Crashes, findings
Just a quick update post if anyone happens to be following me and might be curious to the outcome.
It turns out I was experiencing 2 separate issues, but all triggered by BF6 or exposed by BF6.
TLDR:
My issues in BF6 were actually hardware related. It only happens or is triggered by BF6 because of the stress it puts on hardware components or accesses various components.
BF6 runs well because it utilizes the PC hardware (optimized) but doing so will expose weaknesses in the hardware. In my case the problems were caused by running a 7800X3D CPU with 4 sticks of RAM and a faulty NVME drive.
TL:
Symptom 1. A hard system hang/freeze when loading into a map. The only way to recover is to hard reset/power off/on.
I realized this was a hardware compatibility/stability issue specifically with my 7800X3D and 4 sticks of 16 GB RAM. I didn't know this, but apparently the 7800X3D has a weaker memory controller and is less capable of running 4 sticks of RAM regardless of EXPO being enabled or not. The only problem is that the only time the system completely hangs is in BF6 and loading into the world/map. The freeze would be either immediate or take a few minutes.
My "fix" for this is reinstalling my 7700X, and this got me back to my original crash during gameplay but no more system hangs. EXPO enabled with 7700X. The other option is to use only 2 sticks with the 7800x3d, but I don't want to.
Symptom 2. The original crash I was seeing was still present. The symptom is, character models, map (on the skip briefing screen), textures not loading (flat polygons). As soon as I notice the map not loading and the square placeholders for squad players, I know the game will crash. So, I'll quit the game, but it then takes me to a black screen and the only way out of that is to "end task" in task manager.
For some reason though, powering off/on the system completely allows me to play one match and then during this match the game will freeze or stutter for a few seconds and audio will stutter or cut out. It eventually recovers maybe between 15-30 seconds after (almost like a timing issue). Once the match is done, I'll exit the game and the entire issue starts over, characters models, textures don't load. I've tried almost all troubleshooting I can think of:
I did pretty much all of the troubleshooting I could find but still it was crashing. I'm not listing everything I did but I spent a lot of time. So, "trust me bro".
Anyhow, the thing that clued me in was sifting through Windows event viewer and I kept seeing an NVME storage error trying to access the drive. That was weird because I disabled (not initialized) the drive in Windows (so it doesn't even show up as a drive). I initialized the drive to format it and discovered it was inaccessible with an error (I don't recall the specific error).
Since I wasn't using this drive, I just physically removed it. No more errors. I've played multiple hours/matches so far, no issues. The only conclusion I can draw from this is maybe the anti-cheat (no idea what it's doing in the background) or the game itself was stressing the PCIE bus or trying to access the drive even though it was disabled.
My now stable config is:
7700x
16GB x 4, EXPO 1 @ 5600
RTX 5080, stock overclock
OS on NVME drive
Game library on second NVME drive.
Key Game settings:
at 4k resolution
High preset
DLSS disabled (I may enable this, upscaling only, in the future for the extra performance, but I just want to enjoy the game and stability for a while)
FPS in game limit to 235 (my monitor has 240hz refresh)
Gsync enabled.
Vsync off.
Reflex enabled. (not boost)
Good luck to anyone experiencing issues with BF6.
Software issues caused by hardware are some of the worst to track down. I'm lucky to have the spare hardware available because of my PC gaming addiction/hobby.
See you all on the Battlefield!
