Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Technical Issues Found crashing reason and fix (for me)

So, I've been having constant CTD and BSoD while playing Divinity Original Sin, pretty much since launch, and just yesterday I found the reason why.


First my specs:

Windows 7 Ultimate (64)
Intel Core i7-3770 CPU 3.40GHz
8GB RAM
Nvidia 9800 GT 1GB

I just formated my PC yesterday and installed the lastest drives. Normaly I only keep the GPU card's drive up to date, and update the others only when I do a format on the OS. To my sadness, it did not stop the constant D:OS crashes to desktop (some leading to BSoD). More often than not the crash reports would indicate some issue with the C++ Library, or just the game's .exe, but other times I would catch an "This device drive has stoped working" from my GPU.

After trying everything I could think of, I started going after the game's graphics settings, and to my surprise, changing the resolution seemed to solve the issue. I have an 1360x768 display monitor, but was always playing the game on 1280x720 resolution, non scaled, for performance boost. So when I changed the game's resolution to my monitor's native, it did stop the crashes alltogether.

Before I would crash about 2, 3 times in an hour. But now I can play for hours without having a single CTD. it's magic!

Just sharing the info with you guys. Maybe someone is having similar problems and would find my solution also fixes it for them? Maybe it's the game's fault? Maybe it's my hardwares or softwares? Don't know. I just have not seen this mentioned anywhere as a fix, and totaly worked for me.

Just felt like sharing. =)

Thanks for the update. Was there a difference in refresh rate between the native and lower resolutions? That's the only other thing I can think of besides scaling issues.

No, I was always playing at 60hz. My monitor only supports 60Hz on resolutions above 1024X768. And i haven't touched a thing on the nvidia control panel since I reinstaled Windows and updated the drives. I didn't mention this, sorry, but I only changed the ingame resolution settings, wich, like I said, did not scale in any way (had little black stripes on the top, bottom and both sides of my screen, since I was using a lower resolution than my monitor's). I was also using the game's triple-buffering settings, without frame rate lock. But I'm still using that, so I don't think it was relevant information.

As long as you choose a resolution with the same aspect ratio as your monitor, you shouldn't get black bars on the edges of the screen (even with a different aspect ratio, I think the default in your video drivers would be to stretch rather than add bars).

For the refresh rate, in an earlier version someone had resolutions listed in the game at 59 and 60Hz (desktop at 60Hz); using a 59Hz resolution in-game caused a crash when using spells, whereas the same resolution at 60Hz was fine.

Just checked and you are right! The default IS to stretch. I was changing it to the "No scaling" mode. I am sorry, my mistake. So maybe that would be the the cause of the crashes? Maybe that caused some issue with my hardware?

If you really want I could try the 1280x720 resolution with the true default settings (stretch) and get back to you if it does or doesn't causes crashes.

Personaly, I prefer the little performance impact that the higher resolution gives me than playing a lower resolution re-escaled to fill the monitor, wich in my opinion looks really bad. And the performance impact of windowed mode would almost nulify the bonus given by playing in lower resolution.

Thank you for correcting me on the true default settings of the video drive!

Oh, about the resolution/refresh rate I've only used 60Hz.

Just say it if you want me to try the different Hz and/or the different resolutions again.
Thanks!

If you are curious you can try the lower resolution with scaling to see if that makes a difference. If the performance gain isn't worth the graphics quality drop, then you don't have to test it that way for my sake.
Personally, with my monitor I can not see a difference between native resolution or lower (probably more to do with me than the monitor). At the highest resolution I get some minor background jerking when running, in regions with lots of stuff on the screen. I didn't try tweaking any graphics settings, since dropping the resolution a notch fixed it without a quality drop, as far as I can see.