X4 crashing every hour or so

[CaptainWarbear]

Hi,

I recently purchased X4 on Steam and have been trying to learn how to play. Looked up a few guides to get started and seemed like salvaging is the best starting option - so I started as Young Gun, salvaged around Second Contact and the couple of gates around there that have some fighting going on, while attempting to sell at the nearest Trade port.

At current, I have had about 10 crashes in the last few hours of gameplay. Despite approaching 10h in Steam, my file has about 1.5h on it as any subsequent attempt to salvage has crashed between then and the return to the station.

I'm running a 4090, i9-13900kf, 64gb of ram. Shouldn't be a problem with running the game, but I pushed the graphics down to medium anyway just in case and it didn't change anything. Still getting crashes.

Crashes seem to occur either when flying around in high-density zones collecting salvage or when saving.

Any help would be appreciated as this game is basically unplayable unless I'm saving every 10 minutes to stop losing progress - and sometimes saving is the problem!!

Thanks!

[CBJ]

In order for us to help you, we need more information. The information required is explained in the very first thread at the top of the forum, entitled "Technical Support Requests - Please read this before posting!".

From the little information you've provided, however, there is a very real chance that you've fallen victim to the Intel 13th/14th generation CPU fault that affects memory access causing crashes like this in some applications.

[CaptainWarbear]

In order for us to help you, we need more information. The information required is explained in the very first thread at the top of the forum, entitled "Technical Support Requests - Please read this before posting!".

From the little information you've provided, however, there is a very real chance that you've fallen victim to the Intel 13th/14th generation CPU fault that affects memory access causing crashes like this in some applications.

Version and language: English. 7.5 I believe as that was the last default update on Feb 20th (only bought the game in March).
Whether or not your game is modified using any third party scripts or mods: Nope.
Game start being played: Yep.
Exact nature of the problem, where and when it occurs and what you were doing at the time: See above.
Any possibly relevant changes you have made to your game, system, or software before the issue occurred: None.
Where appropriate, additional symptoms, error messages, links to saves *, screenshots and crash dump files (see this Wiki entry): Had one memory error. The rest are just general crashes where it just stops responding and goes to desktop. All during flight or while saving. Crash reports were enabled by default, but I've now made personalised ones too.
Your system specifications in the form of a DxDiag report and vulkaninfo (see this Wiki entry): I can provide this when required.

This doesn't seem to be happening with any other games so I'm unsure of the i9 issue, though I am aware of it and have installed the patch which supposedly fixes it.

[CBJ]

Your system specifications in the form of a DxDiag report and vulkaninfo (see this Wiki entry): I can provide this when required.

Without it we have little chance of being able to help you. Please don't wait to be asked for these things; it just delays us being able to help.

This doesn't seem to be happening with any other games so I'm unsure of the i9 issue, though I am aware of it and have installed the patch which supposedly fixes it.

A common feature of the issue is that it only affects certain applications which make particularly heavy use of memory.

[Buzz2005]

they need a save game and vulkan/dxdiag info 100% so no need to wait for a response from a dev

[Restlesssun]

Morning All

I have also been having the same issue with a similar setup, RTX4090, i9-13900kf, 32Gb Ram.

I had my processor replaced a few months ago so I did the stress tests to see if I had the same issue again, but I don't so I don't believe its the processor.

I played for 20 hours without issue then it stated happening more and more frequently over the next 5 hours.

For troubleshooting, I played on a laptop with the same save for an hour, re-installed the game on the desktop computer on a different drive, updated the Nvidia graphics driver, disabled mods, updated windows then reloaded my save from the laptop.

I've played for 3-4 hours today before the first crash to desktop. The crash menu appears and disappears too quick to read.

I just happened when I pressed F5 to save and at the end of the save it crash to desktop, so maybe the other times its when the game autosaves?

I've seen a few youtube videos about the latest Nvidia drivers not being very good so i might try a role-back and see if its more stable.

What information do i need to provide to assist with troubleshooting?

Can I view the .dmp files myself to see what it is showing?

[Restlesssun]

Okay, so I pressed F5 to save my game over and over and on the 3rd try it crashed to desktop

I tried a further 20 times with the same save point an no problems.

I'll keep trying and report back

[CBJ]

I had my processor replaced a few months ago so I did the stress tests to see if I had the same issue again, but I don't so I don't believe its the processor.

Nevertheless, that is the most common cause of crashes while saving in an unmodified game.

What information do i need to provide to assist with troubleshooting?

The very first thread at the top of the forum, entitled "Technical Support Requests - Please read this before posting!", answers this question.

Can I view the .dmp files myself to see what it is showing?

You won't be able to find out anything useful from it. We can do that, however.

[Restlesssun]

I appreciate you getting back to me.

I've continued to play for 1-2 hours saving often but no crashes at all. I'll keep going till I find out how to reproduce the CTD.

Love the game tbh, been playing since X-Beyond the Frontier, still my go to game after all this time

[Daemonjax]

Try running the game as admin -- that usually solves problems in games that autosave for me.

But honestly I just disable autosaves in this game.

[Cdaragorn]

I had my processor replaced a few months ago so I did the stress tests to see if I had the same issue again, but I don't so I don't believe its the processor.

Passing a stress test unfortunately doesn't tell you anything. Still very real chance it's the processor.

As they've said they really need the crash dump files and dxdiag to look at to help.

[Restlesssun]

As an update to this issue, I had another game that I was playing that started doing the same thing. Sometimes I could play for hours without an issue, sometimes it endlessly crashed every time it saved.

I turned off steam cloud save, it stopped crashing to desktop.

I also have 2 monitors and play in borderless windowed mode so I check emails etc regularly on the second monitor, this may have been a contributing factor along with cloud saving.

Hope this helps anyone else who might have this issue

[Alan Phipps]

The problem with solving this issue by turning off background stuff is that it can still imply a potential Intel 13/14th gen cpu memory access stability issue when under demand stress. As far as I can see, we never did get any DxDiags.