Game Crashes - Graphics card or 1.2 ?

I have been randomly crashing the past 2 days. This is getting REALLY frustrating. I am not sure if this is an issue with my Gfx card OR PoE itself. I got the most recent patch AND updated my graphics drivers around the same time so I am unsure. Anybody go any ideas?

Here is what I am running:

On a Laptop:
Lenovo Ideapad
Windows 8.1
I7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHZ
6.00 GB Ram
64 bit OS
Nvidia Geforce GTX 660M with driver version GeForce 340.52 Driver - WHQL , ( I am now installing the 340.43 BETA { What I had prior to any issues } Not sure if this will help anything or if I know how to even install correctly but I'll give it a shot and report back if this makes any difference. )


In game I will randomly freeze or spike for 2 seconds. sometimes I recover, and other times I still hear the game moving forward but my screen stays the same and then seconds later I get a crash report. It just says POE has stopped working.... Brings up the find solution window but nothing works so I hit cancel and the game closes.

I don't know the exact alert but 50% of the time after this happens I get the windows message saying " Graphics something something has recovered something something kernal something something " .

I started today off with about 80% xp and have been playing for hours, crashed about 6 times and now im at 10% xp. VERY FRUSTRATING.

I am going to try to downgrade my gfx drivers and see if this works.

Also an ongoing issue is it doesn't show my graphics card in the POE settings, it shows the onboard HD 4000 or w.e graphics, and i've never been able to get it to show the 660m, Even though I know it IS using the 660m for the graphics however this hasn't been an issue before .

Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Hello, i have a GTX650 and keep having same issues here.. also i hear the sound what Windows plays when you unplug something... i have been trying to quickly alt+tab to find out what happens, but never seen any information.

I believe that my problems started too when there was an upgrade to my graphics-drivers and i believe it was saturday when i allowed them to install.

I will try to downgrade too, it's getting dangerous when game freezes/DC's once in 30minutes in Merciless.. so far no Standard for me, but i had an freeze+DC in an Infected lair full of blue's+unique... :D

I have also noticed weird graphical issues around strongboxes/masters/sidearea entrances.

I just checked my logs in the event viewer and it shows many notifications related to Adobe flash player update service... it seem to have stopped/started many times during this mornings playsession and actually it is the only one that can be claimed?
There is no hardware related notifications.
F flash anyway, going to disable it and test without downgrading my graphcis-drivers.

I am having the exact same issues as described by the two Exiles above. For me the crash frequency increased dramatically since the 1.2.2b patch. Before this patch I would have an occasional crash (once or twice a week), but since the patch the game crashes every 2-3 minutes at random.

My system specs:
DEL XPS502 running Windows 7 64bit
Intel I7 core, 8GB RAM
NVidia Geforce Go 525M - latest drivers installed (340.52 WHQL).

I have checked the event log, could not find any references to Adobe Flash updated BUT did find a lot of references to "nvlddmkm". Googling on this opens a can of worms as there seem to be lots of people with this issue and it is not Path of Exile related.


Some interesting links with possible solutions:
1) https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/413110/geforce-drivers/the-nvlddmkm-error-what-is-it-an-fyi-for-those-seeing-this-issue/37/
Forum thread with over 35 pages, spanning 2 years. The first post is moderated and provides some good information:
As a starting note, this is not an nVidia issue. It is not an ATI issue either. These errors are triggered by a Windows service called 'Timeout Detection and Recovery' (TDR). You will only see this error on Windows Vista and Windows 7, as TDR is a feature of the new WDDM driver model (implemented first in Windows Vista). TDR is supposed to be there to help stop BSOD's by resetting the GPU and/or driver when there is an issue or long delay. If the problem happens multiple times in a row, a BSOD can occur.
Solutions are provided as well, have not tried these.

2) http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/288517-33-nvlddmkm-stopped-responding-error-freezing-pixelation
This thread discribes similar symptoms as (1), I have tried solution described by user 'sam3971'. Will report my findings later.

----
Quick edit: after 15 minutes of testing I can already see that solution under (2) does not work. 3 crashes on 15 mins.. :/

I am using a HWMonitorPRO as see that my system is very hot. Sensors reporting 90+ degrees Celsius for GPU and CPU so it may well by a heating issue.
Also testing with OCCT (see (1) - page 37), this program stops a loaf test after 20 seconds because of overheating.

I suggest to update drivers for integrated cards. And make clean instal of stable version of NVIDIA drivers.

"

Ekalindorskii wrote:

I suggest to update drivers for integrated cards. And make clean instal of stable version of NVIDIA drivers.

I did a clean install of the latest NVIDIA drivers (already had latest version, but never ran a clean install) and it seems clean install did the trick. Tonight a smooth session of about 4 hours without any issues. Games seems to run much smoother as well, much less jittery when explosions or other big animations occur.

Kudos for this tip!

I did a clean install(i mean format c:) and installed older GPU-drivers.
The graphical errors and game freezes mostly disapperead but i still DC way too often, might be other issues then?
I have a new symptom too, my cursor freeses like my mouse gets temporarily unplugged, already switched to a different usb-port but didn't help... maybe my mouse is dying, i mean those cords tend to break after x amount of time.

I have to find my multi-meter and measure the voltage outputs from my PSU, it's only 10 months old, but who knows..

All i know that something is not right and it prevents me playing HC right now or atleast HC in Merciless.

I am having a similiar issue with an Nvidia card as well, it originally occured with the last version of the Drivers and I have tried multiple different versions to no avail. The only time it seemed fine was when I used my friends Zotax instead of my Nvidia card. So me and my friend came to the conclusion that since the crashes weren't happening with the Zotax that the rest of my rig is fine but that something about Nvidia with this game in particular aren't playing well.

Quick update.. Problems returned the day after. Decided to install POE on my GFs laptop which is 100% identical to mine.
Result: no crashes at all after 3 days. The NVIDIA driver on this laptop was never updated after the initial install (in 2011, version: 8.17.12.6721)

Conclusion: my gfx is fried, or on the brink of

I have the same problem, but I use Radeon HD 5670
13-4 Driver v
AMD Athlon x2 4200+
Windows XP
and I'm already sick of this problem, this crash kill my driver, Back to 16bit color and changes resolution. So only restart is good :|