Solved BSOD playing Shadow of Mordor

[pizzaboy66]

Hi all, I'm getting a BSOD when I play Shadow of Mordor for about an hour or so. Sometimes it takes longer. It also happens when playing other games with high end graphics although it seems somewhat random. I had no issues with Batman Arkham City, Bioshock Infinite or Murdered: Soul Suspect to name a few. I remember having BSOD with Far Cry: Blood Dragon, but I'm not sure if that's before or after I reinstalled Win 7.

I uninstalled Panda Free Antivirus and installed MSE because I thought that might be the problem. The BSOD still occurred but with a different error. They are the 1/15/2015 dump files.

Ever since I got my AMD 280x I've been running into problems. I RMA'd the last one I got and received this one, however, I'm still receiving the same BSOD so I'm assuming it's my setup somehow. I tried installing different driver versions because some people said 13.x was more stable, but the same problems happened. I reinstalled the newest drivers and here I am.

Thank you for the assistance!

Edit1: thought I'd let you know I have 54 recommended updates from Windows on their updater. I believe I installed these before when I reinstalled Windows and I still got a BSOD. Things have changed though and I'm wondering if I should install all of them again. I'll wait for a response before I jump the gun.

 

[Laith]

What is causing your BSOD is the ATI display driver. Update it.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Hi Laith,

I'm using the newest non-beta driver 14.12 catalyst and 14.501.1003 driver package. I've had issues with 2 different things here, but I'm not sure why. Should I install earlier drivers or could something else be causing this? Thanks for the response!

 

[pizzaboy66]

Bumping.

Like I said, I'm running into problems with this game only. I'm thinking that the drivers don't work for this game.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Ok, so I uninstalled the newest drivers for 13.9 to see if that will fix it. I've installed the 54 recommended updates on Windows update also. I'll update this later.

 

[Laith]

If it is only with this game make sure your antivirus dont interfere with the game.

 

[essenbe]

pizzaboy66, out of your last 6 dump files 2 blamed your AMD Drivers, one blamed your Panda anti virus, which I believe you said you uninstalled and 2 blamed memory corruption.

*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************
Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information.
BugCheck 3B, {80000003, fffff960000cd6f7, fffff8800b422ff0, 0}
[COLOR=red]Probably caused by : memory_corruption[/COLOR]
Followup: memory_corruption

I am inclined to believe if you are having issues with this game only, it is more likely it is a poorly encoded game. There are numerous reports of people who are having similar problems. A bad driver can cause memory corruption as well as ram.

I am going to ask you to do several things for me, and please do them in this order.

Please reinstall your driver, but do it the way I am going to give you instructions.

I am going to give you some links that will help you get a good clean install and not have any drivers you don't need that will conflict with other drivers. Download a WHQL driver from http://www.sevenforums.com/graphic-cards/329659-latest-amd-catalyst-video-driver-windows-7-a.html . Once you have them downloaded, uninstall you current driver from control panel. next clean up any left over drivers from following this tutorial http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/83814-drivers-clean-left-over-files-after-uninstalling.html and select only ATI Display Drivers. After you have done that and rebooted, install the new driver, only select custom install and install only what you have to. Very few people need most of what they include. You do not need the audio/HDMI drivers as you already have that in your Motherboard drivers. Unless there is some reason you need them, the only thing you really need is the Display Driver.

Next, please open an elevated command prompt ( click start, type cmd in the search box, right click on the cmd entry and select run as administrator) in the black box that opens, copy/paste sfc /scannow. If you decide to type it, notice the space between the sfc and the /. It is a system file checker which will scan your system files and attempt to correct any missing or corrupt files. What we want are the results to say windows found no integrity violations. If it says files were found but could not be repaired, close the box, reboot and run it again, after opening the administrative command prompt. You may have to reboot and run it three times for it to repair all system files. If it can't repair them after 3 reboots, let us know.

Please Run Memtest86+

   Information

Please download from this site only http://www.memtest.org/ in the middle of the page are the Download links, you can download the ISO.zip or the Auto USB Flash Drive installer.zip

Extract the Zip file. If you chose the ISO image, burn it to a CD using Windows Disk Image Burner or any Image burner you may have. If you downloaded the Auto USB installer, extract it, insert your USB 2.0 Flash Drive and take note of the drive letter. Run the installer, select the Flash Drive Letter, check the format box and press next. It will install memtest86+ to a flash drive. You can use either V4.20 or V5.01. Boot from your selected media. If you use V5.01 it will tell you to press certain buttons at the start, please press no buttons. The test will begin on it's own and continue to run until you stop it. It needs to run for 8 complete passes or until you receive an error. If you receive an error, stop the test. Even 1 error is a fail. Each pass tests a different part of the ram and each of the 10 tests in each pass tests something different. It takes a minimum of 8 passes to completely test the ram, more passes are better. It is quite a long test and will take several hours depending on how much ram you have. Due to the time length it is best to run overnight. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask​

Then please run Furmark, but have a good GPU monitoring program. If you need suggestions, I will give you one. Your temps will rise rapidly and very high. If they become too high, stop the test. While running it, watch for any artifacts. Run it long enough to where your temps rise and then level out and stabilize. But again, watch the temps very closely. Stop the test if they become too high, but please don't use speedfan. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/100356-video-card-stress-test-furmark.html

If you have any questions or do not understand any of the instructions, please ask. I don't mind explaining at all. Keep me posted as you progress through the tests.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Thank you for the replies!

Laith, I'm not sure if the antivirus is doing it, but I will post if I get another BSOD after I run through essenbe's guide.

I'm going through your guide right now essenbe. Thank you for the insane amount of detail you put into it!

I uninstalled the AMD 13.9 Catalyst and cleaned it with DDU, then I installed 14.12 and only installed the driver and nothing else. I ran sfc /scannow and it came up with no integrity violations.

I downloaded the USB boot and will run memtest later tonight and probably update this tomorrow morning with the results along with the furmark results.

 

[essenbe]

That's great. If you downloaded 5.01, when you first boot into it, you will be told to press a key if you have a multicore CPU and another key for something else. Don't press anything. The test will start and run until you tell it to stop by pressing the escape key. Run it for 8 complete passes at a minimum. It takes 8 complete passes all run in 1 session to completely test the ram. More passes is better. If you get an error, you can stop there. 1 error is a fail, no reason to continue. It should take a minimum of 15 hours to run 8 passes. My other rig with 8GB of ram takes 9.5-10 hours for 8 passes. Great job so far. Congratulations.

I noticed a few errors from Malwarebytes. Disable real time protection and use it as an on demand scanner.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Alright, so I ran the memtest but didn't realize I needed 8 passes before I quit out. It passed 4 times and was about 10 hours in. I'll run it again tonight and I won't interrupt it because I don't need to use my computer tomorrow.

The FurMark seemed to pass. My GPU peaked at 76C with the same options ticked as the link you gave me. It was 29fps or so by a little over 10 minutes in. Unfortunately, I thought when I ticked the box to record data it would save it to a log file. Maybe it did, but I don't know where it is.

Hopefully the memtest will prove successful and it's the game that's broken!

 

[essenbe]

If there is a read me file in the folder you downloaded, it may tell you where or the log may be in the folder too.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Well, I couldn't find the log but I reran the test and took a screenshot.

 

[essenbe]

Looks good to me.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Alright, memtest passed. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. So I guess I'll see if I get any more BSODs and I will post when I do. Thank you for the help!

 

[essenbe]

If you've had BSODs since you lad ran the file, upload the http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-help-support/96879-blue-screen-death-bsod-posting-instructions.html with your next post.

If you haven't already run http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/313457-seatools-dos-windows-how-use.html#Part3

 

[pizzaboy66]

Sweet! I'm not sure what the problem was, but now the game is just crashing and I'm not getting BSODS anymore! It might be because I reinstalled the drivers but I don't know which step fixed it. Thank you!

 

[essenbe]

I sure hope everything stays fixed. If not, post back. We'll be glad to help.

 

[pizzaboy66]

Alright, so things didn't stay fixed, but it happened differently this time.

After Shadow of Mordor CTD about 2 or so hours in, I re-ran it and it CTD before it got to the main menu. Then I was verifying the game cache in Steam and tried to watch a movie on Netflix. The Netflix movie didn't start and everything but my mouse froze. After hitting ctrl+alt+del nothing happened so I decided to just wait and see if my computer would BSOD. Nothing happened and then my mouse cursor no longer moved. I waited about 30 minutes to see if it would crash and nothing.

So, I rebooted the computer and checked to see what caused it in the event viewer. The only thing I could find was "The Superfetch service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service."

I'm not too sure why this happened and there is no dump file. Should I upload what dm log collector can gather?

 

[pizzaboy66]

Oh, another thing I noticed is that programs tend to go haywire after this game crashes. When I got BSODs earlier with this game it caused a lot of things to become unstable and would slowly crash everything until I got a BSOD. It would take a few minutes after crashing just like this time except I didn't get a BSOD this time.

Edit: Will be running this game later tonight to see if I can get a BSOD.

 

[essenbe]

Try not playing the game and see if you get BSODs. It could be the game. When the game crashes, the GPU drivers will usually crash because of the game crashing, so if you have no GPU drivers and try to do something else that uses the GPU, they will crash too, because of the crashed drivers in the game. There are a lot of people having trouble with that game, which tends to make it a poorly coded game. I've tried several games that were poorly coded and always had issues. I just quit playing that game and got along pretty well. Which shows the game is the problem, not the computer.