Driver recovery black screen

[stalintc]

Hi all,

I have been diagnosing the issue I have with the game where, when I am inside the submarine or in port, the screen goes black for 3 seconds or more and then comes back.

Looking into my event viewer I can see that the graphics driver is recovering, likely a TDR error....

I have tried many things to solve the issue:

(Windows 7 x64, 8800GTX 768mb)
- Driver clean and rollback
- Cross check card temperatures and voltages
- Minimum settings
- Compatibility modes
- nHancer settings for the graphics card
- CPU core affinity fixes mentioned here
- Update directx and all system drivers

However, what baffles me is that there is one setting within Silent Hunter 5 that stops the problem from occuring for me...

It is of all things the shadows slider. When I first got the game I put shadows on the lowest possible setting, ever since that I have suffered the above issue. I decided to ramp up all my settings in a last ditch attempt to resolve this issue, the shadows being one of those first settings.

Putting the shadow slider to full has stopped the issue with the black screen, I get super low FPS in the radio room and docks, but it doesnt crash and there are no screen atrifacts.. ill take low FPS over crashing any day :)

Some of you getting the same issue as me, may want to give this rather strange workaround a try?

Just thought I would share.

Happy hunting :cool:

[stalintc]

bumping for those who may need to try this...

[lehovsky]

It all depends what graphic card you have got.
I am running on NVidia GeForce 7600 GS with 256 MB only.
Problem is that the game resulted in black screen after few minutes of play.

what I have done is:

-remove all graphic enchancing mods
-reduce Anti Alising to 0
-go to Nvidia Control Panel (can`t remeber right now were exactly, but it should be something with 3D options (will edit the post later)), and set all AA options for SH5 to 0

Now I don`t have to reload the game every 5 minutes.

[stalintc]

It all depends what graphic card you have got.
I am running on NVidia GeForce 7600 GS with 256 MB only.
Problem is that the game resulted in black screen after few minutes of play.

what I have done is:

-remove all graphic enchancing mods
-reduce Anti Alising to 0
-go to Nvidia Control Panel (can`t remeber right now were exactly, but it should be something with 3D options (will edit the post later)), and set all AA options for SH5 to 0

Now I don`t have to reload the game every 5 minutes.

Yeah I think you are right there are many triggers for the problem, depending on the card.

I had tried the things that you mentioned, but none of them worked for me, I just find it bizzare that the problem goes away when I whack up the shadows, and the second I turn the shadows down to 0 the problem re-occurs. Means I can play with AA at least.

I wonder if it worth collating these fixes that people have managed into one place as a sticky for the driver black screen issue :cool:

I will of course check back for your edited post, to see if there is anything else that I might have missed.

Thanks for your response matey

[smehan]

I too have experienced this problem with my Nvidia 7950gx2 cards. It only happens when I am in or near a port. Whether it is a friendly port or enemy port. I will usually have to go to nav map mode and go out to sea. Once there I alt-tab out then back again, and the problem is gone. While in port I just hold down the alt key (the 2 people I need to talk to can still be seen, as a yellow highlight) and walk towards them. This has been my only solution to play. Anoying for me, but still playable, just not around ports.

[lehovsky]

It looks like graphic is breaking up when near big number of detailed models, trees, buildings, ships and other. I don`t know how it reacts when aproaching large convoy. Will test it though.

Like I mentioned earlier, you need to open 3D options managment / program settings / and add SH5. Then you need to disable AA.

I hope that they will fix it with the patch (yeah... dream on...)