Dishonored freezing/crashing/not loading. Possibly nvidia related

[Fistandilius]

So I bought Dishonored in the winter sale, with all the dlc's for like $13 and some change, but it won't run. Before I get into that, let me preface this post by saying my issues might be related to another issue I'm having with NVidia drivers:

 

I have a laptop. It has an i7 (3830qm), 12gb of Ram, and an NVidia Geforce GTX 675M. It's an MSI GT70 laptop although the specific model number always escapes me. It came with windows 8. It now has windows 8.1

 

I was getting some VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE (nvlddmkd.sys) BSOD crashes when I would play any games after upgrading to NVIDIA's latest driver's. I had to rollback my driver to 3.26 something and uninstall the PhysX software and now I'm at least able to play Skyrim, Alice: Madness Returns, Fallout New Vegas, etc. but still having problems with Dishonored, which may or may not be related.

 

Dishonored gives me this error:

 

 

 

EDIT: One more thing. I don't know if there was another way to buy this, but I have the steam version I got on the winter sale, with the dlc's.

 

This is the TL;DR version. I will give more details in a separate post.

Edited December 26, 2013 by Fistandilius

[Fistandilius]

Here's the long version for people willing to read more detail:

 

I have logged over 1400 hours on Skyrim with this laptop and as we all know, random crashes aren't unheard of. A couple of months ago I was using the laptop and the fan turned on...which is weird because I had never heard it come on before without me manually turning it on. The laptop often gets hot near the exhaust port and I was told this was normal, because all the heat is being removed from the cards and filtered out the exhaust and it didn't seem any worse than normal. I have bought a laptop cooler for it that I try to use when I'm running games, but if I'm just browsing I like to keep it on my lap for comfort and that's what I was doing. After a while it started to bug me so I closed everything and went to shutdown the pc, but it gave me a bsod and said it had to restart. I didn't write down the particular bsod message. When it restarted, it would take me to the lock screen but as soon as I logged in, it gave me another bsod screen, this time I took note of it. It was a different message, that much I am positive on, but it did this several times, and the message was VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE (nvlddmks.sys). After I did a manual shutdown (using the power button), the system righted itself and I was able to use the laptop.

 

I did a search and didn't find much initially on google. I asked my computer programmer friend about it, and he told me to make sure my drivers were up to date. So I first went into control panel and updated the drivers in device manager. But then I did some searching around and found out about the free windows 8.1 upgrade, so I did that. When windows 8 came online, this time I went to nvidia's web page and looked for driver's and downloaded the newest ones at the time. Everything seemed to be ok, until I saw a Skyrim mod I wanted to try. The mod was NPC related and I had another similar mod already so I wanted to remove the other one first. I went into an interior cell (abandoned house) with no followers, made a save, and removed the mod. When I fired Skyrim back up to test it I noticed the game would freeze after a minute or two and I would get the VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE (nvlddmks.sys) error again.

 

After this started happening pretty frequently (and I noticed the fan had a tendency to turn on before it crashed) I started freaking out a bit. I just bought this laptop in April, it's not that old, and I spent a great deal on it. You can't exactly just replace the video card in a laptop most of the time, so hardware failure is NOT good. Even though it's probably still covered under warranty, I'd still probably lose software.

 

After doing some more intensive searching this time I found that lots of people were having similar issues after switching to the newer NVidia drivers. After mentally thanking my friend for inadvertently screwing me, I started searching for a set of older drivers. I finally found one that worked and I was able to play Skyrim, and I got over it.

 

Fast forward a few months later and I bought Dishonored on the Steam sale. Initially, the game ran fine I was able to do the hide and seek with the Empress's kid, but the game would freeze every time I got to the scene where Korvo is accused of murdering the emperess, the fan would come on and I would have to exit the game via ctrl-alt-tab, ctrl-alt-delete, whatever and then the system would go back into BSOD VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE (nvlddmks.sys) mode. Now I tested Skyrim at this point and it was still working, and I had just played Alice the night before. What I did NOT do, was write down my driver version (which I should have).

 

I did some research and found that NVidia had a beta driver that they thought would help. 331.93 Unfortunately, instead of reading the 40 page thread related to it, I installed it. Now all my games were going full BSOD again and I didn't know which driver I had before that worked. I first rolled back to 310.90 and that didn't work. I tried 326.19 and that didn't work at first. But then I noticed that each time I installed the driver, the driver would roll back, but the physX software would not. Instead it said only that I had a newer version installed. The same with the Geforce experience software. Btw... I should also note that at one point I tried to run Dishonored through GeForce Experience and I didn't get any better results.

 

Now at this point, Steam wouldn't even load, but like I said, I noticed that physx wasn't rolling back when I installed the new drivers. So I figured I didn't have much to lose at this point. My $1700+ laptop was now basically a $600 laptop since it wouldn't play games anymore, so I went into Windows software uninstaller and removed physx. I tried removing the nvidia driver but it wouldn't let me.

 

But now after all that, Skyrim was running again. So I tried Alice.... seemed good to go. I tried Dishonored... and that's when I got the error message that I attached above.

 

So now I'm hoping one of you out there who is more educated than me at this stuff can help me out. Because honestly I didn't understand half of what was said in the nvidia 331.93 thread. I know they were asking to submit crash dumps, and while I know what that is, I don't know how to get one. I also don't know how related the driver situation is, to the error message I got above from dishonored. But I got a copy of dishonored for ps3 for xmas and I'm debating if I should hold on to it or not since the pc version isn't working, or just take it back. The again, Bethesda hasn't had the best of luck with PS3 games in the past, so maybe that will be buggy anyhow. I'm also tempted to try running it on the desktop, but it only has a 550ti.

 

Anyways, any help would be appreciated.

Edited December 26, 2013 by Fistandilius

[Fistandilius]

Forget it. My NVidia driver problem is back. I can't play any of my games right now. Thanks anyways anyone who looked.

[Rennn]

Honestly, I would probably back up the stuff I really wanted to save (photos, passwords, etc.) and then just reinstall windows and all your drivers. Update the BIOS. Stuff like that. I've found the Nvidia 320.49 drivers to be the most stable, but even 331.93 works for me and that's generally considered unstable. I don't know if that's the best course of action, but it's what I would do.

 

Bethesda didn't make Dishonored, they just published it. Arkane developed it.

 

Anyway, a 550 TI should run Dishonored well enough. I had a 768MB GTX 460 that put Dishonored on ultra at 60 fps with no stutter or framerate drops. It's quite an easy game to run.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Rennn

[Fistandilius]

Honestly, I would probably back up the stuff I really wanted to save (photos, passwords, etc.) and then just reinstall windows and all your drivers. Update the BIOS. Stuff like that. I've found the Nvidia 320.49 drivers to be the most stable, but even 331.93 works for me and that's generally considered unstable. I don't know if that's the best course of action, but it's what I would do.

 

Bethesda didn't make Dishonored, they just published it. Arkane developed it.

 

Anyway, a 550 TI should run Dishonored well enough. I had a 768MB GTX 460 that put Dishonored on ultra at 60 fps with no stutter or framerate drops. It's quite an easy game to run.

I've tried 310.90, 314.22, 326.19, 331.82 and 331.93 and I'm getting the same crashes. The only reason I thought my desktop might work is because I haven't done any updates on it. Unless it's set to auto update in which case I might be screwed anyways.

 

I don't know if the problem is entirely the driver or the fact that I upgraded to Win 8.1.

 

I have thought about wiping the system and starting over, but I have a lot of programs that were freeware that I downloaded and I'm not sure I'd be able to find them all again. I save a lot of stuff in my software directory, but sometimes if it's small I run the installer right off the server. Also, this laptop came with Windows 8 on it, so I would have to find out if it has a recovery system or check and see if it came with a backup disk of some sort (never looked through the papework).

 

I'm sure you know how it is. Once you do a reinstall you never get everything back the way it used to be.

 

I think I have enough hard drive space on the desktop that I could back the whole thing up, but I have no idea how long it would take to transfer 440gb of data.

Edited December 28, 2013 by Fistandilius

[Fistandilius]

Add 331.40 to the list of failures. Desktop is using 331.65 for Windows 7 64 bit. I had luck with win 7 drivers prior to installing Dishonored, so maybe I'll try that one next.

 

I've been trying to work my way through this thread: https://forums.gefor...d-11-27-13-/29/

 

But right now it's 43 pages long. I see that some MSI users are having luck by using MSI afterburner and setting the following:

 

Quote

 

have you tried using MSI Afterburner and bump the voltage of the gpu?
with Afterburner I move the core voltage slider to +12, and I have not had a tdr in 5 months.
I have never had a directx problem, have you tried downloading directx from Microsoft and re-install it? a friend of mine did awhile back so I re-installed directx for him and so far it's been working fine.

 

Quote

 

for my GTX760 Hawk that having same driver problem before I also use MSI Afterburner 2.3.1 to set the power limit 80 and lower the core clock by -25 (even that means performance reduction), but so far its running fine without crash anymore. I try to do just like BERRRRs but cant modify the core voltage.

 

But despite the fact that I have an 8 month old MSI laptop, it didn't come with afterburner software.

Edited December 28, 2013 by Fistandilius

[hoofhearted4]

That's because you have to download afterburner.

 

Idk if I would attempt voltage tweaks on a laptop GPU though. You'd probably do more harm then good.

 

It doesn't take. Too long to back up that amount of data.

 

As with any problem with a PC have you scanned your computer for viruses. Also you can try doing a system restore to a point before all this started happening. It very well could be a bug messing with your system. Also try it on your desktop. It could just be Windows 8 giving you the problem.

[Fistandilius]

That's because you have to download afterburner.

 

Idk if I would attempt voltage tweaks on a laptop GPU though. You'd probably do more harm then good.

 

It doesn't take. Too long to back up that amount of data.

 

As with any problem with a PC have you scanned your computer for viruses. Also you can try doing a system restore to a point before all this started happening. It very well could be a bug messing with your system. Also try it on your desktop. It could just be Windows 8 giving you the problem.

Like I said, Skyrim ran perfectly for 1400 hours on this laptop, so it isn't windows 8, unless they made some horrible update and I'm not the only one suffering from these symptoms from what I've been reading.

I have avast running on this thing, so I should be good for the majority of viruses and I just did a registry clean with cclean since I'd been changing driver's so often.

I just had another failure with 331.65.

 

I've come to the conclusion that it's more than likely one of three things:

 

1. My GPU is failing - Possible, but given the fact that other people are suffering from the same issues, it's not certain.

 

2. Windows 8.1 doesn't play nice with my GPU - Also possible. Everything I've read though has been from NVidia's end, not Microsoft.

 

3. NVidia's WIndows 8.1 drivers are **** - This is the most likely candidate based on the amount of research I've done. Everything ran fine until I updated my drivers and switched to 8.1 I've rolled back my drivers well below what I'm using on the desktop with little or no positive results.

 

I think the bottom line is, you guys are correct, the next step is to try to re-install windows 8. I found my MSI documents this morning, and apparently there is some sort of f3 recovery mode I can do that is supposed to set everything back to factory specs. I do still need to read up on this though, because apparently there is two options. One is a complete factory reset, the other attempts to keep your files and apps in place. From what I've read, it's impossible to revert back to Windows 8 from Windows 8.1 unless you've setup some kind of restore point beforehand, so I find it unlikely that this option will work for me. For all I know when the recovery mode was put in place there was no 8.1 in the works for them to even theorize about.

 

Which means I need to start backing up files. I will lose some stuff, but I guess at this point it is either that or wait for NVidia to bail me out.

[Vindekarr]

I don't know if it's related or not but I used to have a relative of your card, and had some serious driver issues when I first started using it. Eventually an update was released that fixed the issue, but it has been a theme with Nvidia products I've owned in the past. Even my current GTX760 SC has a few compatibility issues. It's proven itself an extremely reliable card-but for some reason it just doesn't get along with the Frostbite 3 engine in the way my 580 hated Gamebrio.

[Fistandilius]

I don't know if it's related or not but I used to have a relative of your card, and had some serious driver issues when I first started using it. Eventually an update was released that fixed the issue, but it has been a theme with Nvidia products I've owned in the past. Even my current GTX760 SC has a few compatibility issues. It's proven itself an extremely reliable card-but for some reason it just doesn't get along with the Frostbite 3 engine in the way my 580 hated Gamebrio.

 

Well I'm having issues with every game I own, regardless of Gamebryo or not. Dishonored and Alice both use the Unreal Engine, IIRC. I wouldn't be half as upset if it wasn't a laptop. I don't have an option of changing video cards obviously.