Display Driver crash.

[Damane]

we had this freeze issdue in our shell. unloading the guildwork plugin fixed it. People were crashing left and right during events. Mind you this started happening like 3 weeks ago. Since we started unloading the guildwork pluging during events we havent had any crashes

[Roundelk]

I don't have the guildwork plugin and I have tried 4 different drivers.

[Ragnanicci]

I haven't been using Windower or any kind of third party tool at all and I started having this problem since the last update. Mostly inside my Mog House when I am setting blue magic or navigating menus in some way. Has been happening alot in the last 2 days.

edit: I play on my work computer with which I do AutoCAD, 3D Pointcloud modelling, and other visual design. We bought this as a top of the line gaming computer to support all of the programs that I use, and so I seriously doubt it's caused by FFXI... I would assume its a windows update in conjunction with FFXI...

[Prothescar]

In FFXI Config, do you have Graphics Stabilization enabled? Don't know if it still does anything or not but it always helped for me. Also try turning Shadows and/or Weather Effects to off. This has been an issue for many years now, the last driver to truly support FFXI came out a very long time ago. These are the only ways I ever found to limit or remove the chances of crashing (particularly when Dual Boxing). I wa susually able to get away with keeping Weather on but having Shadows turned on normally caused serious issues.

[Roundelk]

In FFXI Config, do you have Graphics Stabilization enabled? Don't know if it still does anything or not but it always helped for me. Also try turning Shadows and/or Weather Effects to off. This has been an issue for many years now, the last driver to truly support FFXI came out a very long time ago. These are the only ways I ever found to limit or remove the chances of crashing (particularly when Dual Boxing). I wa susually able to get away with keeping Weather on but having Shadows turned on normally caused serious issues.

Tried this and I am still crashing a decent amount.

[Silenka]

Tried this and I am still crashing a decent amount.

Does it happen the same way with Windower, ashita and vanilla pol?

[Roundelk]

Does it happen the same way with Windower, ashita and vanilla pol?

I never used Ashita but I will try vanilla.

[Roundelk]

I'm wondering what setting are people using on Windower and FXI config just to check if I have something off.

[NynJa]

If youre getting the kernel crash to desktop, im 99.9%sure it cant be fixed. Like i said, i contacted Nvidia and they were certain the problem was with ffxi and not the card or drivers.

And despite all my efforts, and i put a lot of google fu to use, i was unable to find a fix for the crashes.

[Lucavi]

Sono can vouch for me: it tended to happen for me with OCed cards. I'm very cautious about OCing my cards until I get a new setup.

[NynJa]

My card isnt OCed though, unless it was OC at the factory for some reason.

[Roundelk]

I think my card was OCed from the factory.

Edit: I just checked and it is.

[NynJa]

Ill check mine when i get home then. Off hand, i dont think its overclocked, but its unlocked and can be overclocked with ease.

[Roundelk]

How would I undo it if possible?

[Roundelk]

Just happened again single box and vanilla.

[NynJa]

Your should have some overclock software that came with your card. See if you can disable the overclock or lower its settings through that. Im still at work so i cant try anything out.

Ok so mines not an Asus, but MSI and it comes with Afterburner. I dont have that installed though, so I dont think my stuff should be overclocked.
Turns out my card comes pre-overclocked. Oh well lol, my bios is outdated on it, i'll see if that happens to fix anything.

[Prothescar]

Since the issue is XI only it is 99% unlikely to be the cause of an overclock instability. XI has had driver issues for nearly half of its life now, it has been a problem with XI since at least 2011, I'm surprised it is only getting attention on here now.

The last driver that was officially tested and supported by XI came out in 2011, however major instability issues didn't start happening until nVidia switched their driver branch over to the most recent architecture (a couple years ago). There can also be some compatibility issues with Windows 10, but that's less common.

THis is a multilayered issue caused by software rather than your hardware (a hardware fault would be causing issues throughout your system, not on just a single game from 2003). Modern versions of windows no longer run DirectX8 itself, rather it is emulated thru DirectX9 which can be further misinterpreted by drivers and hardware due to most pieces of current software and hardware being designed around DX10, 11, and 12. This is one potential cause amongst a myriad of others, XI is simply too old and even when it was new it was running under nonoptimal parameters. Inconsistencies and incompatibilities are to be expected.

Aside from Graphics Stabilization, turning shadows off, and turning weather effects off, here's some stuff that I've seen work for other people:

-Disabling Force Feedback in XIConfig
-Forcing maximum performance power options through nVidia control panel for PlayOnline/FFXI
-Disabling Footstep/Footfall effects
-Disabling Combat Effects in game (not ideal)


You can also try some more technical approached and see if they stop the driver from crashing.


Enable Direct Play.

1) Open your Control Panel.
2) Navigate to Programs -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows features on or off (left sidebar)
3) Go through the list and look for an entry named Legacy Components. Expand the list and ensure that Direct Play is enabled.
4) Click okay, restart your PC.




If all else fails: Disabling/editing TDR timings. TDR is a failsafe that Windows uses to try to prevent damage to your hardware: if your GPU (via drivers) fails to respond in x amount of time (the default is 2 seconds), Windows will tell the driver to terminate and reinitiate itself in order to prevent damage or resume normal operating parameters. It is fairly redundant with today's drivers and generally speaking you will bluescreen far before you get a driver reboot/crash via TDR if your hardware were to overheat or encounter a voltage control error. Editing the TDR values is generally safe for nVidia cards, however if you aren't comfortable with registry edits then skip out on this I suppose. It does have a very high chance of fixing your crashes, however.

1) Press Win Key+R
2) Type in regedit and hit enter
3) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> Current Control Set -> Control -> Graphics Drivers
4) On the right side you should see various entries including stuff like DxgKrnlVersion and RollingOver. We want to make a new key. Right click an empty space on the right panel and choose New -> DWORD(if you run 32bit OS) or QWORD (if you run 64 bit)
5a) Option A, disable TDR entirely. Name the new key TdrLevel and set the value to 0 (hexadecimal).
5b) Option B, adjust TDR timings. Name the new key TdrDelay instead and set the value anywhere between 20 and 60 (this is the number of seconds that you're telling Windows to search for your GPU during a long period of inactivity or lack of response from the GPU), the default value is 2. Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> GraphicsDrivers -> DCI. Adjust the Timeout value to the same number that you chose for TdrDelay.
6) Restart your PC.



If none of this works then it's unlikely that anything will. You can try to debug and log the driver to see which .dll is causing the crash.

[Byrthnoth]

Dx9 compatibility is required for some kind of Windows hardware certification, I think, and many high profile games still use Dx9. However, many cards are moving(/have moved?) away from hardware support. Dx9 is not super different from Dx8, and the conversion is done by a Microsoft provided library.

The real problem is and has always been SE's PS2 graphics to Dx8 conversion. The PS2 was capable of a few things that were not present in Dx8, so the way they jury-rigged it has always sucked and occasionally just has not worked (avatars, weather effects, etc.) The IRC windower channel has discussed the possibility of changing Dx8 function calls to Dx9 a few times, but we always end up deciding it will not buy us anything because that Microsoft library works fine. The problem is the inefficient mass of Dx8 calls. Honestly, it feels like someone at SE or Sony took a first pass at this and then they never went back and fixed anything. Unfortunately, it'd be fairly difficult for anyone other than SE to fix the problem.

Due to the inefficient way SE is using Dx8, some drivers/settings/etc. happen to be better than others. The above is the true problem, though.

[Silenka]

Then perhaps it would be wise to see if Roundelk is using the same card as someone else around here who has the game working fine? I know things can differ a lot from PC to PC but if it's possible to tamp down a scenario where the same hardware is working with the game fine, then maybe a software solution can be reached.

Unfortunately, I don't have that card or anything remotely close to it.

[DaFang]

I have the same issue on 2 of my computers. 1 is i7 4790k 32gb GTX780 Windows 10 Pro and the other is AMD 8350 32GB GTX560 Windows 7 Enterprise. Neither graphics cards are overclocked and neither have any problems with other games (COD, Street Fighter V, FFXIV, CS etc.). I run 1920x1080 on both and basically turn all the fluff off. No shadows, footsteps, weather etc. Graphics stabilization On.

Every update to Nvidia drivers has made the problem worse. The latest drivers caused constant crashes on both (like every 5 minutes) and often at the exact same time. IE both characters would just be standing somewhere together doing nothing and suddenly crash. I uninstalled pretty much everything on the windows 7 machine just to rule things out. It has nothing on it now but FFXI, Windower and Chrome.

So I rolled back to driver version 362.00. That driver seems far more stable. I've had 0 crashes on the windows 7 machine and only occasional crashes on the windows 10 machine. I'm thinking of rolling back even further on the windows 10 machine just to see if it gets more stable, but it's tolerable at the moment.

Best advice I can give is start at 362.00 and keep going back if everything else doesn't work.