Game causing BSODs again

Age of Empires II: DE II - Report a Bug
1

:arrow_forward: GAME INFORMATION

  • Build: Current: 101.101.39515.0 5328560
  • Platform: Steam
  • Operating System: Windows 10
  • Gamertag: PlusNomad

:arrow_forward: ISSUE

Game causing BSODs yet again, this time titanicing my GPU driver - See youtube video linked below.

Initially, the game just seems to alt tab, black screen (GPU stops outputting to either monitor), resumes, the entire game’s UI panels have ceased to exist apart from the elements on them, repeats for a while running at about 2 fps in the five second intervals, eventually BSOD. Titanics any video player and pretty much anything using GPU in the background before the BSOD - things return to normal if I alt F4 and close the game before it BSODs. Stop code Video_TDR_Failure, with nvlddmkm.sys failing.

System specs:
Ryzen 9 3950x
EVGA RTX 2080 Super Ultra XC
Asus TUF Plus X570
The drive DE is on is a Sabrent Rocket 1tb NVME SSD.
Ram is Viper Blackout 4 3600mhz C17 (Previously OCed to C16 but reverted to C17 to diagnose this)
Monitors are two Acer Nitro VG271UPbmiipx - 1440p 144hz Freesync monitors - got these at the same time as the last monthly update so its a bit less clear what’s causing it

Steps I have tried to solve this

  1. Played more and less demanding games almost consistantly, no issues presented there. Which use both more 3D and VRAM than DE, as well as more memory alongside more CPU usage.
  2. Underclocked the GPU
  3. Stress tested GPU using Furmark’s GPU stess test for a lenghtly time
  4. Ran memtest64 for a lenghtly period of time with 32 parallel threads to test ram (undoing the OC back to C17 as stock xmp for 3600)
  5. DDU-d the Nvidia drivers and reinstalling via the website
  6. Lowering graphics settings and enabling Vsync to cap frame rate at 144 as a quick way of lowering it’s system demand.

My diagnosing has gone as far to prove that it’s not my GPU, nor the drivers, however it’s the way DE effectively wrecks them whilst running. It’s closer to malware than it was in the beta, and back then it’d just outright crash your PC whenever it wanted to even after it was closed out.

:arrow_forward: REPRODUCTION STEPS

Here’s how to reproduce the issue:

  1. Launch the game
  2. Play it
  3. Realise the developers couldn’t put together a highschool project let alone this mod to the 1999 base game.

It has occurred on multiple maps in 2v2/3v3/4v4 ranked games, and 4v4 unranked arena games at ANY stage of the game.

:arrow_forward: GAME FILES

:arrow_forward: IMAGE & ATTACHMENTS

https://youtu.be/xwKCDTFxU7s

1 Like
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Realise the developers couldn’t put together a highschool project let alone this mod to the 1999 base game.

although the game has a ton of issue. it looks like a computer problem from your side tbh, something you gotta fix yourself.

3

If its related to my hardware, then it’s specific to this game. No game, nor stresstest or benchmark has been able to reproduce the issue for anything other than this game. Ergo, it’s due to the game. It’s also a semi common issue if you search for the nvlddmkm BSOD in relation to DE. If the game doesn’t work with specific, high end modern hardware that’s common, that’s a problem with the game.

2 Likes
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if I’m not mistaken, the game has a problem when the vram is higher than 8gb

5

Including 8gb itself?

6

theres so much stuff involved that can cause problem. OS, OS version, drivers, hardware, game, other installed software and if each one has 4-5 different ones other than OS which is windows, thats at least 1024 combination.

looks like the game runs fine at the start then having issue, you can try process elimination from there. use a different computer etc

7

So you mean, its the game? Stop coddling the devs, if they put out a well created product they wouldn’t need you defending them needlessly on a bug report thread.

2 Likes
8

stop assuming things and actually look into it will you? assuming I defend them and exaggerate by saying I do it needlessly.

9

Download GeForce Expierence and check for newest GPU drivers

10

Geforce experience is malware at best, I manually update drivers myself, and in my post mentioned I DDUd what I had and manually installed the latest. There also hadn’t been an update for a while, to which I had the latest at a time it did work.

11

Hey there,

Sorry you are having issues. I’m not exactly a computer whiz, but I can offer some suggestions for you to try to help.

Have you tried uninstalling the game and then reinstalling with all hardware running on “stock” settings. Not overclocked, not underclocked. It may not be a stress load issue but more of a “user wants variable hardware rates, engine doesn’t know how to handle it” issue. I’ve had this with some older games in the past where I just had to run all hardware at default settings, even my fans.

It’s possible something in your windows xbox live installation is broken, and this game does use that.
Have you tried a store app powershell reset? That fixed my issues once connecting to Forza servers.

Run windows powershell in admin and use the command: Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}
wait for it to finish (might take a few minutes, and restart)

Last idea, and one I ran into recently on an ordered built computer. The folks who put it together actually put the wrong manufacturer bios on my motheboard, which, in addition to causing 30-40 second startups on a m2ssd, caused a few other issues as well. I had to install the correct bios and that fixed many of my issues and got my startup down to about 4 seconds.

Best of luck.