The Witcher 3 "Balcony Crash"

[flexy]

Just out of curiosity, how many with an Nvidia card, mostly 9xx series but possibly also newer 10xx series have experienced crashes at the beginning in The Witcher 3 on the balcony?

(There is TONS on this on the web)

After a long time of debugging, testing etc. I concluded that The Witcher 3 "does something" weird in this scene, including very fast fluctuation of boost bins and voltages which crashes otherwise stable cards.

My personal theory is that this is a situation which is in particular highly demanding on VRMs (voltage regulators) on some cards, leading to the crashes. Downclocking and/or decreasing powerlimit (even from stock, factory OC cards!) to 90% or 80% solves the problem. (Whereas the downclocking has the same effect as reducing powerlimit, eg. the card uses less power)

"Common sense" would say it is a game bug or driver bug, but then seeing that a lower power draw of the card definitely helps to avoid this crash says otherwise.

Just out of curiosity.

Edit: The crash happens for MANY people, only those with Nvidia cards, either the instant they go out on the balcony or if they stand on the balcony for some minutes. Most people who have the crash can otherwise play the game without a problem.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Nope.

 

[AdamK47]

I would blame the card, not the game.

The game does not crash for me at this scene.

 

[TeslaDev]

I'm running a 970 and it crashes here every time. Also if I try to go downstairs and train Ciri...bought the game and never have been able to play it.

No other game crashes on my system. I play Star Citizen..pushing my card to its limits, no problems. BF: hardline ultra for hours..no problems. Boot up W3...can't even get past intro mission...

 

[flexy]

I did LOTS of testing, my card runs the scene fine as long as I don't go over 1392. It is some weird combination of overclock, voltage and heat I assume. Try to underclock your card, say with MSI Afterburner or Precision X. It has been reported the crash comes only with later drivers and after Win10 AU update, which I assume somehow makes cards more sensitive to overclocks, and this can also mean factory-OCed cards.
While underclocking a card, say -100 or so isn't the "greatest" solution for sure, it sure is better than having gotten the game and not being able to play it.

 

[TeslaDev]

Yeah, I read about that somewhere and tried down clocking 100 mhz...while it made it not crash immediately after walking to the balcony, it still crashed after about 30 seconds of gazing at the scenery. Perhaps I'll have to get more aggressive on the downclock. Quite disappointing.

 

[flexy]

What card do you have? EVGA? Also try running your fan at least 45%, as fast you can tolerate.

 

[TeslaDev]

Yep, EVGA GTX 970 SC GAMING ACX 2.0...to be exact.

I'll tweak with the fan profiles next. Thanks for the advice. Will report back my results.

 

[flexy]

Yeah, same as mine...go figure

 

[TeslaDev]

I set my Power Target to 90% and gave my fans a super aggressive custom step profile. This worked. With that fan at 60%, I hold in the mid 50s Celsius under full load. So I could probably back off a bit. Game didn't crash at all though. What a pain! My GPU sounded like it was going to fly out of my case with the fans that high.