I've been battling the ridiculous amount of unmitigated crashes this game produces since I started playing it. Mind you I own a GTX 670 that has been running the latest games beautifully. In this game I experienced the DirectX error crash, the CTD with no message, and the COMPLETELY INFURIATING system lockup that requires a hard power down. The fact that EA/Bioware's only response has been "Try underclocking your GPU" is not helpful. After some pondering and many nights of experimentation, here's my solution.
I constantly run diagnostics through MSI Afterburner, previously EVGA PrecisionX but that didn't play well with some games (I'm looking at Ubisoft). After seeing all the spikes and inconsistency in the video card's stats, I decided to try something different by forcing the card to perform at a constant maximum clock. Here's the method I came across that makes this possible: http://www.overclock.net/t/1267918/guide-nvidia-inspector-gtx670-680-disable-boost-fixed-clock-speed-undervolting
This requires a little bit of tech experience, but is not as complicated as it may seem. It stabilized my game, even allowing me to Alt+Tab to write this post. This only applies to nVidia users, I guess, at least I assume so, but the gist of the solution is to force your card to always be clocked at its max instead of allowing the application to determine when this should happen. AMD card users may be able to find another way to do this. I sincerely hope this helps some people out there who are as frustrated and disappointed as I was.
UPDATE EDIT: Ran really well for hours, then I got the DirectX crash. I think that downloading this VCRedist has fixed that, though, I was able to get through a part that constantly threw that crash. Use the x86 version. I'm still convinced the previous clock fix has resolved the other crashes as I haven't seen them since.
