Solution for the infinite black loading screen and disconnection issues

Hello !

This is not a question, but rather how I managed to fix those issues. I figured if it could help some people resolve the problem it could be worse a post...

So I've had difficulties loading the game for a few weeks, and after the latest update I couldn't login on any servers any more.

Config :

Playing on PC with Steam

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU

NVidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Asus motherboard (you'll see why I post this)

The issue :

What happened was : I was able to launch the game and access the first screen without any issues. That screen with the Continue button and where you can select different data centers with tab. But from there, whatever data center I selected, I was never able to get pass the black loading screen with the 3 band Apex logo on the bottom right corner of the screen.

I think I managed to get pass this screen once, only to get disconnected just a few moments later, as I tried to browse the game menus (and after a freeze).

What I did :

I tried a lot of things, basically everything I could find, and none of them seemed to work. Stuff like tempering with USB ports, checking game files integrity, launching in admin mode, with a -dev option, updating my NVidia drivers, trying my luck with multiple data centers, rebooting etc...

What I noticed though, after seeing a few posts talking about it on the Steam forums, is that the CPU usage during the loading and on the data center selection screen was pretty high. About a steady 40% CPU usage on the data center selection screen, and peaks at 100% during the loading on the black screen. What I tried is I launched the game, launched windows task manager and waited for the CPU usage to drop while on the data center selection screen. After a few minutes CPU usage was down to around 10%, I went on and clicked to load the game and it worked... I was able to access the game menus, but I still had heavy CPU usage, and browsing in the different sections sent the CPU at 100 % again, causing a disconnection (with a server connection lost error message or something like that). Anyhow, waiting again for some time for the CPU usage to drop once in the game menus seemed to work, and after that I could browse the menus.

So, an educated guess (still a guess though) on the issue would be that when reaching 100% CPU usage, the network layer can not execute correctly anymore, and some sort of keep alive mechanism with the servers gets interrupted, thus detecting game freezes as disconnections.

What fixed the issue permanently :

I went on and checked on my motherboard manufacturer's website (Asus in this case) for updated chipset drivers, installed them and rebooted. Since then, peak CPU usage during loading reaches only about 60% use, the connection to the servers only takes a few seconds and I don't have any freezes in the game menus any more.

I also installed AMD Ryzen Master, not sure if it had an impact though.

TL;DR :

You can check if the issue is the same as the one I had by monitoring CPU usage during loading and only pressing continue on the first screen once CPU usage drops.

And, update your CPU drivers.

Hope this helps.