Doubt it would make a difference on the monitor....a true HDMI monitor WILL look better when gaming, but doubt it helps this crash.
Alright, I went fiddling around with some new combos of possible solutions. Results are as follows.
I set my GPU into debugging mode from the Nvidia control panel, and chose my GPU as the PhysX processor under 3D settings (this was previously set to "automatic"). Game crashed as per usual in less than five minutes.
The best result was achieved by underclocking my GPU by a 100MHz and running the game in windowed mode. I got about 1½ hours in until a crash in cutscene back at Skyhold.
With these two last attempts I've gotten no error message, but the game just freezes, again forcing me to use task manager to quit it.
Is it possible your GPU could be overheating? Have you checked your computer for dust and monitored your temperatures? (You can use a program such as HWMonitor to monitor your temperatures). I had similar issues with the game one summer, the Nvidia GPU I had at the time was very prone to overheating (it did make a great heater in winter, though. Kinda miss it!).
Hey! This is what I was suspecting as well, but the temperature never went over 80C and mostly stayed in the 60-70C range. Currently I'm using EVGA from Steam to underclock the card and have the temperature max set to 80C. I don't really know what constitutes as overheating though, so let me know if I should lower it even further!
I changed my GPU for a new one (same model, 3 fans instead of the 2 I had in my previous one) to try to fix the problem, and cleaned everything with canned air when changing the GPU so it can't be the dust issue.. New GPU and dust removal didn't remove the problem though.
I've heard people fix this issue with a clean driver install together with ccleaner. So far I've only used DDU for a clean install (tried at least 7 times with different Nvidia drivers), so the next thing I'm going to try will be DDU+Ccleaner for the newest drivers + an old one from a time the game worked for me..
Ahhh I want to play this game so bad, it's my absolute favourite.. 🙂
Updates again...
I tried to install older drivers using Ccleaner, from October 2016 when the game worked for me. Got about 30 minutes in before the crash.
Tried the same to the most recent drivers with Ccleaner, my GPU temperature set to max 75C and underclocked by about 100-150MHz. Got about 1½ hours in and quit the game successfully without crash. Tried to run the game the next day with the same underclocked values, got less than a minute in.
Set my tesselation quality, post processing, ambient occlusion, post process anti-aliasing and multi sample anti-aliasing off in game, and effects quality to low. Same 1-2 minutes of gameplay.
Tried backing up and deleting all my save game files, but Origin kept cloud syncing them back despite trying to cancel the cloud sync.
Tried messing with Nvidia control panel settings again, set maximum pre-rendered frames to 1, power management to prefer maximum performance and vertical sync to adaptive. Didn't even get to the main menu.
Reverted all Nvidia settings to default and optimized the game back to GeForce experience recommeded settings. Checked with the DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer that it was up to date. Ran DirectX Redist. Uninstalled DAI and ran CCleaner, re-installed DAI + DLC via Origin (not CD to get the updated version). After this I got to play for about 2 hours without a crash and quit the game normally. As a sidenote played through the latter half of Halamshiral and the following long chain of heavy cutscenes without skipping any of them and the game run just fine.
Restarted the game today, and got the same 2-ish hours in without a crash, and got to quit the game normally. For some reason after re-installing the game practically all of the graphics settings were set to ultra, whereas previously I had a lot of them on high, a few on medium and only a couple on ultra. My PC heats up like crazy but at least the game looks gorgeous and has worked so far..
I will keep playtesting for a few more days. As this is my 4th playthrough I get bored after about 1½ hours into it anyway and haven't had the time/interest to play for longer periods of time at once. Will try to find the time to play for an extended period of time sometime next week to make sure it works.
