Critical PC crashes!

Hello, i already had this issue since the last beta patch but hoped it to be fixed in some time.

Let me explain what exactly happens:
on several custom maps (all of them worked during tft and early beta stages, one of them is made by myself so i can ensure that no changes done to the map caused the issue) shortly after starting the map all screens of my pc turn black, all fans start spinning on 100% and i have to shutdown the device by holding the powerbutton.


following conditions i could narrow down on the map i made myself thats causing the issues:
-it does not happen when testing the map from the editor
-it does not happen if i play with an empty lobby except myself
-it does not happen if the lobby is full of computer-players (computer players do not act in the map)
-it happens at diffrent moments everytime, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes it takes several minutes
-i am using custom UI in the map, but interacting with the UI on purpose does not cause any crash
-i am having some areas with a lot of doodads but aside from frame drops (~100 -> ~30) when looking at those areas, nothing really happens there and also does not crash
-units moving/interacting does not casue the crash as sometimes the game is running without issues for a while ad sometimes it crashes before any interactions with units
the last time this happened it uninstalled my wc3, i had to download and install the game completely again via launcher, only the /users folders were left.
this time the bootmanager had to perform a repair of the C: drive to be able to boot.


i have absolutely no issues with other games (no matter how power demanding they are - for example ark on highest settings is running smooth) and it only happens while playing wc3 on certain maps, i can provide a dl link to one of the maps here: epicwar[dot]com/maps/303308/ (not allowed to post links)
most maps work properly, no matter if older or newer.

this literally makes the game not just unplayable but puts my device and data at risk. so i’d like u to check the issue. sadly there are no logfiles from those crashes as the device has to be shutdown.

below u see my device details just to prevent anything like "maybe your pc is too weak for wc3)

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 Core

CPU-Cooler: Corsair H100i PRO RGB

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER

Memory: 32 GB (2x 16GB) G.Skill RipJaws V schwarz DDR4-3200

Mainboard: ROG Strix X470-F

Drive (1): Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB PCI E

Drive (2): Samsung SSD 860 EVO Plus 1TB

Power Adapter: Corsair TX 750M

Case: be quiet! PURE BASE 600

Something is likely wrong with either hardware or drivers. Warcraft III, like all user level applications, is not programmed to crash the operating system. If the operating system crashes or computer freezes then something is wrong with the hardware or how the OS is using it.

First start by making sure your motherboard BIOS/UEFI is up-to-date. This rules out a motherboard bug that has been fixed being the cause. Be aware this may reset all motherboard settings to default, including overclocks.

If you have overclocked any part of your system (Memory, CPU or GPU) then try reverting it to stock. XMP should still be used for memory since 3,200 MHz is in spec for the 3900X. Just because an overclock is stable in other games and applications does not mean it is stable in every one. Overclocks include both PBO and Auto OC from Ryzen Master and even include turning off SMT or any other modifications from stock operation of the CPU. If it still freezes this rules out overclock instability as being the cause.

Remove your Nvidia GPU drivers using Display Driver uninstaller. Install the latest stable from Nvidia. This rules out graphic drivers being the cause.

You can run some stress tests like Furmark (GPU) and Prime95 (CPU) to check if system thermals are normal. They are not intended to be run together to test both at once but other combined tests are available which will push your entire system power consumption which can expose PSU faults. A correctly operating system should have no issue handling all workloads for an indefinite amount of time.

Use Samsung Magician or other S.M.A.R.T. compatible software to check the condition of your SSDs. Especially the NVME one could potentially cause a system crash if it is malfunctioning for whatever reason. A malfunctioning SSD would also explain why data loss is an issue. TBW for the drives must be under the amount specified by Samsung since otherwise the drive will be highly prone to data loss.

1 Like

maybe i should have stated that im working in the it myself…
anways thanks for your reply, i made sure (double checked) that bios is updated (it is) also i clean uninstalled the graphics driver using ddu.
i never had and currently have no overclocked hardware.
furmark did run without any issues. gpu got to about 82° after 10 min and after that nothing much happened/changed anymore it just kept running. so i ended the furmark test after 30 min.
i didnt know prime95 but it is also running since 30 min now, keeping my cpu at constant 100% without any errors or crashes.

the OS is btw installed for about 5 months now and yes all are updates done.
during early beta patches or when it still was tft, all those maps worked without any issues, as soon as the last beta patch was released the maps started crashing my device. i really don’t think its HW or driver related.

anyways, i’ll leave the prime95 running for a bit and test the issue again but i’m sure the result will stay the same^^

edit: after a total time of 1,5 hours i remembered that prime95 was running in the background (was doing my usual stuff in the meantime and forgot about it) - no errors as expected, now going to test wc3 once again

results:
test#1
didn’t crash my whole pc but before the crashes usually happened it disconnected me from the gamelobby and threw me into the stats screen

test#2
wc3 crashed during loading screen, no full pc crash

test#3
map did run for like 10-15 minutes, then the device crashed again as i originally described

im still cinviced that it has nothing to do with my device

It can only be. OSes are designed in such a way that user applications, like Warcraft III or any game, cannot crash them and at most can crash the application themselves. If they are crashing the entire system there is some other error occurring, either with the hardware, drivers or the OS itself.

Are you playing with Reforged or Classic graphics? Reforged graphics use a lot of video memory so might show video memory errors that other games which use less will not. If classic graphics does not cause the device to crash this could well be the case.

You may wish to post your dxdiag listing. This shows more detailed system information that what you posted above.

well, HW was tested, should be fine.
from what i could monitor of my system ressources nothing was used up.
yes i am using reforged, u can review the map if u like, shouldnt be that much on it that uses that much memory
and if thats the case, then its for blizzard to fix, cant be that a rtx2080 isnt enough for wc3…
what part of dxdiag do u need?

Do the crashes happen when playing with Classic graphics? Your system should be able to run Reforged graphics without issues, but since it has issues it is important to try to track down what is causing them.

Technical support usually asks for the full dxdiag for this kind of error. I think there are stickies regarding this.

This topic should either be moved to the Technical Support forum, or a new topic created there in case it is being overlooked by technical support staff. Due to the severity of the freeze/crash I highly doubt this is the result of a bug.

i’ll try the classic mode during the day and provide feedback on that too

i never contacted technical support before, i didnt know that, sorry.
i quickly saved the dxdiag and msinfo files, yet i am not able to find a way of attaching it to the post here.

and yes i agree with you to move the post over to the tech support forum. -> done.

i also edited the opening post to provide more details about the game settings when the crashes happen. important could be the 3:
-it does not happen when testing the map from the editor
-it does not happen if i play with an empty lobby except myself
-it does not happen if the lobby is full of computer-players (computer players do not act in the map)
(players create very small amounts of units and buildings during the first 20 min. of the game, when testing from the editor i can use cheats to accelerate beyond this pooint and it still is running stable, there fore i doubt any gpu memory is causing the issue)

today i played around with a 360° camera. while trying it out my device crashed again. so i thought i monitor my ressources carefully as i might be able to reproduce the issue.
so far i couldnt crash my device again, yet i as soon as i started the map u can see that the gpu usage spiked to about 80% (the little drop in between and at the end was me when alt+tabbing out of wc3). while the gpu usage is so high, the ingame fps are still at ~300 as there is literally not much on that map.
ibb[dot]co/KVQhWdF (again not allowed to post links or attach screenshots)
sadly i was unable to recreate the issue, but i could save a lot gpu usage when turning doen the max ingame fps to 60 (as they have been set to 300 for whatever reason). i’ll test it tomorrow if the issues continue with that. and upload the files asked below.

Hey there,

Lets go ahead and grab a DxDiag so we can further investigate the problem. Here are the instructions:

  1. Press Windows Key + R.
  2. Type DxDiag and press Enter.
  3. In the DxDiag window, click Save All Information.
  4. Name the file “dxdiag” and click Save
  5. Once you have that made, open the file. You’ll need to copy and paste the contents of the Text document into the post, and put four Tilde (~) marks above the DXDiag. It’ll look like this:
DXDiag goes here

If you have issues pasting here, please use Pastebin and post the link (ex: Pastebin (dot) com/123456).

Dxdiag: pastebin[dot]com/gpZxjLgE
MSInfo: pastebin[dot]com/8gGAt427

while i was looking through the MSInfo file i found that none of the wc3 crashes are in there, and only 1 out of 10 world edit crashes is shown there too.

also i know that im still on win 1903, but no matter what i do windows is always telling me that there are no new updates for me. i consider installing 1909 (current build) manually if needed.

also i noticed that the games was running on up to 300 fps (idk why that setting was set to 300) and that even an empty map used up my gpu’s power to ~80% due to that. i changed the setting and will test if crash still occurs.

edit: i swear these crashes are so random…
i was playing around with the 360° camera map for couple of hours yesterday and today, nothing happened again after i edited my previous post, set the fps cap to 60 and made the screenshot. i ddnt change anything on the map either, just playing around. suddenly, just now when i started the map, after like 3 seconds it crashed my device again.
when i was playing around before i could run the map without any issues (except the one i mentioned) for 30 min+.
this time the crash made the battle net launcher forget my login credentials and the wc3 installation folder (i had to navigate there again and it worked) xD

im starting to get really worried about further investigating the issue, as it could cause me serious hardware damage or data loss to force this error to appear again.

Try disabling 2 of your 3 displays so that just a single display is operating. Ideally unplug the others for this test. So many displays is an unusual hardware configuration and it is fairly common to run into driver bugs under such configurations. If the crashes stop then one can start looking into why such an issue is being caused by the multiple displays.

Like wise try disabling all audio output devices you are not actively using. Multiple enabled (but not used) audio output devices have been known to cause issues.

Since data loss is being involved it might be a good idea to check the condition of the drives. For example make sure that the NVMe drive is operating at a reasonable temperature and not reporting any errors.

3 displays is “unusual” and its “common” to run into driver bugs under “such” configurations? - that maybe was the case in 1998… 2 displays are standart nowdays and 3-4 nothing “unusual”. i’ve been working with 3 displays for 10 years now…
but sure to narrow down the issue i’ll unplug them tomorrow… (going from 3 to 1 screens feels like loosing an arm)

ahm? im using them all? there should be speakers, a headset (headphones + microphone) and 2 webcam microphones? the webcam microphones are the only ones i could really disable…

yeah u told me in the first post already to check my ssd’s status, they are fine. the benchmark and the diagnostic scan stated that their conditions are “new” (thats what they are, about half a year old) and went through without any errors (as the other benchmarks for gpu and cpu).
i get ur intention of trying to narrow down the potential causes, but its unlikely a hardware issue when the device runs properly under heavy usage for a couple of hours and wc3, a nearly 20 years old game, manages to crash it consistantly.
ive seen other posts here of ppl complaining about the same issues, way more power demanding games run without any issues, but wc3 shuts down their devices commonly and they all also mentioned the gpu fan spinning at full speed. i really dont think its my hardware…

just today i had 4 of those crashes playing wc3 for about 6 hours.
when i have no wc3/worldedit running the device never crashes no matter what i do.

UPDATE:

As its 2 days ago now i thought its fine to “double” post to make ppl see a new action. sadly im unable to…

tested now with only 1 monitor and 2 disconnected.
no crashes so far…
if this really is the issue then i hope this will be fixed soon…

Quick Post so Cryze can post the solution he found.

You may want to make a thread about it on Nvidia’s community forums. I would hope that some Nvidia developers see it and may investigate it or be able to provide you with a solution.

Although the code of Warcraft III may be a trigger, the drivers should not allow this to happen. This is a pretty major fault condition.

If the opportunity arises I will try and raise attention of this type of problem. Maybe Blizzard could find a work around, or at least apply pressure onto Nvidia and other graphic vendors to improve the stability of their drivers in this specific use case.

Kaldraydis Lets go ahead and grab a DxDiag so we can further investigate the problem. Here are the instructions:

will i receive a reply from you after i uploaded the files you asked for?

@DrSuperGood:
i will make a post in the nvidia community forums but to be honest: i have no issues on any other games with 3 monitors, and never had for the past 10 years. this is clearly a thing for blizzard to fix.

Cryze,

I looked over your DXDiag, and found some interesting information. That said, please be advised that system level restarts and crashes, or Blue Screens of Death are not in our scope of support as it takes a system level issue to cause them. We may be triggering things, but in cases such as these, we’re not the root cause, just the thing that sets off whatever instability you’ve got.

  1. +++ WER0 +++:
  2. Fehlerbucket 1895486962480874040, Typ 4
  3. Ereignisname: APPCRASH
  4. Antwort: Nicht verfĂĽgbar
  5. CAB-Datei-ID: 0
  • Problemsignatur:
  1. P1: dwm.exe

Your crashes may be happening when these desktop window manager crashes occur. Desktop window manager is a core windows service, and should only crash when the system detects major instability. There also was an issue with your prime95 test:

1. +++ WER9 +++:
2. Fehlerbucket 1198791586694424797, Typ 5
3. Ereignisname: RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64
4. Antwort: Nicht verfĂĽgbar
5. CAB-Datei-ID: 0
 * Problemsignatur:
6. P1: prime95.exe
7. P2: 29.8.1.0
8. P3: 10.0.18362.2.0.0

This is a Radar_Pre_Leak, which occurs when coding goes to RAM it’s not supposed to go to. Now, Prime95 is a stress tester, it’s going to hit your RAM and CPU hard. However, this may be indicative of a CPU or RAM issue since there were errors running it. You may need to check the ram with something like Memtest86+ to see if anything comes up with it.

Beyond that, however, you’d need to contact Microsoft or a local PC tech for help.

well… after a while i returned, the nvidia community forum support did not really help much, they asked me to uninstall icue, ofc it still crashes

also as it just happenes to be the case: wc3 is still constantly crashing and just now it crashed even if i had only 1 screen connected, so using multiple monitors is not the cause of the problem

i have also contacted my local pc tech, they stated that everything is fine with the device and those errors occuring in the stress tests should not affect the performance of my device when playing a game like wc3 and should for sure not cause this critical crashes. they said that they could sell me better hardware but it would make no sense as its most likely the software not running properly.

as there are many other posts on the forum with the exact same issue (just to mention 1: us.forums.blizzard [dot] com/en/warcraft3/t/wc3-makes-my-pc-to-crash/22491/8) i dont think you should try to put the responsibility for this crashes to someone else and start looking into the games code and whats going wrong instead of pushing it onto user devices, nvidia or microsoft support.

i say it again: everything else is working fine wihtout crashes at all. its only wc3 and the wc3 worldeditor causing heavy crashes. i was a trsuting customer for years spending a couple thousands on hots or hs and buying each game made by core blizzard. this time i really need the customer support from the blizzard i backed for so long.

Hello Cryze,

Sorry to hear that you’re experiencing issues even with just 1 monitor connected. :frowning:

The purpose of the Technical Support forums is to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues, not to debug code or fix bugs. We (Customer Support) are not developers or QA testers. While we can check internally for known bugs we can’t assist with new/unconfirmed bugs. I did look through our internal lists but I am not finding any confirmed bugs that would match up with what you are seeing.

If you believe that this is happening due to a bug in the game’s code you would need to create a post on the Bug Report forums. In the report you would want to include the details about your hardware setup (CPU, motherboard, GPU, monitors, etc) as well as the software/drivers (OS version, driver version) that are being used in order for our QA team to be able to reproduce the issue. If you have steps to recreate the problem 100% of the time include those as well, or if it’s happening very often on a specific map make sure to include that.

Based on what I’ve read in your posts it sounds like it’s random in nature, so it may be difficult to reproduce even with an identical setup. If for example, ALL WC3 players using a 2080 Super and 3 monitors were experiencing system level crashes on a specific map that would be something QA could investigate. That kind of event would generate a lot of posts/tickets, however we’re just not seeing that right now. The issues you’re facing actually appear to be system specific, which is why we previously referred you to look into the hardware side of it all.

Hopefully this helps give you a direction to go with. Best of luck.

2 Likes

Jesus… I have same problem.

I have 9900k, 2080 Ti with 64gb ram.

My computer randomly shuts and restarts.

My thermal is only at like 50 degrees, and I do not shut on any game.

WTF!!!

As earlier mentioned, the game client simply triggers your system instability. It is not the cause. A BSOD or PC restart requires Windows or your PC to send the signal.

If you are getting PC shutdowns, please review these articles, and if they don’t help, take your PC to a PC technician. We do not support system instability.