ESO crashing every 5 mins

killabunny1234b16_ESO

My game has been crashing every 5 mins, I log on & load the game up fine, then just crash.
My PC just hangs and need to be forced to reset. Or my screen turns black with the eso sounds still going on in the background and i get this windows error -

"display driver stopped responding and has recovered
display driver Nvidia windows kernel mode driver, version 337.88 stopped responding and has succesffully recovered"

Before the last 3-4 days Eso and my computer have never had any problems running the game for countless hours at a time, i was able to do the trials for almost 2 solid days (about 6+ hours a day of game play) but then i just started to crash every time i load the game

Here are some of the things I've done to try and fix the issue
- Reinstalled the game
- Updated to the latest drivers.. All drivers including my gpu
- Rolled back to 5 different gpu drivers
- Cleaned out my pc from any dust / made sure my fans were working
- Reinstalled Windows (7 sp1)
- Made sure my UserSettings.txt was not read only for this fix-

"You can edit your file manually with my notes below
INDIVIDUAL CONFIGURATION LINES/COMMANDS THAT HAVE BEEN CHANGED:

Command: "SET RequestedNumThreads "0" needs to be REPLACED with two different command lines as follows:
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "0"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "0"

The following 4 command lines could be added to your UserSettings.txt file with no deletions.

SET MULTI_GPU_CHECK "1"
SET DisableFXPrecaching "1"
SET PreferExclusiveFullscreen "0"
SET MonsterTellsEnabled "1" (none of the above worked :P )

....and many others..
Nothing has worked and my pc's state is currently a fresh install of Windows 7, AVG antivirus, ESO & Teamspeak 3 and nothing else
My only luck was just after my last install of windows / eso & the geforce gtx 680 drivers 332.21 I stayed online, in combat for over a hour (in Coldharbour), then tried my luck at trails again, and crashed just like b4, over and over
(the problem is not just in trails btw, ill crash anywhere)

Plz plz plz help me.

PC Specs -
Windows 7 home Premium 64 bit, service pack 1
Intel core i7-3770k @ 3.5 GHz
Nividia Geforce GTX 680
16GB of ram
230GB SSD
2TB Western digital black HDD

Seravi

@killabunny1234b16_ESO, are you running DX11? Lots of NVIDIA folks have this issue. You have changed most of what we change. Try changing the DX level in the UserSettings.txt file.

"SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D11"" to "SET GraphicsDriver.7 "D3D9"

killabunny1234b16_ESO

yep tried that one as well

Booie

Shot in the dark, but have you tried disabling the anti-virus?

Dominoid

Removed all add-ons?

Did you install the new Nvidia driver that just got released? If so, roll back. If not, couldn't hurt to try.

Sihnfahl

Try deleting the shadercache.cooked file in your ESO directory... not the program one. The one in your Documents folder.

goochpuckett

I am having same problem, I can normally play for a little while except in group dungeons (they cause me to crash three to four times a play) until I black screen and 95% of the time have to hard restart comp. Sometimes I get lucky and it just stops and asks for report, but most of the time my monitor completely loses signal with my computer and goes into power saving mode. That only happens with my monitor when you leave the computer still for 2 hours OR if the signal is completely stopped, unfortunately if it was just going into power save mode it would be able to re-attain the signal so its worse. I just got this again but didn't have to restart computer and it gave me a report on what happened, it showed something I am most curious about maybe someone who is more tech-savvy can explain. I didn't get a picture which im upset about, but I believe it said my memory was 745/750, does this mean its my hardware? I cant seem to find on my computer a list of the hardware inside the pc, and its no gaming pc but has some good qualities such as intel i7 processor running at 3.1ghz, it only has NVidia GeForce gts 240 but I play at minimum setting to reduce amount of crashes yet it still happens eventually. Sometimes I can play for up to 5 hours without a crash, sometimes its every damn 10 minutes. Theres a lot of info here and im ready for someone to sift through my rambles to give me some answers to my confusion.

ZOS_JasonI

Hey there, @killabunny1234b16_ESO and @goochpuckett. We've created help tickets for you both so that our Support Team can look into the issues you're experiencing. Crashing can be the result of different problems, so we'll want to investigate further by requesting some more information. Our agents will reach out to you via email as soon as they can.

In the meantime, be sure to run ESO as Administrator, set the app as "high priority" in the Task Manager, and disable any firewall or antivirus protection. As basic as those steps may sound, they often help with these types of issues. We also recommend closing the launcher once you begin playing so it's not running in the background.

Calorath

Just a note here, but ESO does not have to be run as administrator. I am an IT guy and have an AD domain here at home in my lab. I have never run ESO as admin, not even in the beta, and it runs fine. I too use Windows 7 Pro 64bit SP1. Heck, all settings are stored per-user, so why run as admin?

I must also ask why disabling a firewall is advised. The XP, Vista, and 7 firewall allow all outbound connections by default and once a connection is made, it is allowed in also. The only thing a firewall does, unless specifically told otherwise, is to prevent external connections from coming into your PC, such as a hacker. Disabling the firewall could be dangerous for the average user.

I don't run an antivirus myself since every PC that comes into our business for virus removal has an AV on it, but I will agree with this advice. AVG is horrendous for interfering with some apps, as is Avast and a few others.

Not trying to disrespect the ZOS employee here, just stating some facts. The game stores data in the user-account appdata area, so there is absolutely no reason to run as admin, and since the client connects to the server, there is no reason to disable a firewall which prevents unestablished incoming connections. I run as my user with my firewall on at all times, and have no issues like this. My issues are with that Craglorn patch since I now get to enjoy loading screens every ten to fifteen seconds while wandering around.

Forztr

An official employee telling someone turn off antivirus and firewall to play the game? If you have such disregard for basic internet security then why should I trust you as company to hold any personal information about me and my CC.

LameoveR

Hi.
It's not obvious that for changes to take effect in UserSettings.txt for "D3D9" you need to set READ ONLY flag on this file after edit.
Game sets "D3D11" back at start if there is no READ ONLY flag on file.

theyancey

I'm running the same 337.88 drivers with no problem. I have a 660 TI and win 8 pro 64 bit.

nudel

Calorath wrote: »

Just a note here, but ESO does not have to be run as administrator. I am an IT guy and have an AD domain here at home in my lab. I have never run ESO as admin, not even in the beta, and it runs fine. I too use Windows 7 Pro 64bit SP1. Heck, all settings are stored per-user, so why run as admin?

I must also ask why disabling a firewall is advised. The XP, Vista, and 7 firewall allow all outbound connections by default and once a connection is made, it is allowed in also. The only thing a firewall does, unless specifically told otherwise, is to prevent external connections from coming into your PC, such as a hacker. Disabling the firewall could be dangerous for the average user.

I don't run an antivirus myself since every PC that comes into our business for virus removal has an AV on it, but I will agree with this advice. AVG is horrendous for interfering with some apps, as is Avast and a few others.

Not trying to disrespect the ZOS employee here, just stating some facts. The game stores data in the user-account appdata area, so there is absolutely no reason to run as admin, and since the client connects to the server, there is no reason to disable a firewall which prevents unestablished incoming connections. I run as my user with my firewall on at all times, and have no issues like this. My issues are with that Craglorn patch since I now get to enjoy loading screens every ten to fifteen seconds while wandering around.

Actually, I do have to run the game as an admin. From what I'm told it's to do with having it installed in Program Files. I could move it, but meh. I need a more compelling reason to do so.

My launcher will not launch the game and will immediately generate a crash report when I click play if I try to run it without admin.

BaKaNoOB

Vertical Syns - Enabled , no issues then at least for me (i notised that when v-syns is off my GPU fans are running at hight speed i had this with Starcraft 2 before time, after that in every game - enableb V-Syns), it looks to me some overheating issues are in your case

killabunny1234b16_ESO

update, still the same problem.

@LameoveR
"It's not obvious that for changes to take effect in UserSettings.txt for "D3D9" you need to set READ ONLY flag on this file after edit.
Game sets "D3D11" back at start if there is no READ ONLY flag on file. "

The "fix that I posted at the top was from eso support and they told me to make sure the UserSettings.txt was NOT read only. I'm not rly sure who to believe at this point I have seen and tried the dx9 solution and did not work, but i will try it again on a new install of windows/eso.

@ZOS_JasonL admin,
"disable any firewall or antivirus protection"
Umm what..? I have to run eso with no protection on my pc..? Is that wise..? is there a better solution? could i use another (free) anti virus that is more compatible?

And thank you for starting another ticket but I'm not sure how much use it will be, I've made 2 this week and both have stopped replying. Is this a problem Zos is working on?
They must be aware of the hundreds of posts I've seen about this since Craglorn? or are they viewing this as a 3rd party problem and are not intending a patch/hotfix to make Craglorn not try to kill my PC?

I have tried so many fixes (about 10-15 hours worth) now and the only thing I cant change is ESO... I love this game and just want to play it..

killabunny1234b16_ESO

@Calorath Soul Shriven
"I don't run an antivirus myself since every PC that comes into our business for virus removal has an AV on it, but I will agree with this advice. AVG is horrendous for interfering with some apps, as is Avast and a few others."

could you recommend a free anti virus, or just not use one at all?

Seravi

I don't run mine as Admin. My game is installed on D not C as I explained to support starting on 4/1. I also will not disable antivirus software as I have allowed this game to access the net. I have been through every single "fix" they have to offer and the ONLY thing that allows me to play is the one lovely line running D3D9. This problem was present during Beta and has grown with every update.

Booie

There is nothing wrong in trying to disable anti-virus and/or firewall as a part of debugging. If one of the things makes the issue go away, then we have narrowed it down to a certain area and can make specific changes to that area, and then enable them again with the exceptions added.

Calorath

killabunny1234b16_ESO wrote: »

@Calorath Soul Shriven
"I don't run an antivirus myself since every PC that comes into our business for virus removal has an AV on it, but I will agree with this advice. AVG is horrendous for interfering with some apps, as is Avast and a few others."

could you recommend a free anti virus, or just not use one at all?

I personally do not run an AV on any of my Windows PCs. I use Firefox and do smart browsing. I look at links before I click and see where they go, for example. I do not open email I am not expecting and I have my email preview pane disabled. I can then open unexpected email with images and attachments blocked and see where it came from. If the sender's address is unknown to me, I safely delete it.

This is not for everybody though. Many people honestly believe they're the one-millionth visitor to every site and click those banners. This almost assures them a virus at some point. I am an IT lead and can remove anything in about five minutes. Most people cannot, but even the best AV software (Bit Defender last time I checked) has under an 80% detection rate for new viruses. This is a call you have to make yourself.

Finally, the old saying "you get what you pay for" is true here. AVG, Avast, and many others (Clam, anybody?) are free, and have abysmal detection rates of zero-day viruses. They're alright for known, existing viruses, but most of what gets people are zero-day, not a ten year old virus. If I was to recommend one, I would recommend the Norton with just AV/spayware protection, NOD32, or Bit Defender. They are all payware and in the most recent review I read, had the best zero-day detection rates.

Booie wrote: »

There is nothing wrong in trying to disable anti-virus and/or firewall as a part of debugging. If one of the things makes the issue go away, then we have narrowed it down to a certain area and can make specific changes to that area, and then enable them again with the exceptions added.

Disabling an AV yes, a firewall, no. This is where understanding how a firewall works and how the game client works comes into play. See, a firewall will allow outgoing connections and deny unknown incoming connections unless configured to do something else. When you start your game client, the ZOS servers do not magically know you are loading up and try to connect to you. Instead, your client creates a connection to the ZOS servers. That is an outgoing connection and will NOT be blocked unless the user purposefully blocked ESO from going online. My firewall currently only allows incoming connections for file/printer sharing, core networking, remote desktop, and network discovery. ESO works flawlessly. This is on multiple systems. Again, I have a lab at home with ten PCs in it, all gaming. Turning off my firewall would resolve nothing and only open the system up to the LAN and anything that makes it past my hardware firewall on my gateway.

*EDIT*

Also, has nobody decided to note that the error he is getting is an nVidia driver error? I got those years back (2004 I believe) and what it means is that the video card locked, so the driver reset everything. In my case it turns out I had a card that had some bad capacitors on it. PNY replaced the card at no charge to me and it works to this day. Had the same issue on a second nVidia card, also a PNY, and it too had a bad capacitor. In fact it had one bust and leak crap over my SB Audigy II, and both were replaced at no charge to me.

OP:
Contact nVidia or your video card manufacturer and I bet they can resolve your issue. Have you checked your GPU temp while playing? How about having your video RAM checked? I would start there.

Booie

.

Dodece

I have had similar issues with very similar hardware. I have been stricken with a recurring unknown error which was causing the game to routinely crash on me about once every thirty minutes. Sometimes more often then that. After fighting with the problem for days. I think I have stumbled upon a solution even if it is a rather ugly one.

When I started up the game I went into the video settings, and turned off all of the effects. Yes the game is pretty ugly when you turn these things off, but I do seem to be able to play now without crashing. I suspect one of those effects is a cause of a great many problems. I couldn't tell you which one. So if you want to run a process of elimination. More power to you, but I have been able to play today for four hours straight without crashing.

Our problems may not be the same, but it is certainly worth a try.

killabunny1234b16_ESO

Update.
Ive updated my nvidia driver to the latest and run some tests again, the dx9 fix did not work again.
Ive been monitoring my gpu/cpu load & temps and they all seem normal, apart from when a crash kicks in.. i get a 100% usage spike on my gpu followed by 0% less than a second later.

I kept my firewall on and turned avg off (did not work) but found lowering all my settings to off or low lets my stay online. The strange thing is that this has little to no effect on my gpu or crashing last time I tried.
Ive been able to stay online, in combat for over a hour tonight so thank you @Dodece & everyone else

I tried slowly putting some effects back on and it soon started to crash again. It seems anything over low texture quality or particle density starts to kill my game.
and yes eso is dam ugly at low settings

Now the question is can I bring myself to play a game that's biggest draw was its graphics.. You might think hell yes gimme back eso (and i do as well) but rly, turn all settings to low / off and take a look.. its sooo bad

I still want to hear from the admin about this problem & solution, please post any information about this. are you looking into the problem? I still have not got a reply email in days from the multiple tickets I've made.

Calorath

You have an issue somewhere. I beta-tested on two systems and play on both, plus a third. My low-end system is a Pentium D 960, 4GB DDR2 800MHz, 320GB SATA 3.0Gbps HDD, and an nVidia GTX550Ti, which is WELL below your specs. I run Windows 7 Professional 64bit SP1.

The kicker? I run with most settings near max and get a steady 30fps except in towns which have high player populations. I recently turned textures to medium and turned shadow quality down, as well as particles to see if it would stop my constant loading screens. No go. Either way, I am running on inferior hardware to yours and using higher settings without crashing.

If you are curious, my other two systems are a Core i7 laptop with 8GB of RAM, 7 Pro 64bit SP1 and an nVidia Quadro NVS4200M, and a desktop boasting six-core i7 with 64GB of RAM and a GTX780Ti. Both suffer the same loading screen issues, but the desktop can run with max details where my Pentium D and laptop cannot.

*EDIT*

Also, I just realized it was suggested that the firewall be turned off to attempt to fix a video issue. Think about that for a minute...

Ackwalan

I'm getting the same over heating and black screen problem that a lot of people seem to be having. I tried all the tips that everyone else has suggested, and none of it seems to work. I get about 30-45 minutes of game play, then my fps drops from an average of 30 down to 1 and then I get the black screen with the driver problem. This started happening over this weekend, and I have had no problems before this.

Using a Geforce GTX 770m
driver version 337.88

goochpuckett

SO, to the employee who contacted us through this post... Have you realized that all your "possible fixes" have no effect for us? One guy doesn't even have the graphics problems we do, just loading screen mishaps which make no sense! The Craglorn patch is killing ESO, all of the users who have problems are contemplating deletion, its not a pretty subject... But maybe the entire Craglorn patch should be taken down and privately troubleshooted by you're developers?

Paralyse

This is a well known issue for both NVidia and ATI/AMD boards. Basically, the graphics card "times out", which is detected by Windows, and Windows attempts to restart the display driver to resolve the system hang.

With some light registry hacking you can increase the delay acceptable before Windows thinks your graphics board has experienced a hang.

That is a temporary fix. This problem is usually a warning of impending graphics card failure, particularly the GPUs or the interface between the GPUs and VRAM. You should definitely do a visual on your card and make sure the fans are operational and not full of dust, and that the board is fully seated. If possible, flash it to the latest BIOS version. It can also be caused by a failing power supply -- during heavy processing, the board is not receiving enough power or is experiencing voltage fluctuations on the 5v, resulting in a hang.

I went through heck with this on my old Core2 Quad w/a Geforce GT275. Drivers, registry hacks, nothing worked. Within a month I couldn't even get Vista to boot -- upon inspection I found that the cooling fan on the graphics card was dead, and furthermore, my supposed "600W" power supply (thanks ebay) when I put it on my scope was fluctuating by as much as 1.5V on the 12V line, and +/- 0.4V on the 5 volt, which is enough for modern TTL to take a powder. (That "600W" power supply bench tested at ~11.5V/31 amps on a bar load, i.e. 356 watts..LOL.)

tl;dr 1. drivers 2. bios 3. ck card health 4. ck power supply 5. turn computer into anchor

duchessofkvetchb14_ESO

We're starting to have this issue again too (on 2 of my PC's, both for the same character, and only very recently). Just a few days ago I somehow managed to "fix" a memory leak error on the same character (again, just this ONE dude...) by removing all inventory items and dumping them in the bank. Makes little sense, but this and a few other issues make me think that sometimes the corruption occurs within our own character code.

One thing to definitely try, along with eliminating the problem by logging onto another machine, is using a brand new character, on the same box you have the issue with now.

duchessofkvetchb14_ESO

Also, for those getting video card overheating issues - do your machine a favor and blow the dust out, as well as get some new thermal grease applied. I had tried everything else to lower temp, including dropping video settings way down - but nothing worked until a thorough cleaning. Brought one of the temps down a full 20 F (this is before the crashing issues above, however, which occur for a specific character and account).

maneatingmonkey

killabunny1234b16_ESO wrote: »

"display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

@killabunny1234b16_ESO It's nice to know that I'm not the only one getting this issue. I had previously put it down to the fact that I am playing on a 3 year old laptop with an AMD card (Radeon HD 6770M) that hasn't seen an update since 2011, although I guess that can no longer be the reason, considering you get them on a PC with awesome specs an a Nvidia Card.

I've tried changing the game to run with DX 9 and Open GL (through the ESO Toolbox addon), but the performance hit for those is intolerable.

Sometimes I can play for 2 hours without getting a graphics driver crash but other times it happens 3 times within 10 minutes. When this happens I have to switch to using integrated Intel graphics, so I don't get any crashes, and play ESO with all the graphics settings turned completely down.

Dodece

The vast majority of these issues aren't related to malfunctioning hardware. The reality is that overheating is probably the result of bad code resulting in extreme stresses being placed on the system. The developer made a point of promising that this game wouldn't be hardware intensive.

Bad code writing is the most likely culprit. The games code is asking the system to do things the hardware cannot accommodate. The only question I really have is this. Is the engine itself that unwieldy, or are they that sloppy. If its the games engine we are pretty much screwed. If it is sloppiness on their part. Then well people can improve with experience.

However I am not sure they have the time to actually get good. Everything to do with this game seems to have been amateurish. No public relations, poor sales department, and dialed in customer service. If I didn't know any better I would think they were intentionally trying to scuttle their own product. Seriously this company is supposed to have around two hundred and fifty employees. They couldn't find a few people to work crowd control.

killabunny1234b16_ESO

Paralyse ✭✭
3:35AM
"This is a well known issue for both Nvidia and ATI/AMD boards. Basically, the graphics card "times out", which is detected by Windows, and Windows attempts to restart the display driver to resolve the system hang.

With some light registry hacking you can increase the delay acceptable before Windows thinks your graphics board has experienced a hang."

yeah its one of the 1st "fixes" i tried,

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946

link is to the Microsoft Fix It on this issue. this did not work for me.

I'm quite sure this is not a overheating, dirty case, fan or power issue. my pc has a good 5 fan push / pull setup with water cooling for my cpu, plenty of room to cool as well.
It also runs any game I've thrown at it at ultra settings without any problems.
My average temp even when crashing or playing for hours at a time is around 65-70C gpu temp.

the fact that this has only started to be a problem with the last patch of eso says it all tbh.. someone at Zos messed up some code somewhere.

side note.. this is now day 4 without any reply from Zos on 3 different tickets..? WTF..