PC [PC] The Division crashes, Mouse stutter/FPS drops

[blaze01]

Hi Guys.

I've got some huge problems with the game. Problem is, I can't really tell what the reason is. I was playing the game on Windows 7 since release and haven't had any issues. I updated to Windows 10 on tuesday and re-installed everything. Since Thursday the game is practically unplayable. The mouse stutters and hardly moves at all. Turning around is impossible. I was able to fix that issue by going into the task manager and only let the game run on 3 cores. That seems to causes the game to crash. A lot. Usually withing a few minutes.

The other issue I've ran into is with my graphics. Until a few days ago, the game ran perfectly on high-ultra settings at 1080p and with 60+fps. Now even with lower settings my fps drops to below 50. Of course I have the newest drivers and so on...

My system: i5 3570K, 8GB RAM, GTX 980Ti 6GB

Other games (such as CS:GO, Rocket League) are running just fine. If anyone has run into similiar issues and could prove some help, I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you!
 

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

Hey Blaze,

As ridiculous as it sounds, it may actually be windows 10. I had a friend who also had a ton of problems with his games after installing 10. He switched back to 8.1 and everything ran fine again. So the first thing I would try is reinstalling 7. If it still has problems, we'll go from there.

Hope this helps!

~HawKShoT

 

[blaze01]

Back on Windows 7. Didn't change much. I can move the mouse around a little, but I still have bad stuttering, lags and low fps. Unplayable this way.

I changed the boot order in my BIOS to install Windows 10 from an USB stick. Did that mess up something else in the BIOS that could be responsible? 
 

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

Back on Windows 7. Didn't change much. I can move the mouse around a little, but I still have bad stuttering, lags and low fps. Unplayable this way.

I changed the boot order in my BIOS to install Windows 10 from an USB stick. Did that mess up something else in the BIOS that could be responsible? 
 

It's a possibility. You could try installing it off a disk. But if your back on 7 and it's still a problem, I have a feeling that's not the culprit.

What are you hardware temperatures in-game?

~HawKShoT

 

[ShroudOfSelizar]

Believe it or not.. it might be RAM. This is only from personal experience, but I was experiencing crashes left and right, and some would even crash my entire computer. I went from 8GB to RAM up to 16GB of RAM, and haven't had any problems since. I know the recommended settings state 8GB, but apparently it has something to do with a Memory Leak or some crap. Again, this is just from personal experience, and it was also the same case with my brother who was experiencing similar issues. He upgraded to 16GB of RAM, and no problems. We both run Windows 10.

 

[blaze01]

Yeah, so I was able to fix all the issues except the low fps by installing the old GPU driver. The newest one is 364.72 and the I have now is 364.51. Seems that I have to mess around with the graphic settings to get the fps up and more stable. I still want to look into this. For the moment I'm happy with Windows 7 but I want to upgrade in the future. What's interesting though is that I tried the same with Windows 10 and it didn't work.

Temperatures: GPU was between 40 and 55°C (during the game) and I haven't seen the CPU above 45°C ever.  System is self build and GPU and CPU are water cooled. As you can guess from the specs I posted above the system is a few years old, except the GPU (I upgraded that about 6 weeks ago).

Memory leak sounds like an issue with the game rather than my system?! And it also sounds like something that would affect thousands of people rather than just me. But I'll ask around. I have a few friends that play the game on Windows 10. I'll ask them how much RAM they have.

Thanks guys!
 

 

[quinch1199]

Memory leak usually occurs after a period of time through playing the game, this varies from several minutes to even an hour or more. So, may not be the problem here.

Couple of things to check.

With Windows 10 install, you didn’t get any added “bloatware”? Check system tray for browser/system/Apps running in the background. Some software is ok to run alongside such things but this game may not.

uPlay issue? I’m assuming you’ve uninstalled/reinstalled the game and uPlay? I know the App is NOT great to be honest and has caused me issues.

Registry problem? Again, should be solved with clean re-install of game, uPlay and drivers.

Virtual memory? Should NOT be a problem but worth checking.

To me, this sounds like a large suck of memory is being taken by something in the background. I run the game on Win10 just fine, medium-high settings, i5-6600 Skylake, 8Gb RAM, Nvidia 960Ti. Windows runs from an SSD, game is on a regular Toshiba HDD. Newest GFX driver as well.

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

From @ShroudOfSelizar's reply, you should do a memory check maybe. Can detect if you have a bad stick anywhere that may be causing the problem. You can usually find a option for it in CMOS on bootup. But I'm sure you know how to find that.

Let us know if any progress is made,

~HawKShoT

 

[blaze01]

It's been a while and I sadly wasn't able to fix any of my issues.

I didn't get any bloatware with Win10, in fact, I did a clean install from a USB drive with nothing but windows. After that I installed a few things by hand, like Office, Firefox and so on. Not sure about the uplay issue. As I said, I did install Uplay and The Division on a fresh install of Win 10 and later Win 7. Issues remained the same. That's also why I don't think it's a registry issue. How do I check out if it's a virtual memory issue? Or rather, is there any kind of software that allows me to monitor my PC and find out what's going on? Again, the strange thing is, it worked just fine until I updated to Win 10, but going back to Win 7 (like before) didn't fix anything.

Oh, I also checked my RAM with a tool called memtest. Took a few hours, but I didn't find any faulty sticks. Not sure if buying a 16GB kit to replace my 8GB kit is worth it at the moment, but it's something I could do.

I also tried to turn it off and on again, didn't do a thing.

I hope this isn't considered as necroing an old thread...
 

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

Hey blaze,

Good to hear from you again, this is honestly the most complicated issue with the game I have heard of so far. And I'm starting to run out of any practical ideas. What have we been through? No faulty RAM, clean installs on Win 7 and 10, and temperatures are fine.

How about your hard drive? Is it a HDD? SSD? SSHD? Other games/programs run fine on it? Do you have a RAID array at all?

Hope to hear back soon,

~ HawKShoT

 

[blaze01]

No Raids or anything. Got a SSD for the OS, an extra SSD for Games and another HDD for Data. The Division is installed on the same SSD as the OS (has been that way before and after reinstalling Win 7). The only thing changed between that were a) the 1.1 patch for TD and b) the order of the boot devices.

I don't remember it that well anymore, but I think I had to change something else in the BIOS because the SSD with the operating system couldn't be found anymore. But I don't remember what it was. I also had problems with some of the mainboard drivers, specifically the intel stuff. Maybe I just broke something... :/

Edit: Other games run fine. I've tried Rocket League, Diablo 3, CSGO, Final Fantasy X and Ori and the Blind Forest DE. I'll try something that requires a little more power tomorrow, have to dl it first. Could try Rise of the Tomb Raider or maybe MGS5? All other programs like browsers, office, itunes, teamspeak and so on all run fine.

 

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

Hey blaze, 

The next thing I would do is do error checking on the SSD. Go to windows/file explorer and right click your drive, properties, tools I think it was, it's in one of the tabs and error checking is in there. Just run that and tell us what you get back. 

If the problem is that game data is in bad clusters/sectors then that may solve it.

Let us know,

~ HawKShoT

 

[blaze01]

Checked the SSD, no errors found. Rise of the Tomb Raider runs just fine. No issues in that game. Well, lets hope that the patch tomorrow changes things for the better. Seems that NVIDIA released a new driver a few days ago. I'll try that one out as well.
 

 

[quinch1199]

Trawling for any further possible issues here but is your processor Overclocked and have you monitored core usage in-game yet? A comparison with core load during the game when these issue occur and a game that runs smoothly might help. 

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

This is becoming a difficult problem to solve.

Right click anywhere on your desktop to bring up the context menu,  click NVIDIA Control Panel, from here select Manage 3D Settings in the menu on the left side of the window, Make sure your in Global Settings and find Maximum  Pre-rendered frames. If it's set to 0, click it and it should bring a down a dropdown menu where you can select how many you frames you want to pre-render, select 1 and apply.

Try opening the game again and see if there is any performance gain.

~HawKShoT

 

[blaze01]

CPU isn't overclocked. As for core usage during gaming, I'll try to monitor that and get back to you when I have collected some data.
 

 

[quinch1199]

CPU isn't overclocked. As for core usage during gaming, I'll try to monitor that and get back to you when I have collected some data.
 

Important you compare directly with a game that runs normally to check. Massive have developed a completely new game engine specifically for this title and I'm not sure how optimised it is for multiple cores as one assumes, usually incorrectly, its been done well!.

There are plenty of titles poorly optimised (ARMA looking at you!) but this can often be got around. Must admit your issues are increasingly seeming as they're specific to your build for some reason. 

 

[Callsign_Gloves]

Important you compare directly with a game that runs normally to check. Massive have developed a completely new game engine specifically for this title and I'm not sure how optimised it is for multiple cores as one assumes, usually incorrectly, its been done well!.

There are plenty of titles poorly optimised (ARMA looking at you!) but this can often be got around. Must admit your issues are increasingly seeming as they're specific to your build for some reason. 

I agree with with quinch. This is seeming more like a build specific problem as we go on.  Will let you know if I think up anything else.

~ HawKShoT

 

[blaze01]

Well, the patch seems to have fixed the crashing and the mouse issues. I usually have around 70-80fps, but the fps goes down to 50 when I look into the distance and things like that.

What exactly am I looking for with my CPU? I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary...
 

 

[quinch1199]

Well, the patch seems to have fixed the crashing and the mouse issues. I usually have around 70-80fps, but the fps goes down to 50 when I look into the distance and things like that.

What exactly am I looking for with my CPU? I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary...
 

If its sort of fixed for now you can at least relax but I'd be looking for undue load on one core rather than the CPU spreading load over all your cores.