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AC4 for PC keeps crashing

R

Ruahrc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2009
Messages
451
I started playing AC4 for the PC but have had enormous difficulty making progress due to the game crashing all the time. AC4SP.exe or whatever it is keeps crashing.

I got the game for free when I bought my last video card, redeemed/downloaded via UPlay. I have tried running it via Steam (as a 3rd party game), direct from UPlay, in administrator mode, etc etc. nothing seems to consistently get the game to work stably.

Even running UPlay in offline mode it seemed to help but still crashes.

It would not be so bad except for the fact that it seems like whenever the game crashes, I lose all my progress since the start of the play session (even though the game has supposedly been "saving" each time I make progress like complete a mission or open a chest, view a cutscene, etc.). So I'll play for say an hour, and it crashes and I lose that whole hour of progress, not just the few minutes from the last save activity. I think this is key behavior to note as it may reveal the source of my issues?

Is a common/known issue with AC4 for the PC? Are there any known workarounds? Even if I can get it so that it at least saves my progress instead of setting me way back when it crashes, at least that will allow me to proceed and not lose too much playtime.

Quick system specs:
Win7
EVGA GTX 770 (edit: oops i actually mean GTX770 not 970... wishful thinking on my behalf I guess lol) , I also downloaded/installed the latest available nVidia drivers a few days ago to see if that would help although I don't see how new drivers would have an impact on a game that is already a few years old.
8GB RAM
512GB SSD
I do run custom GPU speeds (particularly memory speeds) in MSI Afterburner but I have never had a problem in any other game (including very intensive ones like GTA V) so I don't think hardware instability is causing the issue is it? My temps are fine and earlier on I did try clocking things down and I still got the crashes, so...

Last thing does this have to do with where I am in the game? I am only near the beginning, when you first get to Havana. I like to go slow in AC games so I have been doing the side stuff like chests, assassinations, etc. not just the story missions but if Havana in particular is causing the problems (I read somewhere once that Havana is the most resource intensive area in the game due to it being the biggest city) maybe I just plow through the story there so I get out of that area to where the game may be more stable? I don't know it seems like grasping at straws but I really want to play through the game but not deal with these constant crashes.

If I have to start over it's not the end of the world (only about 5 or 6% in) but I also tried that earlier but even then I am running into the same issues.

Any ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Ruahrc
 
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Sorry this probably won't help much, but I've got over 100 hours in AC4 (great game!) and virtually no crashes to speak of, maybe 1 or 2 the entire time. Rig in sig, used to have a GTX 760 before the 970 and that worked fine too.

The save system definitely is a little weird. It'll save your progress on the number of collectables and activities you've completed, but if you quit and come back it'll start you at the beginning of the last story-line section you were on. And/or may start you in a very approximate location from where you were.

So my only guess is maybe it needs more than 8GB of ram? What kind of memory usage are you seeing? It is a pretty big game, might have some leaks that run up the memory usage. Also might help to re-set the ingame video settings to default and go from there. I know it has a bunch of different AA settings in there and some of them have much worse performance than others. May be you managed to combine some settings that are near incompatible with NVidia setup. I dunno...

So more info needed: what happens when it crashes? Blue screen? Just goes to desktop and says AC.exe stopped responding, or what? Any specific error messages that might indicate video/ram/storage access issues? Does it always happen after several minutes of playing? When it tries to save? Might help to have steam check the integrity of game cache (not sure how this would work with u-play)
 
Disable physx stuff. That was a major problem; no idea if patches fixed it. 8GB of RAM and 2GB of VRAM on my GTX 670 was enough to make out the game (even with Physx) at 60 frame rates.
 
Never had any crashing issues with that one, but triple buffering was always straight-up broken in that one. You either had to toggle back to your desktop a couple times, use D3DOverrider, or force windowed fullscreen with one of those apps.
 
Well things seem to have improved. Although I'm not sure what is different.

I previously had the Physx particles set on high, I reduced that to Normal (saw a little frame rate increase too) and kept playing. I'll still get a crash now and then but now it seems to save my latest progress so I am not losing hours of playtime like I was previously.

Actually the weird thing is my play session last night was acting a lot like my GTA V experience. In GTA V the game would infallibly crash about 5-10 minutes in. But only on the first time. After the first crash I could play for hours and no problems whatsoever. Last night I got a crash in AC4 after about 30-40 minutes, and then no crashes after that. And when it did crash at least all the progress I made in those 30-40 minutes was saved.

Anyways enjoying the game so far, will keep playing and see if anything changes.
 
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