Black screen forced to hard restart.

Talamoana Warrior!

When I try to play, and go through any instances/towns, my screen will either go black or flicker black while I can still hear the sound of the game. I cannot tab out or ctrl+alt+delete, forcing me to hard restart my computer. So I have seen multiple posts about people having this problem. However after looking through them all and trying multiple things to fix this problem, nothing seems to work. Now I want to see if anyone else has any input on my problem.

Things I've tried:

Using Display Driver Uninstaller and reinstalling to latest updated drivers > Clean install
Uninstalling Path of Exile > Reinstalling multiple times (Reinstalled on different drives)
Reinstalling Windows 10
Setting a fps cap to 60
Lowering my monitor refresh rate to 60hz
Pumping more power into my GPU
Toggling Vsync on/off
Play around with ingame graphics settings
More things can't remember, will post when I do

PC Specs:

Case : Corsair 760T Arctic White Full-Tower Windowed Case
Power Supply : 750W EVGA SuperNOVA
OS : Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Motherboard : GIGABYTE Z170XP-SLI
CPU : Intel i7-6700k @4.0 GHz
Memory : 8.00GB DDR4
Hard Drive : 1TB Seagate
SSD : Samsung 850 EVO 250GB (Boot drive)
Video Card : Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
Monitor : ASUS VG248QE 144 Hz

Note:
I am able to play other games perfectly fine such as Fallout 4, League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Gary's Mod, Blade and Soul, etc.

If you guys could get back to me soon, that would be great! If anymore information is required, I will be happy to provide. Thanks.

Not exactly the same cause of the problem, I usually crashed while in my character inventory. I noticed that POE is starting up using about 5GB of my RAM and slowly consuming more until it uses all 16GB and I get black screened. Also forcing me to hard reset.

Specs are:

Power Supply : 750W Corsair HX750i
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Motherboard : MSI Z77A-GD65
CPU : Intel i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz
Memory : 16.00GB DDR4
Hard Drive : 1TB Seagate (Boot Drive)
SSD : Samsung 850 EVO 500GB (Game Drive)
Video Card : Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Monitor 1 : BENQ GW2750 60Hz (Main)
Monitor 2 : ASUS PB298 60Hz

I would agree with GodbGood.

It's probably a RAM issue, but you don't know it yet.

I had a very similar problem.

I'd play PoE, go to bed and when I'd wake up in the morning, my screens (both of them) would be blank.

So, I figured, I'd just exit out of the game, and then all would be good.

Except, it continued to happen.

And it all appears to center around the way windows 10 manages memory and the way Poe caches assets. The long and short of it is: poe and/or windows doesn't reallocate it's empty ram pages, so you'll eventually run out of space as more assets are loaded. It could be assets from PoE or other applications or programs in windows.

Even if you reduce the amount of items in RAM (disable un needed processes and services) the issue will still present itself, albeit a bit later.

I spent many sleepless nights digging around in memory trying to find the culprit. It's not really a PoE problem per se, although, I'm sure they have some control over how often ram is re-purposed.

From my experience, the only application I've found that can deal with this is: RamMap. It's a systernals program (Microsoft supported) which is not only a good diagnostic tool, but can actually flush the ram. Releasing the standby pages and allowing them to be reallocated.

The problem seemed to be really bad with the release of the new expansion, but as more and more content is dumped into the game, the amount of assets loaded gets larger and larger, this is probably why it's coincided with the expansion.

Again, I'm not convinced it's solely a PoE issue, but rather a windows one. But, I believe GGG can optimize the game much better.

I've been having the same problem. I'm forced to hard reset the laptop after it goes black. This started happening all the time ever since the ascendency expansion.

I however am starting to think it's the game, not the laptop.