotRO players were discussing game error 128 errors awhile ago]

Eventually, I re-enabled the graphics overclocking but lowered the game graphics and graphics overdrive settings considerably (600 GPU clock and 600 memory clock), with frame rates about 30-40 fps. I've since been able to bump them up a bit (750 and 800) and can run DirectX 11 using Catalyst 13.1, but with many of the settings lowered. No crashes in the last 2 weeks (so far); frame rate about 60 fps in public (not running around).

I think the original overclocked graphics settings were 850 and 1200 MHz.

I'd love a more detailed explanation of what's wrong, so I can feel confident running DDO at optimal settings. I have no idea what happened, why I came up with that solution, or why it's worked.