Newcomer / Intro BSOD - Black Screen Of Death

[yyy]

Hello

I've been plagued by the Black Screen of Death ever since I installed the game. I don't know what causes it and the issue is there in all versions. Raised an incident with Frontier but weeks have gone past and there is no response, which is extremely disappointing.

For those who don't know what the issue is. The display goes black. I can still hear sounds from the game. The only option is to go back to windows and kill the game from Task Manager. This issue happens randomly and I can't pinpoint a cause at the moment. When the issue does happen it may occur once or many times rendering the game unplayable. Tonight I had a pretty hard time docking since the game kept crashing and I didn't want to leave my ship in space for someone to shoot it down (a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get this far).

If there is anyone out there who knows how to solve this, your help will be much appreciated.

Thankyou.

yyy

 

[STRONTIUM DOG]

if all drivers are the latest versions as suggested by Lexer and windows is updated too......
try NEVER NEVER mode in control pannel power options as in turn of display ext

 

[Shadowdancer]

Did you try running the game in windowed or borderless mode?

 

[Kalara]

Another thing that happens to me from time to time when I have graphic issues, is the crashing of the driver, resulting in different possible outcomes (artifacts on screen, black screens, ...).
What cause this for me is dust that is lodged into the PCI slot.
So I take out the card, air clean it, and put it back and I'm good for another month (I really need to clean my PC more).

Oh and cleaning of dust from all the fans is also a good idea (heat management can also lead to quite a big array of problems).

 

[yyy]

if all drivers are the latest versions as suggested by Lexer and windows is updated too......
try NEVER NEVER mode in control pannel power options as in turn of display ext

I just updated AMD graphics drivers, so will change the setting you suggested later. I would like to know the cause as that might help someone else in my situation.

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Did you try running the game in windowed or borderless mode?

I always run the game in fullscreen mode. In principle that should work shouldn't it?

 

[yyy]

Another thing that happens to me from time to time when I have graphic issues, is the crashing of the driver, resulting in different possible outcomes (artifacts on screen, black screens, ...).
What cause this for me is dust that is lodged into the PCI slot.
So I take out the card, air clean it, and put it back and I'm good for another month (I really need to clean my PC more).

Oh and cleaning of dust from all the fans is also a good idea (heat management can also lead to quite a big array of problems).

Agreed lack of cooling can be a problem with high performance graphics cards where dust reduces the ability to manage heat. Will clean out the machine tonight.

That said AMD catalyst Control Center doesn't give you the temperature of the GPU, so I can't tell when its overheating. I've never been a fan of AMD GPUs. NVIDIA is better at this because I can monitor the GPU temperature.

However, I suspect temperature is not the problem, because I've run the game at Low, Medium, High and Ultra graphics settings and the black screen has appeared on all. I can tell the cooling fan runs louder, the higher the graphics settings.

Nevertheless, I will try to eliminate cooling as the problem by cleaning out the dust.

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Update gpu, sound, chipset and usb drivers. Maybe try re-installing the ed launcher as that is also reportedly a trouble causer for some, (try running it in admin mode maybe?). Its not much but I have heard these things have helped some ppl.

All are up-to-date except for the GPU drivers.

.....Just updated the AMD catalyst drivers, but cannot find out how it runs until tonight.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I always run the game in fullscreen mode. In principle that should work shouldn't it?

Fullscreen doesn't have any advantage anymore those days, unless you need to run something below the monitor's native resolution over the entire area. Crashing windowed applications are also way less likely to leave you with an unusable system.

That said AMD catalyst Control Center doesn't give you the temperature of the GPU, so I can't tell when its overheating.

It's in the Overdrive settings IIRC. You can also use tools like OCCT which produce a very competent overview of the entire system.

 

[STRONTIUM DOG]

forgot to mention if for some reason you are running a screensaver(modern monitors no need) some people still do to display photos
disable that too as it can cause problems.