Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems My PC has a problem with blue screen crashes. How dangerous is this to my game saves?

Hi there. I apologize if this is kind of a dumb or just unanswerable question. I guess I'm looking for either some reassurance or a strong warning either way.

As the title says I have a problem with hard, blue screen of death crashes on my PC. To be clear, these crashes have nothing to do with the game as they predate ever installing the EA. About a year ago I started getting these blue screen crashes, was in the process of diagnosing the cause and figuring out how to stop them happening, and then they stopped on their own after a month or two. It didn't happen for about 11 months and I thought I was free, but they've just started happening again in identical fashion to how it was a year ago. Basically I always crash 2-3 times every time I start using the PC, and after that I might get none or I might get 1-2 crashes in 5-10 hours of use, no matter what I'm doing.

I've heard horror stories over the years of people's game saves (in other games) being corrupted if they lose power or other unexpected/improper shutdowns. Given how many hours I expect to put into my BG3 run-throughs, the thought of losing game saves is awful. I will definitely have lots of different saves for each character I'm playing, but since the saves seem to be organized by character, it seems plausible that all saves under one character could get corrupted/wiped out in the event of a bad crash. For what it's worth, I've had one of these crashes while playing the EA so far and loaded back into my most recent quick save with no issue.

Anyways I realize that without omniscience nobody can give me any guarantees of whether my game saves will be safe or not. I'm not looking for promises, but I wonder if I could get any insight about whether it's even plausible for an entire character "folder" to get corrupted. Are there going to be cloud saves that would provide me reasonable insurance? I see there are "Steam cloud files" synchronized for the early access but I don't know what all those entail. Tech people, if you were in my shoes, how worried would you be about playing with this happening on your machine? Would you risk it?

Obviously I am going to try and work out how to solve this issue, but since the game comes out in just a few days, I may not figure it out before it's time to start adventuring, and it's tempting to see if it will just resolve itself again like it did last time.

I appreciate any thoughts or feedback.

its very easy to lose the entire folder because 'corupt' may just be a single text is missing from the name... thats why you cloud saves are even a thing and also why USB external drives and having your documents inside Microsoft onedrive are both bad ideas

i personally have zero issue... unless you count actively trying to make a crash so i can test results and i know my backups are working

blue screen = hardware or software

the hardware is normally power, heat or a cable

the software will be a driver or the settings i.e, i change the desktop screen rez and then restart system = doesn't boot... your software settings are not being updated [a very common two screen issue] i.e, Windows 1 size fits all drivers caused this

Yeah, so after spending many hours looking into it last time this was happening, I figured out that I have this obscure Gigabyte motherboard that was only ever used in a few prebuilt PCs. On Gigabyte's website it says that my mobo's BIOS is unstable and they strongly recommend upgrading it. But any upgraded BIOS that's publicly available is not compatible with my particular motherboard. The crash dump logs are pointing to a problem with the "PCIe root port," and knowledgeable computer people have advised me that this is part of my mobo's chipset, which suggests it's a motherboard issue and not a hardware problem with the SSD connected to that PCIe slot. (I have also downloaded and installed all updates for this SSD.) As well, because I'm using a 10th generation Intel CPU, I apparently can't have my C drive be mapped to a storage device on a different, possibly non-problematic port. You can also find reviews of my exact prebuilt PC as well as reddit posts describing exactly this problem with the same prebuilt PC, and they came to the same conclusions that having this obscure motherboard with a problematic BIOS that can't be changed screwed them over.

The above is a summary and I'm leaving out a lot of details, but I've consulted with multiple IT guys who agreed with this. Basically to definitely stop the crashes I'm going to have to take my PC to a shop and have them do a whole motherboard replacement. (Something I theoretically know how to do but am not confident enough to attempt.) Anyway, this is getting pretty far into the weeds, but since you started giving me some tips I figured I'd just lay this out there.

the odds are good that Gigabyte made a backdoor into your system to update their bios... as this assumes Windows regedits that no longer work in W11 that would be why there is no update and also 1 possible reason the system bluescreens

yes replacing the motherboard = you may as well just replace the system so a better fix tends to be finding a stable setup and sticking to it... which in this case is prob the OS build that was around at the time the motherboard came out so that means saying off line [not ideal for a gaming rig] or locking out updates [takes high networking knowledge]

my advice is save up for a new system

I had some BSOD recently that are likely very particular to my PC but also affected by BG3 issues.
- GPU is direktly on top of the Windows M2 SSD
- BG3 does not properly store the screen resolution and my PC can not keep its cool when playing on 4k
- Windows is set to run on 4k

When I play and forget to set the resolution to QHD the GPU gets hot enough to push the SSD temperature above 55°C which causes an emergency shut down.
Its also clearly dependend on the environmental temperature. If its summerly hot in my room that happens, if its fresh it does not.

dude... you keep that up and you're going to have a fried large brick paperweight... dial things down and or get some way to shift/cool things down.

Its all good when I remember to switch resolution to 2560x1440 after starting the game. GPU is 20°C colder then. Unfortunately the resolution is reset to 3840x2160 every time I start the game.