Display Driver Crash on Startup

[Pengwolf]

This is an issue I've been experiencing inconsistently for months as the crash seems continuously "evolve" over time. As of today, it is now a guaranteed occurrence, which is weird because the game was working perfectly fine last night.

The bug started as a rare display driver crash to a randomly colored screen, until around a couple months ago when it's frequency increased dramatically. There was a spike in it's occurrences around the first Fortuna update, which I managed to fix after messing with some settings, until two days ago when it started to happen frequently again. Today, the game has crashed my display driver every single time I tried to open the game without fail, causing the monitor to tell me there is no input being detected.

Important to note: there is no difference between any settings on my computer or update versions of drivers, etc between yesterday and today. The last major change was when I updated to the latest recommended drivers, which was done the same day this bug started to commonly re-appear, but it was done after the bug popped up, not before, and there was a period of time where the bug vanished completely before it turned into a guaranteed bug.

 

System Specs Below:

i5-4690 3.5GHz CPU

16GB Ram

GTX 760

 Nvidia GeForce Driver ver. 417.35

Additionally, I have underclocked my GPU slightly as that not only fixed the bug in the past (among a different crashing bug I used to see), but it fixed freezes in several other games as well.

 

 

Update: I just launched the game and no crash. Once again, no changes to anything happened. The only possible difference I can think of is that Youtube wasn't open in a chrome browser, which is also incredibly inconsistent as having youtube tabs open caused no problems yesterday or in any of the other situations where this crash occurred.

Edited December 31, 2018 by Pengwolf

[Llamatronian]

If you're having crashes and other issues on multiple games it might be the video card that's at fault. Check (carefully) to see if the fans are still moving freely, and that the heat sink beneath them is free of dust. There are programs you can get to monitor the temperature of your video card as well, and running one of those might be a good idea.

Also update your video drivers to the latest version from Nvidia, just in case.

Worst case you might have something more complex wrong with the card itself, like VRAM that has failed.

Edited December 31, 2018 by Llamatronian

[Hobie-wan]

You could also have a problem with your power supply. The video card might be ramping up and needing power and the PS might be unable to comply. PS issues can cause all sorts of weird issues. If possible, use/borrow another PS and see if the issue goes away.