Random Nvidia display driver crashes no matter what I'm doing (possible fix in post #4)

PC Bug Report
1

The game has been crashing seemingly at random, it’s happened no matter what I was doing:

  • Looking at the character creation screen, reading classes descriptions.
  • When customizing my character, after trying to rotate her to check the different markings options.
  • Talking to random NPCs.
  • Walking around town, just looking around.

So far, I’ve yet to succeed in leaving the very first town you come across :sweat:

My longest time without a crash has been achieved by… just staying in a single spot, not moving at all, and going through the different menus and UI elements :rofl:

I’m not getting any specific error message at all, just the crash report window with no further info…
However, every single crash produces the following in Event Viewer:

Error: The description for Event ID 0 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

\Device\Video3
Error occurred on GPUID: 2d00

The message resource is present but the message was not found in the message table.

Warning: Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

I’ve done a clean install of the latest Nvidia drivers (DDU and all), stopped pretty much every single program and services that aren’t Battle.net from starting, disabled all of my antivirus’ security features,… Nothing helps.

My specs are as follows:

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3D, MSI MAG x570S Tomahawk Max WiFi, 64 GB DDR4 @3200 MHz, ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 3070 V2 GAMING OC 8 GB, 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

Running Windows 11 Pro 22H2 (build 22621.1413), latest AMD chipset drivers (5.02.19.2221 from 2023/02/28) and latest Nvidia display drivers (531.29 from 2023/03/14).

Addendum:

Lowering Anti Aliasing from high to low has allowed me to complete the first dungeon, return to town, continue the storyline, and get ready to seek out the hermit.

Then the game crashed while I was just looking at the various challenges and what they unlock :upside_down_face:

This was once again a nondescript Nvidia driver crash, only visible through the Event Viewer.

System and video RAM usage was still completely crazy: 16+ GB of RAM and almost 8GB of vRAM.

I should also note that there are very frequent stutters when the game loads a new model or texture :expressionless:

3 Likes
2

Same here 5th crash today

1 Like
3

Same story here. Clean install of the new drivers, game on an SSD, and the graphics driver will just give up the ghost at random whenever it pleases. Here’s a few things that I was doing each time I CTD’d…

  • Comparing items in my inventory by holding shift to bring up that UI element.
  • Opening my map to see where I am (give us an overlay map, btw).
  • Trading something to a friend.
  • Killing a pack of enemies.
  • Using a waypoint.
  • Walking in town going from one NPC to another.
  • Standing totally still, doing nothing, because I was AFK on a bio break.

Most of these happened on the highest possible settings, achieving between 110-150 FPS. When lowering settings to the high preset, the crashes happened a bit less often… but are still happening. There’s probably one or two settings in the bunch that are the culprit.

1 Like
4

Alright, I might have found a fix: I was able to play for more than 4 hours without having the Nvidia display driver crash even once.
Hopefully, this can help some of you too :smile:

What I did was enable DLSS (quality mode). Yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense.

What’s even weirder is that I didn’t notice any of the usual performance benefits of DLSS, even though the game is now rendering at a lower resolution:

  • No noticeable boost to the FPS. Of course I was already getting between 140 and 160 FPS before, so that wasn’t really the issue here.

  • The game still stutters —or even freezes for a couple of seconds— when it has to load in new assets like a new zone, clutter, monster, other players,… for the first time despite being installed on a fast, quality PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

  • I’m still getting massive FPS drops during in-engine cutscenes (see here).

  • The game still uses a truly ridiculous amount of system and video RAM: 16+ GB and almost all of my GPU’s 8 GB respectively.

All I can gather from all this is that there is some serious problem with the lack (absence?) of optimization this game has seen so far, if even using DLSS doesn’t really improve performances in any significant way.

But hey, at least it’s not randomly killing my display driver whenever it feels like it anymore :joy:

On a side note, my computer can run way more demanding games without having to deal with such nonsense… So, Blizzard? Better get your crap together for the 6th of June :angry:

1 Like
5

Same here, Game crashed when I compareing two item in my bag. Checked the window event it was the same nvlddmkm not respone error. How do you fix this crash? Thanks

6

I had same issue…i had to update bios and since that i have no issue