Mass Effect Andromeda DirectX crash (one in particular)

[Either_Ardrey]

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@madhiding wrote:
Well, this game does. Let me tell you how this game uses so much ram than anyone ever expected.
1. I reply to Bruzur because his spec is 1080 SLI, this is for 4K resolution.
2.High resolution comes with a high virtual memory committed. Normally is 11GB committed virtual memory in Mass Effect for a single card to transfer to Vram. SLI will double the size resulting a whopping 22GB committed virtual memory.
3.Mass Effect program itself also has a high 8GB committed virtual memory for ram to use.
4.These two types of virtual memory cannot exceed actual physical ram memory plus page file size. This sucks because you have still a lot ram left but cannot be used and you already uses 30GB virtual memory.
5.If you set pagefile to 0, you will get best performance in cutscene and Tempest because they need fast swapping files, but the game will crashes soon or later.
6.If you set pagefile to 32GB then you lag in various cutscene and stutter the hell out of Tempest because suddenly increase 1GB swap file to pagefile is hard for SDD or HDD.
7. I use 1080Ti SLI at 5120x2160 DSR with max setting except no AA. I tested this game myself and it happens every time. Using process explorer you can see Mass Effect easily reach 22-23GB private bytes and it's own 8GB bytes.
8. You can test the explanation yourself to see if it matches your experience. And the game sucks anyway especially in memory management.

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I also have mine in SLI for 4K (I'm using GTX 1070s though), and so far I've managed to get pretty decent results with most of the game with 16GB RAM and no more than ~10GB of page file. The only slow down happens in the Tempest, which seems to happen even with the larger page file size.

[nickson5]

Will they fix this memory problem and HDR? Can I get a refund even if it's passed the timeframe? I'm trying to play at 4K with 2 1080Ti but I don't have 40gb of spare SSD place to Pagefile it.

It's so ridiculous. WOW TOTAL FAIL. I've never seen a so poorly coded game.

[Either_Ardrey]

@nickson5 wrote:

Will they fix this memory problem and HDR? Can I get a refund even if it's passed the timeframe? I'm trying to play at 4K with 2 1080Ti but I don't have 40gb of spare SSD place to Pagefile it.

It's so ridiculous. WOW TOTAL FAIL. I've never seen a so poorly coded game.

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If you have 2 1080Ti's, then you shouldn't need 40GB for the page file size. I'm using 2 1070s, and I can get away with about 10GB of page file size on the core drive. If you're trying to get Max settings AND have 4K, then you need to readjust your expectations. We're not quite there yet with current games (you'd need a ridiculously expensive rig to try). We are only in the birth of games built to acknowledge the existence of 4K, it's going to take a while before it all settles out, and the developers get comfortable with the new technology. You also have to factor in the fact that Frostbite wasn't originally intended for this kind of stuff, so to even have a functioning game at all is a small miracle in itself.

[Benadiction]

I've had the exact same issue since launch. Played the game perfectly during the trial stage with no issues, crashing only started after the game officially launched. Same DirectX issue as everyone else; and despite hours, days and weeks using online chat to speak to EA customer services, all they could do was regurgitate the same old useless information which pretty much wasn't any better than "Have you tried turning it off and on again"?

Needless to say I gave up with the endeavour hoping for some fix in an upcoming patch...

My crash was only caused by the ending of a cut scene or by pressing M to view the map or Esc to go into the menu screen.  

Months later and I return, having fully uninstalled MSI afterburner, freshly installed my Nvidia drivers again ready to get stuck in. Right off the bat the game crashes before it even finishes loading this time. Having read the solutions on here, I dropped everything to LOW and turned off Vsync, HDR and Triple Buffering. I swear I did all this before when I first encountered the problem but it seems to now be stable.

With the game in a stable state, one by one I switched everything back on, gradually going up in increments and testing the game for crashes before moving onto the next setting. With everything now on HIGH, 4k, Vsync, Triple buffering and HDR also on, the game is in a perfectly stable state and I begin moving everything  up to ULTRA. Everything drops in easily and there are no issues except the very second I applied ULTRA to the SHADOW settings the game crashed immediately.

From this I surmise that the shadow setting could also be a root cause for everyone else struggling here and I hope this helps.

My specs:

ROG Strix 1080 8G

16GB RAM

Intel 6900k

[dennispalas]

This actually worked for me, i've tried everything, even reinstall windows, and nothing the i tried this and actually work, thanks

[herra74]

I have a GTX770 and 8GB of RAM. I haven't been able to completely fix the freezing (resulting from a DirectX error), but I think I've narrowed it down to a memory leak issue (as have others) and managed to make it less frequent. It's definitely not a hardware issue.

Things I've tried that absolutely did not help, although they've reportedly helped others:   

- Repairing the installation had no effect

- Uninstalling GPU drivers with DDU and making a clean reinstall had no effect

- Uninstalling and reinstalling audio drivers had no effect

- Lowering CPU and GPU temps had no effect (extensive monitoring shows the freezing is not linked to stress on the CPU or GPU)

- Adding TdrDdiDelay and TdrDelay keys in the Windows registry did not help*

- Running the game on windowed mode did not help

The three** things that significantly reduced the interval of crashes:

- Underclocking the GPU core and memory clocks below stock values

- Increasing Windows pagefile size to over 16 GB

- Running MassEffectAndromeda.exe in Windows 8 compatibility mode

Now I'm not sure why lowering GPU memory clocks would help but it did increase freeze interval from a few minutes to over an hour. Although I only got to test than on Eos, and as soon as I got back on Tempest the game crashed again, so any improvement it could be circumstantial.

Increasing pagefile size however correlated with freezing becoming much less common in the exact situations where the game froze before.

I'd like to point out that a game needing a huge pagefile in 2017 is absolutely bananas, but hey, if it works it works. Someone somewhere theorized that the game has a memory leak whereby it needs to dump all of its memory onto the page file or it crashes, so any pagefile smaller than the amount of RAM the game uses is insufficient. The memory leak is inevitable, but if the theory holds, the larger your pagefile the longer it takes for the game to crash.

*Update: It is possible that adding TdrDdiDelay and TdrDelay registry keys into the Windows registry (google for instructions) contributes to making the freezing less frequent, together with the other fixes, but will not solve the issue alone.

**Update II:It seems that running MassEffectAndromeda.exe in Windows 8 compatibility mode also significantly helps the game's stability. Together with the other fixes above I've been able to increase crash interval from a few minutes at worst to several hours at best.

[BLKST-Ryan]

It seems like "TdrDdiDelay" only delay the crash by X amount of second.

[Shashankvk]

Thank you so much, I just cleared 22 GB of space by deleting screenshots, will update if it works.

[spareme12]

 Ugh. Beyond frustrating. I started by going through the list much like everyone else.

Lowered the graphic settings inside the game.

Reinstall the game.

Get all updates.

Clean install of video driver with the latest version.

A minor level of success was found after creating a page file, but very minor, and now it only runs for about 30 seconds. Started with 1-8 gigs, then moved to 1-16, and now at 1-32. Even tried to use the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives setting.

Tried to lower my memory and clock speeds from the stock setting, moving down 100 MHz for each on every attempt. After the fifth or sixth attempt, the game started to crash during the load screen.

Really feeling out of options at this point.

If someone has an option I have not tried yet or wants to walk me through steps, I am happy to listen.

System Specs--

AMD FX 6300 3.5 GHz

Win 7 Pro 64 bit Service pack 1

16 gigs memory

Vapor-X R9 280x 3gb GDDR5 PCI-E

ASRock 970 Extreme4

Enermax 1350w 80 Plus Platinum

[holger1405]

@spareme12

Don't set the page file 1 to 32GB, set minimum and maximum to 32GB > test.