Game freezes when returning after months, rig not changed

[conceit]

Hi,

yesterday I played ED the first time after months in a longer session, co-op gameplay in a private group. I have done this quite a bit several months ago, and have been using this exact hardware rig for the last two years in ED without any issue.

Yesterday, ED froze two times. This ended both wing missions we tried (you seem to fail a wing mission if the wing splits up). It might be VR related, not sure, but in this state I cannot start wing missions at all. I looked through the forum, but only found very few posts with similar symptoms, all too long ago at a time when I did not have these issues, and nobody wrote if this once was resolved.

Again: I have not changed my rig, the only thing that was updated is ED and other software (Windows, drivers, Oculus stuff etc). Maybe something broke. Anyone had this and found the cause?

WANTED: Please REPORT if you do have this bug and

• do NOT have OCULUS RIFT (never installed its software)
• do NOT have an NVIDIA GPU

FREQUENTLY UPDATED:

Symptoms (taken from Cmdr A D's eloquent description):

Spoiler

• Intermittent screen "freezes" in VR with game still seeming to run in the background.
• Sometimes accompanied by the error message "Direct3D cannot lock a buffer".
• Can only then exit the game using the task manager to stop the process.
• High CPU utilization of the Elite Dangeous executable (probably a symptom)

Things you should TRY FIRST:

Spoiler

1. Users reported that they have no or reduced crashes when closing the launcher.
2. A file system scan on your system and installation drive won't harm anyways.
3. Cmdr A D worked out with FD support, that system file inconsistencies may be a cause. Follow these instructions to check your system files for corruptions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb...er-tool-to-repair-missing-or-corrupted-system
4. CaptainCaboose reported that stopping/uninstalling of both MSI Afterburner and Malwarebytes (AV software) removed the bug for him. Still, other reporters don't even use this software (see considerations).
5. IRQ conflict problems are so 90ies... But read CMDR Jezzer's post, which also includes a link to a useful conflict resolution tool.

Considerations / Observations:

Spoiler

• The bug, if not triggered by damaged system files, seems correlated to resource utilization of background processes. Especially network load seems to have an impact.
• The bug is correlated to Oculus Rift software (many reporters use VR), although also non-VR setups seem to be affected sometimes.
• I can report that this bug often occured when ALT-Tabbing to another application (browser). Might be network-related though.
• nVidia drivers may cause the issue. Any non-nvidia user having this?

Things we probably can exclude: Removed. I don't think anymore that this is a good approach to narrow it down.

 

[Aashenfox]

Hi,

yesterday I played ED the first time after months in a longer session, co-op gameplay in a private group. I have done this quite a bit several months ago, and have been using this exact hardware rig for the last two years in ED without any issue.

Yesterday, ED froze two times. This ended both wing missions we tried (you seem to fail a wing mission if the wing splits up). It might be VR related, not sure, but in this state I cannot start wing missions at all. I looked through the forum, but only found very few posts with similar symptoms, all too long ago at a time when I did not have these issues, and nobody wrote if this once was resolved.

Again: I have not changed my rig, the only thing that was updated is ED and other software (Windows, drivers, Oculus stuff etc). Maybe something broke. Anyone had this and found the cause?

Since 3.2 my game runs like poo if I leave the launcher open in the background. Causes ticks and frame drops, but not outright freezes. Try closing it by alt tab after the game loads and see if that helps.

 

[conceit]

I wonder how the launcher can influence the game in such a heavy fashion, while you can simply close it in background and the game doesn't even recognize. But whatever, I'll give it a shot, who knows what's going on there.

 

[idahosurge]

If you updated your VR then the first thing I would do is unplug your VR from your PC and in ED set any related settingw from VR back to normal display then reboot your PC. If that clears it up then uninstall and reinstall all VR related software and drivers. Reboot after uninstall and after reinstall.

 

[conceit]

Since 3.2 my game runs like poo if I leave the launcher open in the background. Causes ticks and frame drops, but not outright freezes. Try closing it by alt tab after the game loads and see if that helps.

I can now definitely say that this did not help in my case. Just crashed again, with launcher closed.

If you updated your VR then the first thing I would do is unplug your VR from your PC and in ED set any related settingw from VR back to normal display then reboot your PC. If that clears it up then uninstall and reinstall all VR related software and drivers. Reboot after uninstall and after reinstall.

The VR stuff updates all the time, and so do the nVidia drivers, Windows, Steam... That would basically mean I had to re-install really everything. After having played several other VR games during the last months without any issues, I think this problem is probably more ED-centric. The "reinstall everything" hint is always a little generic (no offense, I'm thankful for your suggestions), but I'd rather see it as a last resort when everything else fails.

 

[A D]

Had the same problem with VR. Hadn't made any changes to my computer other than updating ED and Nvidia drivers, but then around Beyond 3.2:

- Intermittent screen "freezes" in VR with game still seeming to run in the background.

- Sometimes accompanied by the error message "Direct3D cannot lock a buffer".

- Can only then exit the game using the task manager to stop the process.

I opened a support ticket with FD. They suggested I wind back my graphics card settings. This didn't help and, in any case, I have a 1080Ti which is not overclocked and was happily running at 51C degrees in game. In the end was able to reduce "freezes" by (a) completely uninstalling the latest Nvidia graphics driver using DDU, (b) reinstalling an earlier Nividia driver (Circe May 2018) which I knew was problem free, and (c) UNDERclocking the graphics card a little - around 1480 Mhz max on the GPU clock. Also wound back the VR settings a little bit (by using one of the default ED VR settings). These things helped somewhat as I have had only 1 "freeze" since making the changes on 4-5 hours of play in single session, but I'm pretty sure something is still broken, just haven't got to bottom of it yet.

Just a note. I don't think its Oculus. I uninstalled all of the Oculus drivers and played ED on the monitor for a bit - still got the "freezes". Seems to be an ED/Nvidia issue.

Did quite a bit of Googling on this one. The answers are all over the place. What is clear is that it's not a new problem. It emerges as early as 2016 and a number of players have experienced it in ED, but no-one really knows why. So my suggestion is anyone who has or has had this problem, post in this thread - just factual info and solutions actually tried (not speculative). Hopefully a pattern will emerge.

o7

 

[conceit]

Just a note. I don't think its Oculus. I uninstalled all of the Oculus drivers and played ED on the monitor for a bit - still got the "freezes". Seems to be an ED/Nvidia issue.

All you've written is exactly what I see here (but, with a 1070 GPU). That you did all the work, uninstalling Oculus software and trying in 2d, is awesome, thank you. That really narrows the problem down to ED/drivers, actually. Now, maybe we can check a few more things. Currently I'm curious about hard disk space. My storage is really at the brim, so maybe it's a temp-file issue or something. How certain are you that you had enough disk space when this happened?

 

[Nick Sticks]

Windows 10?
Had a big update recently?
If so then turn off the new Windows 10 game related and recording settings.

 

[A D]

All you've written is exactly what I see here (but, with a 1070 GPU). That you did all the work, uninstalling Oculus software and trying in 2d, is awesome, thank you. That really narrows the problem down to ED/drivers, actually. Now, maybe we can check a few more things. Currently I'm curious about hard disk space. My storage is really at the brim, so maybe it's a temp-file issue or something. How certain are you that you had enough disk space when this happened?

100% certain have the disk space and ram on my rig.

ED is installed on my D: drive (1 TB EVO SSD) with > than 600GB free. Even if ED is using a temp folder on my C: drive, it has > 90 GB free right now. I Also have 16 GB ram on the MB and 11 Gb vram on the graphics card.

 

[conceit]

100% certain have the disk space and ram on my rig.

ED is installed on my D: drive (1 TB EVO SSD) with > than 600GB free. Even if ED is using a temp folder on my C: drive, it has > 90 GB free right now. I Also have 16 GB ram on the MB and 11 Gb vram on the graphics card.

Ok, then let's put this idea to the bin... Next idea: I had this once when soloing in open, after ALT-Tabbing (not reproducible), but two times in short sequence when doing wing missions (private group), no ALT-Tab I believe. Maybe network related?

 

[13A]

Just a thought, are you running EDDiscovery? I've had freezes when I've not played for a couple of days and EDD tries to refresh the database. It hogs most my disk access until it's done.

 

[conceit]

Ok, you guys rock, thanks for commiting your thoughts.

Windows 10?
Had a big update recently?
If so then turn off the new Windows 10 game related and recording settings.

Just checked: Game DVR was already disabled, I now also disabled streaming (which I never used) and audio transmissions (same), and the game bar. So, basically, everything Win-10 gaming related should be off now. I do not believe that this caused the issue (as DVR was off already), but it doesn't hurt to try.

Just a thought, are you running EDDiscovery? I've had freezes when I've not played for a couple of days and EDD tries to refresh the database. It hogs most my disk access until it's done.

Not using it and never installed it. Anyhow, making a list of active "unusual" software components and other suspects is not a bad idea... So here's mine (hopefully complete). Checkmark (plus sign) your similarities if you had this issue. Put a minus sign in if you can exclude it as a problem source.

Things we probably can exclude:

[-] Oculus Rift related (drivers, home, tray tool)
[-] ED Discovery
[-] Insufficient disk space
[-] Launching from ED profiler
[-] Leaving the ED launcher open

Things that might have caused it:

[ ] Voice Meeter (Banana)
[ ] Discord
[ ] ED Profiler (using a configuration)
[ ] Saitek/Logitech X52 software
[ ] Google Chrome (Alt-Tabbing)
[ ] Network related
[ ] Alt-Tab related

 

[bladebss]

I get freezing, and buy that i mean the game freezes and i cant get back to my desktop. This alomost always happend near stations and usualy busy stations. And more so if i see npcs with foreign names. I have been leaning towards networking as the problem but im not completely shure.

I play almost 100% open. I should test playing solo and see

 

[Deleted member 182079]

I'm having two different issues with freezing up of the game, both occurring only since recently (few weeks). Did not face these in the past apart from the very occasional crash when playing in Open.

1) Game locks up, usually just when docking in a busy station, in Open. Audio still plays but game is unresponsive and I have to kill the process via task manager. Don't get this in Solo which makes me believe it's netcode related (as suggested above already).

2) After about 5-10 minutes of playing, the game loses focus (am playing on a laptop connected to a monitor via HDMI). I'm launching the game via Steam shortcut (bought the game directly from Frontier, not Steam) and this only happens if I leave the ED launcher open. Closing it after focus loss and it doesn't happen again. Also doesn't happen if I immediately close the launcher once the game has started. Never had these issues previously with the same set up.

 

[conceit]

As you guys might've seen, I updated the OP with the current status of our little investigation. Maybe you guys tell me if you also use some of the software listed above.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Only additional software I'm using (apart from Steam running in the background) is TrackIR 5, but I don't think it's to do with that because I minimise it and the focus rests on the launcher. Playing with an XBO pad (which is why I'm using a Steam shortcut - there's some issues with the pad drivers in W10 causing micro freezes in various games including E: D - using the XBO Steam controller profile sorts that out).

What I might try is minimise the launcher and see if the problem still persists. Closing it so far has always prohibited the focus loss from happening again so didn't investigate this further.

FWIW I also have W10's focus assist set up in a way that it's enabled when I play a game, I don't think it's to do with notifications personally as it happens when there aren't any.

 

[Ian Skippy]

All you've written is exactly what I see here (but, with a 1070 GPU). That you did all the work, uninstalling Oculus software and trying in 2d, is awesome, thank you. That really narrows the problem down to ED/drivers, actually. Now, maybe we can check a few more things. Currently I'm curious about hard disk space. My storage is really at the brim, so maybe it's a temp-file issue or something. How certain are you that you had enough disk space when this happened?

I'd hate to bring it up, but similar symptoms can have wildly different causes. Have you asked in the VR forum? Surely its not just nvidia/ED, tons of us (I run a 1070) have no issue. Maybe some combination of some left-over VR stuff, combined with nvidia cards and ED 3.2? Just seems off that it just happens to hit two vr guys...

 

[conceit]

I'd hate to bring it up, but similar symptoms can have wildly different causes. Have you asked in the VR forum? Surely its not just nvidia/ED, tons of us (I run a 1070) have no issue. Maybe some combination of some left-over VR stuff, combined with nvidia cards and ED 3.2? Just seems off that it just happens to hit two vr guys...

As far as I understood (from googling this topic), not only VR folks have problems with this, but anyhow, your assumptions can still be true: There could be multiple issues, including VR. Nuff reason to try sorting these things out by comparing our rigs. So, all we have now is some "educated guessing". But maybe it helps to narrow it down a bit.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Tried to run the game with the launcher minimised, and indeed the focus isn't lost despite playing for a few hours. Strange/interesting.

As for the proper lockups, well that happened to me a few times in a row now. Each time in Chelomey Orbital in Cubeo fwiw, just before or shortly after docking in Open (with not a lot of other players either).

 

[A D]

Ok, you guys rock, thanks for commiting your thoughts.



Just checked: Game DVR was already disabled, I now also disabled streaming (which I never used) and audio transmissions (same), and the game bar. So, basically, everything Win-10 gaming related should be off now. I do not believe that this caused the issue (as DVR was off already), but it doesn't hurt to try.



Not using it and never installed it. Anyhow, making a list of active "unusual" software components and other suspects is not a bad idea... So here's mine (hopefully complete). Checkmark (plus sign) your similarities if you had this issue. Put a minus sign in if you can exclude it as a problem source.

Things we probably can exclude:

[-] Oculus Rift related (drivers, home, tray tool)
[-] ED Discovery
[-] Insufficient disk space
[-] Launching from ED profiler
[-] Leaving the ED launcher open

Things that might have caused it:

[ ] Voice Meeter (Banana)
[ ] Discord
[ ] ED Profiler (using a configuration)
[ ] Saitek/Logitech X52 software
[ ] Google Chrome (Alt-Tabbing)
[ ] Network related
[ ] Alt-Tab related

Hi Conceit

First things first. I'm not using any of the above software except for ED Profiler. Additionally, using Voice Attack. Have been using both with ED for years. Not conclusive, but would be surprised if they were the culprits.

Second, I still have an open support ticket with FD. Here's what I've told FD as of today:

========

"PROBLEM:

Here's what I do know:
1. The game suddenly "freezes" in VR or 2D without warning (though it seems to be running in the background).
2. Sometimes receive the error message: "Direct3D cannot lock a buffer".
3. Either way can only then exit the game by using task manager to stop the process.
4. No obvious problem with my graphics card, ram or drivers.
5. Internet connection all good - consistent 43MB download/14 MB upload. Local ping around 12-14ms.

SOLUTIONS:

Here's what I've tried without success:
1. Uninstalling Nvidia drivers using DDU and doing a clean install of a stable graphics driver.
2. Uninstalling Oculus drivers and playing the game in 2D. Reinstalling Oculus as problem remained.
3. Uninstalling the game and doing a clean install - right from scratch.
4. Winding back the graphics card settings (as suggested by Support). Card now effectively underclocked and running at a coolish 51C.
5. Winding back the game settings (now lower than when I was using a GTX 1070).

NEW INFORMATION:

New information - I checked the CPU (Intel i7600 4 core) today when the game froze. The game exe file was using 98% of the CPU resources.... not joking, it was literally using almost all of the CPU processing power!!!! Obviously this why the game stops streaming. I restarted the game from scratch to see what it used when loading - it was around 30% of the CPU processing power (which is where it has remained while I've been writing this post - about last 20 mins) but with no actual gameplay."

========

Could CMDR's check their CPU usage when the problem strikes?

Easiest way to do this is leave ED open when it freezes and instead hit Ctrl + Alt + Del to bring up the task manager. The ED executable will be an open app under "processes". It will tell you how much CPU processing power it is being using when the freeze happens. As stated above, mine was literally at 98% and ED was the only third party app open at that time!