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Dark Souls 3 CRASH FIX

la_briola

Member
edit6: NVIDIA driver 347.88 from 2015 fixed the crash on my 770, please everyone try it.

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edit5: YOU NEED TO SET Lighting quality to LOW AT EVERY BOOT/STARTUP!

Many of us have the issue that we crash at the bonfire. We load, walk and crash again.

The fix, which works for many, is setting the Lighting quality to LOW and then loading the game.

Good luck!

edit: turn the auto adjust graphics settings OFF

edit2: seems to only effect NVIDIA cards that are below the 900 series

edit3: setting the power management option to prefer maximum performance fixed the autosave framerate drops for me
awN4Xdb.png

edit4:
People with Nvidia GPU's tried this? Allegedly helps with performance/stutters.
  1. Open nVidia Control Panel. You can click the little nVidia icon in your taskbar to open it.
  2. Go to 3D Settings, and then "Manage 3D Settings."
  3. Switch to the Program Settings tab, and then select Dark Souls III (darksoulsiii.exe) from the drop-down list. It may take a few minutes to populate.
  4. Navigate to the settings you'd like to change, and select the option you want from the drop-down tab. In this case, we want "Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames", we want to set it to "Use the 3D Application setting", and you'll probably find it at the very bottom of the list.
  5. Once you've made your changes, make sure to hit the Apply button that will appear!
https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/4ek4z8/just_a_tip_for_any_pc_bros_with_nvidia_cards/
 
Thanks for the fix!

When can we set it back to high, or is this just a permanent thing on all bonfires until the next patch?
 
Whenever I do this, it doesn't seem to save the setting upon rebooting the game.

And even with it set to low, I'm still getting random crashes AFTER the first bonfire. Whenever I kill a single enemy in the small area right after the first boss but right before Firelink Shrine, the game crashes. :(
 
GB thought this might be if people were using HDMI output to display the game. It was a random thought from Vinny as the same issues was happening on multiple computers with multiple components and multiple characters and that was the sole connections they could think of.
 
GB thought this might be if people were using HDMI output to display the game. It was a random thought from Vinny as the same issues was happening on multiple computers with multiple components and multiple characters and that was the sole connections they could think of.

I use Displayport for my 120HZ monitor. 3~4 monitors, but only one active at the moment.
 
Many of us have the issue that we crash at the bonfire. We load, walk and crash again.

The fix, which works for many, is setting the Lighting quality to LOW and then loading the game.

Good luck!

Can you describe this crash? I've been getting a weird crash on medium and high settings, and I would like to confirm whether or not it was this bug specifically.

I've crashed twice and each time was near a bonfire before
Firelink
 
Can you describe this crash? I've been getting a weird crash on medium and high settings, and I would like to confirm whether or not it was this bug specifically.

I've crashed twice and each time was near a bonfire before
Firelink

The NVIDIA driver dies, you can confirm this if you play in window mode -- a popup should appear.
 
Yup. Can confirm it worked for me on a GTX780 3GB.

Giantbomb crew were having that exact same issue before launch. Surprised they didnt patch it.

Yeah, especially as they themselves contacted Bamco about the issue. You'd think they would have looked into it or something when one of the sites that got a review code say they can't play the game because of an easy 100% repeatable hard crash.
 
GB thought this might be if people were using HDMI output to display the game. It was a random thought from Vinny as the same issues was happening on multiple computers with multiple components and multiple characters and that was the sole connections they could think of.

im using hdmi out and havent had any crashes, for what it's worth
 
For the record: gtx 770 4gb with latest drivers (tested the two releases before too, same issue)

I played for 5h and had no crash since.
 
I had one 'dark souls has stopped working' crash in 3 hours with everything maxed out. Guessing that wasn't the same issue.
 
Be careful. The game can sometimes set it back up to medium or higher when you launch the game again and that can cause you to crash again. The crash seems to happen near any bonfire, not just the first or in the first area.
 
Be careful. The game can sometimes set it back up to medium or higher when you launch the game again and that can cause you to crash again. The crash seems to happen near any bonfire, not just the first or in the first area.

There's an auto adjust graphic settings option, that must be doing it.

Must be better to leave it off.
 
Be careful. The game can sometimes set it back up to medium or higher when you launch the game again and that can cause you to crash again. The crash seems to happen near any bonfire, not just the first or in the first area.

No wonder I freaking crash each time I died. God damn bonfire
 
What were the three weeks for?
 
Giantbomb crew were having that exact same issue before launch. Surprised they didnt patch it.

Yup. Can confirm it worked for me on a GTX780 3GB.



Yeah, especially as they themselves contacted Bamco about the issue. You'd think they would have looked into it or something when one of the sites that got a review code say they can't play the game because of an easy 100% repeatable hard crash.

I think that they patched part of it, at least. I didn't get any crashes, running at max settings for 4 hours straight. So I doubt that it's "the exact same issue" since the problem that GB and other outlets had was way more widespread.
 
Many of us have the issue that we crash at the bonfire. We load, walk and crash again.

The fix, which works for many, is setting the Lighting quality to LOW and then loading the game.

Good luck!

If that happens to me I'll just refund it and buy the PS4 version.
Pretty stupid crash to have in the PC version because of settings, lol.
 
how big of a change does the lighting make? just less GPU ram or something?
The change is minimal. It removes a few specular highlights.

It does seem like a very annoying thing to debug, given that it appears completely unreproducible even on basically the same configurations.

What were the three weeks for?
Improving performance in some CPU bound areas from 35 to 60 FPS?
 
Yeh, think I'll wait for a patch and a slight price drop before picking this up on the PC.

Will go with Ratchet in the meantime.
 
Did you exit the game before the crash? If you did, and you have the auto detect option on, then the settings likely reset.

Yeah. However, I've noticed that my advanced settings don't seem to be saving between sessions. I disabled the auto detection feature and I did exit the game properly after getting everything configured. I even tried setting the config file to read only. Regardless, I make sure the lighting is set to low every time I load the game and I still get crashes. Before setting lighting to low the crashes were related to an Nvidia dll. Now they're just generic DarkSoulsIII.exe errors.
 
I read somewhere else that a fix for this crash is choosing the knight and as long as you have the helmet on your game won't crash. lol
 
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