9.0 CTD/BSOD X4 Panic SMem failed - Information Requested

[Botji1111]

Version: 9.0
Not modded
Happens regardless of game start

Wanted to get back into playing this after the 9.0 update but I have been getting these types of CTDs (and one BSOD) that going by my google results seem to be related to video memory and/or RAM/Pagefile.
From my own few tests it does seem to be related to graphics as my original graphic settings would make the game crash within one or two minutes of starting up a new game(not during loading, able to walk around on station) but after lowering certain settings and seemingly especially the LOD sliders for objects and effects, I am now able to play anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour or two but the crash seem to be inevitable and the reduced settings only delays it.

I have seen a few different variants of the CTD, sometimes it just pops to desktop without any message or prompt at all and sometimes there is a prompt about a X4 Panic error talking about SMem in one way or another not doing what was expected of it, either existing at all or allocating seemingly random amounts of bytes ranging from like two numbers up to hundreds of thousands or millions of bytes and once the crash resulted in a BSOD. Unfortunately I only have one example of the SMem error saved as a screenshot.
https://imgur.com/a/0Vn1F7c
([img]thingy not working here? oh well there is the link)

DXdiag: https://pastebin.com/cUEV8qQ1
Vulkan: https://pastebin.com/Nr0sYL0n
X4 crash dumps: https://www.dropbox.com/t/q7myPpbpslQN7nF0


For now the only other thing I can add is that getting the Vulkaninfo I got this in the CMD: "WARNING: [Loader Message] Code 0 : windows_read_data_files_in_registry: Registry lookup failed to get layer manifest files."
But it did create the txt file with info so idk what that is about.

[CBJ]

OK first things first, a BSOD is not something a game itself can cause. That has to be a hardware or driver-level fault, and the game is just what happens to expose it.

I've taken a look at your crashdumps, and I can confirm that all of them occur while attempting to allocate memory, and by that I mean system RAM not VRAM. Since you are not short of system RAM, this is a strong indication that the fault lies in accessing that memory. This can be a sign of faulty RAM, or it can be a sign that there is an issue with the timing or voltage setup for your memory in your BIOS. It's quite a common thing for tightened timings or overclocks that work in most situations to become unstable with a game like this, which is very heavy on both CPU and memory access. In a lot of cases we see this is because of the 13th/14th generation Intel CPU issue, but clearly that's not the problem in your case as you don't have one!

Start by removing any overclocks, tightened memory timings, undervolting, and any other tuning that you've done at the BIOS level, and running a full memory test using a memory testing tool such as memtest86, and see how you get on.

[Botji1111]

OK first things first, a BSOD is not something a game itself can cause. That has to be a hardware or driver-level fault, and the game is just what happens to expose it.

I've taken a look at your crashdumps, and I can confirm that all of them occur while attempting to allocate memory, and by that I mean system RAM not VRAM. Since you are not short of system RAM, this is a strong indication that the fault lies in accessing that memory. This can be a sign of faulty RAM, or it can be a sign that there is an issue with the timing or voltage setup for your memory in your BIOS. It's quite a common thing for tightened timings or overclocks that work in most situations to become unstable with a game like this, which is very heavy on both CPU and memory access. In a lot of cases we see this is because of the 13th/14th generation Intel CPU issue, but clearly that's not the problem in your case as you don't have one!

Start by removing any overclocks, tightened memory timings, undervolting, and any other tuning that you've done at the BIOS level, and running a full memory test using a memory testing tool such as memtest86, and see how you get on.

Will do, its just that due to similar issues with Helldivers2(not SMem errors, just the usual temp and instabilities after enabling XMP before you can dial in the settings) after I updated my BIOS and like a derp forgot to save my previous settings so I have already been through most of those in the bios which includes multi-hours memtest86 tests of various types to check for stability. Making it hard for me to see that as the cause and would not make much sense why I can pretty much on demand get these SMem errors within minutes in this game just by turning a few graphical settings higher.

[CBJ]

I can't see the screenshot as Imgur is not available where I am (you can try ImgBB as an alternative). The apparent correlation with changing the graphics settings may be coincidental, or it may be simply that doing so also happens to result in more system memory being allocated. Either way, the crashdumps point very clearly to system memory access being the source of your problem.