PC Load Screen Freezing (black screen during load or crash)

**LOAD SCREEN FREEZING**

(Black screen with purple loading icon in lower right corner, video lock up needing hard restart issues, or window crashing to desktop after starting)

This is a shader compiling issue.

So, this issue has been affecting many ever since the game launched.

I had this issue, ensured everything was updated (BIOS, GPU drivers, etc.), run as administrator, compatibility modes, restarts, disabling various graphics features, etc., etc., etc.

None of it worked.

Many folks mentioned deleting (or simply removing) the shader_cache folder in the game files and it worked.

As a workaround, it caused some performance issues but the game was playable, until the most recent update.

Now, if you attempt this work around it says there are "Corrupted Files" and you have to run the repair if you want to play.

So that workaround is out the window.

Spoke with EA Support earlier about this issue and was told it's a known issue causing problems for lots of various hardware configurations/platforms (i.e. PC, PS5, XBox).

Supposedly a fix is in the works and set to be released sometime "soon."

Added the usual "some people are having issues because of outdated BIOS causing crash during shader compilation" bit. No help there, my BIOS is up-to-date, still no luck.

Also mentioned that some people apparently have had issues with nVidia graphics driver versions newer than Version 560.94 (tried a rollback to this version as well, didn't help).

All in all, it sounds like some of us are simply out of luck until they release a fix....