Fix Battlefield 3 crashes with NVIDIA gfx cards

Posted by Acoon on November 8, 2011

In spring of 2011, I pre-ordered Battlefield 3 because i loved playing Battlefield 2. I kinda skipped all releases in between because I started playing World of Warcraft. However, since I pre-ordered I also got the early beta which was just fine for a beta. I'm still a bit disappointed about how the game is based in a browser window, but guess that's what they decided.

When the final release came of BF3 I was sitteng eager to start ranking up and unlocking stuff. To my disappointment, the game crashed after first round. Thinking that was just bad luck or overloads on servers I started up the game again, only to realize it happened again. This has been happening for almost two weeks now and 9 out of 10 times, the game crash at the end of a round.

Because of this I spend hours and hours on investigating and tried all the advice people had on the internet forums and on EA's own tech forum. This gave me norhing until lastnight, when i saw a post that mentioned NVIDIA gfx cards.

Here is what finally fixed the issue.

SMARTDOCTOR & OSD

Rumor has it that these two programs can cause the game to crash. It's not verified and I have a hard time understading why it should matter, but there's no harm in disabling them while playing.

This is no longer a rumor. Initially I just killed all processes that had anything to do with Smartdoctor and OSD to test, and that gave no difference. However, when I then uninstalled them instead and still carried out the other actions i describe, it stopped crashing.

NVIDIA Drivers

You should always run with the latest drivers. It's impossible to troubleshoot issues if people are being "smart" and rolls back to older versions.

However, you should reinstall the driver from NVIDIA and make sure you comply with the following:

• Check the box to make sure it's a clean installation. We want to make sure drivers are deleted before reinstalled.
• Uncheck the "HD Audio Driver".
• Uncheck "3D Vision Controller Driver" & "3D vision driver". If you use 3D, you can try and leave them and see what happens. It may work.

Now you have a minimal driver installation without to many things to interfere.

Onboard sound driver

If you have onboard sound, which you most likely do, find out what the manufacturer is for the sound device and update the sound driver for that device by downloading the latest driver that from that manufacturer.

Sound output

So far there is an indication that the sound is the cause of alot of the issues. Therefor it's suggested that you disable the devices you don't need. If you are only using the onboard sound device, you should be ok now.

If you use a secondary sound device, eg. a USB headset, you should disable the onboard sound device. This is how to do it:

1. To get to device manager, click "Start" (start orb) then Right Click "My Computer" and choose "Manage".
2. When the dialog pops up choose "Device Manger".
3. Scroll down until you see "Sounds, Video and game controllers" and expand it.
4. Find your onboard sound and Right Click then "Disable".
5. Reboot just for fun and test the game.

The result

Initially the game crashed whenever the round ended, but after applying the above, I've been playing for 3 days without a single crash.

Computer specs

For reference, this is my current computer running Windows 7 x64:

• ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
• Intel® Core™ i7-2600K 4x3.40GHz (Turbo 3.80GHz)
• 16GB Kingston DDR3-1333 RAM
• SeaSonic 750W SuperSilent 80 silver certified
• Gigabyte P67A-UD4 Motherboard
• Intel 510 120GB SSD Sata3 disk (450MB/s read og 210MB/s write)
• Scythe silent cpu cooler

Comments:

Leave a Reply

Name:

Email:
(Your email will not be publicly displayed.)

Please type the letters and numbers shown in the image.Click the image to see another captcha.