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Benadiction's avatar
Benadiction
8 years ago

Re: Mass Effect Andromeda directX crash

I've had the exact same issue since launch. Played the game perfectly during the trial stage with no issues, crashing only started after the game officially launched. Same DirectX issue as everyone else; and despite hours, days and weeks using online chat to speak to EA customer services, all they could do was regurgitate the same old useless information which pretty much wasn't any better than "Have you tried turning it off and on again"?

Needless to say I gave up with the endeavour hoping for some fix in an upcoming patch...

My crash was only caused by the ending of a cut scene or by pressing M to view the map or Esc to go into the menu screen.  

Months later and I return, having fully uninstalled MSI afterburner, freshly installed my Nvidia drivers again ready to get stuck in. Right off the bat the game crashes before it even finishes loading this time. Having read the solutions on here, I dropped everything to LOW and turned off Vsync, HDR and Triple Buffering. I swear I did all this before when I first encountered the problem but it seems to now be stable.

With the game in a stable state, one by one I switched everything back on, gradually going up in increments and testing the game for crashes before moving onto the next setting. With everything now on HIGH, 4k, Vsync, Triple buffering and HDR also on, the game is in a perfectly stable state and I begin moving everything  up to ULTRA. Everything drops in easily and there are no issues except the very second I applied ULTRA to the SHADOW settings the game crashed immediately.

From this I surmise that the shadow setting could also be a root cause for everyone else struggling here and I hope this helps.

My specs:

ROG Strix 1080 8G

16GB RAM

Intel 6900k

3 Replies

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    8 years ago

    I have a GTX770 and 8GB of RAM. I haven't been able to completely fix the freezing (resulting from a DirectX error), but I think I've narrowed it down to a memory leak issue (as have others) and managed to make it less frequent. It's definitely not a hardware issue.


    Things I've tried that absolutely did not help, although they've reportedly helped others:   

    - Repairing the installation had no effect

    - Uninstalling GPU drivers with DDU and making a clean reinstall had no effect

    - Uninstalling and reinstalling audio drivers had no effect

    - Lowering CPU and GPU temps had no effect (extensive monitoring shows the freezing is not linked to stress on the CPU or GPU)

    - Adding TdrDdiDelay and TdrDelay keys in the Windows registry did not help*

    - Running the game on windowed mode did not help

    The three** things that significantly reduced the interval of crashes:

    - Underclocking the GPU core and memory clocks below stock values

    - Increasing Windows pagefile size to over 16 GB

    - Running MassEffectAndromeda.exe in Windows 8 compatibility mode

    Now I'm not sure why lowering GPU memory clocks would help but it did increase freeze interval from a few minutes to over an hour. Although I only got to test than on Eos, and as soon as I got back on Tempest the game crashed again, so any improvement it could be circumstantial.

    Increasing pagefile size however correlated with freezing becoming much less common in the exact situations where the game froze before.

    I'd like to point out that a game needing a huge pagefile in 2017 is absolutely bananas, but hey, if it works it works. Someone somewhere theorized that the game has a memory leak whereby it needs to dump all of its memory onto the page file or it crashes, so any pagefile smaller than the amount of RAM the game uses is insufficient. The memory leak is inevitable, but if the theory holds, the larger your pagefile the longer it takes for the game to crash.

    *Update: It is possible that adding TdrDdiDelay and TdrDelay registry keys into the Windows registry (google for instructions) contributes to making the freezing less frequent, together with the other fixes, but will not solve the issue alone.

    **Update II:It seems that running MassEffectAndromeda.exe in Windows 8 compatibility mode also significantly helps the game's stability. Together with the other fixes above I've been able to increase crash interval from a few minutes at worst to several hours at best.

  • BLKST-Ryan's avatar
    BLKST-Ryan
    8 years ago

    It seems like "TdrDdiDelay" only delay the crash by X amount of second.

  • GmY77's avatar
    GmY77
    Seasoned Novice
    6 years ago
    @Benadiction Same DX Error... but using Nvidia 6x - 12GB Ram - Intel I5 if i leave all to LOW settings DX Error appear... if i try HIGH settings the same... from 5 to 15 minutes and then DX Error. I have to try disable Triple Buffering, Vsync etc... but very strange error, considering many other games works perfectly and i formatted my pc (Windows10PRO) 1 week ago and i not installed anything, only updated drivers.

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