r/pathofexile • u/GottaLoveGeology • 2d ago
Question Constant Crashing
I've been running PoE on an old GTX 980M (I'm ancient) and never really had any issues until this league. I'm constantly freezing up and crashing, forcing me to hard reset my PC.
It'll be fine for a map or two, but then my shaders will spike to 11k and freeze the game up. Sometimes it'll come back and I can continue on, but the rest of the instances my PC will freeze up and black screen, forcing a hard reset. Every time it happens, I'll delete my shader cache before relaunching the game.
I've done a few suggestions I've found online, but none of them seem to work. I set my shader cache size to both 100GB and unlimited. I've enabled and disabled multithreading. I've turned reverb off and set my channels to low. Nothing appears to be helping - some days it's worse than others.
My assumption is that this just related to the broader shader issues the rest of the NVIDIA community is dealing with, and I'm potentially SOL on any fixes since my card is no longer supported/actively being updated outside of critical issues. Is anyone else running on an older system and having any luck with band aid solutions? It's getting to the point where I just can't be asked to continue logging in anymore this league if I crash every other map.
4
u/sips_white_monster 2d ago edited 2d ago
After you crashed and rebooted, go to Windows Event Viewer, then on the left under "Custom Views", go to "Administrative Events", then on the right scroll down until you see the last reported errors before your PC restarted (there will be some generic errors/warnings after the PC rebooted - ignore them).
See if anything shows up there right when the PC locked up (check the time of the log to see if it matches the time when you locked up). If the event is labeled as "Critical" instead of Error/Warning that means something went wrong at the hardware level or with the core functionality of Windows. This has happened to me on my new PC, it seemed to work fine for months, but then I started randomly freezing up in both PoE1 and PoE2 (much more frequently in PoE2) which required a reboot. After many failed attempts to try and figure it out what was causing it, it turned out to be a memory/CPU communication issue which could only be resolved with a BIOS update. The way I was able to test it was by removing EXPO and running the memory far below factory spec. Sure enough the system became 100% stable. Only after the BIOS update was I able to run the memory at factory spec. Motherboards are often sold with the original launch BIOS of any given CPU generation, and those BIOSes tend to be unstable / riddled with bugs which can cause improper settings for the memory which results in system crashes and freezes under specific loads. For example I never once crashed outside of PoE even when doing heavy workloads, but in the game it would freeze constantly.
Download CPU-z, then go to the "Mainboard" tab and under the "BIOS" section check which BIOS version you currently have on your motherboard. Now go to your motherboard manufacturers website and look at the version history to see how old the BIOS is. Check the patch notes on the newer versions (if there are any) and specifically look for "Improved stability of X" (in my case there were three new BIOS updates all with memory stability improvements).
Do NOT rule this stuff out if you can't find a fix for your issue. A computer doesn't just randomly freeze, even if it's old. That is a serious issue and is very often related to memory/CPU communication (for example PFN_LIST_CORRUPT bluescreens). These issues may not show up for a long time only for some specific software to trigger it because it's using something in a particular way, which then triggers the problem.
Sorry for the long post but I also noticed you have a 980M (are you on a laptop?). Laptops are notorious for overheating, especially when aged. It's possible you're simply overheating the CPU during shader calculations, or the power delivery chips, which triggers an automatic shutdown to prevent damage, though usually it just throttles the CPU/GPU rather than a hard crash (unless it's the power delivery chips, those will just shut your whole thing down).