Battlefield 1 has stopped working

[DaGrooved1]

Greetings Helpers,

It seems I'm not the first person to experience this issue, and it seems to be a very generic issue with a thousand causes, so at this point I am looking for any and all suggestions.

Game will run perfectly smooth for about 30 minutes to an hour before freezing for 3-5 seconds leading to "Battlefield 1 has stopped working"

If I am running in Direct X 12 event viewer shows faulty bf1.exe, where as if I am running in Direct X 11 it will show a faulty d3d11.dll, running an old driver resulted in a faulty nvwgf2umx.dll  but using a newer driver fixed that issue.

Brand new system assembled just last week:

Ryzen 5 1600 (stock speed)

Zotac GTX 1080 mini (stock speed)

16GB DD4 2666 RAM (stock speed)

MSI B350 mobo

Thus far I have tried:

Reformatting Windows entirely

Clean boot

Reinstalling / Repairing Game

Installing game on different hard drives

Completely clean installs of various Nvidia Drivers

DirectX repairs

Various RAM settings, overclocked, stock, underclocked, etc

Various in-game settings, low, medium high, vsyncs, Dx 11, Dx 12

Running as administrator

Compatibility settings disabling full screen optimizations, override high DPI scaling, etc

Running windowed / full screen / full screen border-less

Adjusting affinity, priority, etc

Latest BIOS, Chipset drivers ,etc

Ensuring Microsoft Visual C++ 2012, 2013, 2015 all up to date

CHKDSK, DISM, SFC, CCleaner, etc, no errors found

I have my Dxdiag attached, you can see in the diagnostics section where I was switching between drivers resulting in different errors, and where I performed a clean boot which stopped the Nvidia control panel service from launching properly. I was lead to believe it was a GPU issue given the d3d11.dll issue when ran in Dx11, but given everything I've tried I'm wondering if it's something else?

Haven't noticed this issue in any other games I play. Might try installing Battlefield 4 and see if it has the same problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Moskolonel]

Have you try to install previous driver of your graphic card? Last up can be create crash of game.

[DaGrooved1]

Where this system is only a week old I had started out with the latest driver.. I have tried a number of older drivers that still resulted in similar crashes, is there any driver release in particular that is known to work well with Battlefield 1?

I gave my old setup to my girl friend who's using the latest driver on her GTX 770 and she experiences no issues what so ever, which is why I'm questioning if this is actually a GPU issue at all. I've been running DX11 Benchmarks for hours and my GPU never goes above 70 degrees.

[Carbonic]

First of all, thanks for the very well written post. Such details make me happy

Does it happen in any other games? What other workloads have you tested with? Other games? This is kinda important if we are to make hardware instability a less likely cause.

The different causes for the BF1 crashes mentioned in Dxdiag could suggest a general instability. Since BF1 is very happy with maxing out both GPU and CPU, a guess could be that your power supply (PSU) gets unstable after a while on maximum power draw from both GPU and CPU.

Since AM4 is a new platform I would probably also run memtest just to be sure it's not a memory compatibility issue.

[DaGrooved1]

You may be on to something there Carbonic, I went into my settings and set my RAM to a different XMP profile, the game now lasts twice as long before crashing, same "has stopped working" error, with the log reading:

Faulting application name: bf1.exe, version: 1.0.50.33312, time stamp: 0x596416b9
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.15063.447, time stamp: 0xa329d3a8
Exception code: 0xc0000374

Unfortunately this "ntdll.dll" is another very generic error with a thousand and one causes haha. I have ran a number of benchmark programs in both DX11 and DX12 and haven't been able to replicate these crashes, which had lead me to believe this was something more than a GPU issue. I will run memtest and see if I can't find any problems.

One step closer to a solution hopefully!

[DaGrooved1]

Well it seems I've gone one step forward and two steps back. Shortly after my last post I began to experience the same crashes with the same d3d11.dll or bf1.exe. Eager to determine if this was a system instability issue or something related specifically to this game I did some tests.

Battlefield 1 crashes after an hour of play.

Crysis 3 runs on ultra settings for at least 4 hours without any issues. (after 4 hours I had to stop to eat food)

Both the "Heaven" and "Valley" Direct X 11 Benchmarks both run problem free for at least 2 hours each. GPU temperatures never go above 70 degrees Celsius.

Other popular online games run for extended periods of time without issue.

Battlefield 4 crashes after an hour of play.

In fact Battlefield 1 and 4 will crash after an hour even if I just leave it on the main menu, without ever having joined a game. I receive a "Your graphics card has been removed or a driver update has occured." error (but no update has occurred of course). Followed by a "Battlefield 1 has stopped working".

There is something about the latest Battlefield games that my computer really doesn't like. Or vice versa.

Back to the drawing board! I feel I may end up having to wait for a game update or a newer Nvidia driver to be released.

[Carbonic]

How much CPU and GPU does the Battlefield games use when you play?

Did the benchmarks and other games have similar usage?

What about CPU temperatures?

[DaGrooved1]

In-game Battlefield will take up a similar amount of CPU, GPU load varies on whether I'm running it on low or ultra, but it will crash at either setting. Highest CPU temperature I achieved was 68 degrees Celsius.

When left on the main menu it uses considerably less than other games and benchmarks, CPU temp barely goes above it's idle temp around 40 degrees (I may buy some better paste and re-seat the cooler, I think I can get the idle down to around 35-37 degrees). But it will still crash telling me my graphics card was removed.

The main menu crash is what really baffles me. It's not putting any load on my system what so ever. Yet it crashes after the same amount of time that it would if I were in a game. It's almost as if something is occurring at a fixed point, some routine code or procedure, that just doesn't agree with this game or my system.

[DaGrooved1]

Just wanted to give everyone a little update on my situation in case it can help anyone else in the future. Beyond the constant crashing I was also experiencing incredibly low FPS for a system of my caliber (GTX 1080, Ryzen 1600, 16gb of RAM) I was getting between 30-50 FPS. 

After days of trial and error I rolled back to the Windows 10 Anniversary edition (pre-Creators Update), installed the latest Nvidia drivers and every single issue has disappeared.

My game is now buttery smooth 100+ fps on ultra with zero crashes. 

Windows 10 Creators Update was causing all my problems.

Thanks for everything guys!