To make a (very) long story short, after having played two days without any issues, on the third day BG3 crashed seemingly on every other move. It was then that I finally realized that none of the changes I made had mattered. Every time I was able to play bg3 without crashes, I had restarted my PC. When playing with crashes, I had only shutdown my PC.
To explain this a bit further, when you shutdown Windows, you do not shut down Windows. Microsoft by default puts it into some sort of extended sleep mode, so that Windows can start faster if you start it again. A restart really shuts everything down and starts it again cleanly.
I had already disabled fast start and sleep in the power options, thinking this would be equivalent to the restart behavior, because I run a Soundblaster G6. While its sound output is so much better than whatever you find on the mainboard, the drivers usually aren't all that good, and I had issues with it if fast start was enabled. It looks like disabling fast start still doesn't shut down everything cleanly. I currently suspect that the G6 driver after a shutdown in some way doesn't reinitialize cleanly, interfering with whatever bg3 is doing, which then leads to the crashes.
Yeah, disabling all that "fast start" stuff is one of the first things I did after building this PC. With M.2 SSDs or even "just" SATA SSDs, it really doesn't make much of a difference and you really don't want Windows to just hibernate when you "shut it off". As you said: This can cause all sorts of weirdness with drivers, etc.
Not sure if this is relevant here, but I *also* disabled the "fast start" functions in my BIOS. Think it's called "MSI Quick Boot/Quick Start" or something on my board. Pretty sure other manufacturers offer something similar.
The time you save by enabling all that stuff is quite inconsequential, IMO. We're talking maybe 10, 20 seconds on a halfway modern PC. Besides: I don't really mind the "wait" - things are still insanely fast these days. I used to run Windows Vista on an old fashioned HDD not *that* long ago. Meaning I would press the power button in the morning, fix me some breakfast and coffee, maybe have a smoke and when I returned to the PC after all that, it was, perhaps, up and running...
S.
