Part of the problem is that to fix the issue, the devs would have to spend a load of time trawling back through SWL code that other people wrote, trying to identify where it’s conflicting with the new nvidia stuff. There’s then no guarantee that there wouldn’t be another conflict with the next version of the driver that nvidia puts out. That makes it a potentially very costly thing to try to fix, just in terms of the dev time required.
Sadly, that means that a fix is unlikely, so you have to decide if you’re willing to use the work around and use specific drivers that are known to work, or you can stop playing. It’s an annoying choice to have to make, but there’s not really another option available to us.
While it’s understandable that an engine-level fix to address instability related to Nvidia drivers would be too costly to address, I think there’s a greater cost in doing nothing about it. Nvidia dominates the GPU market. Many newcomers and returning players to SWL will try to play the game and be turned away once they realize how unstable it is and what is needed to work around it. There’s no hope for future growth or player retention if a significant number of players will experience frequent crashes that are unavoidable only if they use out-dated drivers or AMD GPUs.
Just how ‘frequent’ are these crashes, really? I’m running the latest drivers (442.19) on a 1060 and a 1050 and I wouldn’t describe the crashes as frequent. It’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. There are still occasional surprise drops to desktop. Supposedly RTX-series cards fare even better.
I crash usually within 5 minutes of playing. Then again within 20 minutes. Eventually it becomes less frequent as I spend more time in a specific zone, but anytime I go to a new area I usually crash pretty quickly. I’ve tried a few different drivers, but I reset everything on my PC last summer so I only have access to a few of them, which are the most recent ones, which also seem to be the least stable. I would gladly keep to one driver version if it actually worked properly, but I have yet to find one.
I can’t play the game at all. I make it to the playscreen and as soon as I try to do anything it crashes. To be honest I’ve given up on SW. I’m getting more done in real life so maybe I should thank funcom
So I’ve been away for awhile, I returned today to find myself a victim of this issue as well, everything seems fine and then … desktop. I can play for maybe 30 second to 5 minutes… more often than not closer to 30 seconds. I have a Nvidia GTX 1070. Current driver is 445.87.
Is the best solution really to revert to a driver from before November of 2019? I don’t even see it on Nvidia’s page anymore and that wouldn’t benefit any of the other games that I have that I can play without any issues at all.
Any new information out there? Any official word (i.e. we’re working with Nvidia)?
They’re almost definitely not working with Nvidia on it; by all appearances the game is mostly on the back burner in terms of technical support. Trouble is also that the problem has a myriad of potential causes, which is why people often suggest rolling back to a driver version that has been the closest to rock solid.
I’m on this version with almost no crashes:
Not the latest driver, not using Steam. If I do crash it’s usually when I’m closing the game or switching character, anyway. My friend is using the the same card and a similar PC spec on Steam/Windows 10 and she has had constant crashes since updating to that driver version.
I will ask her if she could update her driver to the latest version and try the game out for a bit if she is willing.
Alright, reverted to driver 445.75 and that seems to have done the trick for me. I’ll know for sure when I can play for longer but so far so good. Thanks, all!
just updated to latest version and game crashed after 10 mins, as usual… sadly we can’t play like this.
if FC doesn’t care about people leaving because they can’t even play, i don’t think we can do much.
I am crashing a lot. I can’t even replicate it in specific set ups / or say it is in relation to anything I am doing. I feel like I have tried everything, and that a lot of people have given me a lot of valid and reasonable advice which I have tried. We are 2 months and 8 days away from 8 years of playing TSW and SWL - I never crashed as much as I do now. I coped with the warp to desk top after a New York Raid… you know it is coming, but it is after you are done.
Right now, I crash when I open my bank, or when I am running down the road in London. I crash when I am tanking, when I just get into game from loading it with a freshly booted computer. I crash when I have been in game for a couple of mins… or if I am lucky after a couple of hours. I crash all. the. time.
I have quite a lot of patience. But I am pretty sure even my cabal will eventually stop inviting me to teams if I crash during everything
