The Rough Guide to common PoE crashes, errors, lag, and disconnection causes...
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The Rough Guide to common PoE crashes, errors, lag, and disconnection causes...
G'day. This is my rough guide - written by a player - to what to do when you have problems with PoE, including crashes, in-game lag, disconnects, and other failures. These are the steps that we recommend to everyone who comes to the forum with the common problems. You have been directed here because your problem is a match for the diagnostic steps this guide covers, so please, take the time to run through these steps and help eliminate most likely causes before you get in touch with GGG technical support. If you do run through all the steps here, and nothing works, then contacting GGG support is useful. By pointing them to your thread, and your comments about what you did, you can skip a whole bunch of them asking you to do this exact same stuff and all. Feedback? You are welcome to provide feedback on the guide in this thread, or you can PM me. I make absolutely no promises about when I will respond to your question, though. Personal attention? Not gonna happen. I love you, but I'm not going to respond to private messages asking for help, and I can't promise to solve your problem. I will probably just ignore your PM, or direct you back to this thread. Now, jump down to the appropriate heading for the problem you are having! PoE is crashing! There are a bunch of different errors that seem like they may be related; some manifest as an assertion after DirectX reports E_OUT_OF_MEMORY, or that it couldn't allocate the requested amount of memory. Other crashes, such as failing to create threads, to uncompress textures, and similar issues, may be rooted in the same problem, and simply not reporting the triggering error code. These may or may not be a PoE problem, simply that PoE is reporting it. On the basis that your random crash might be similar, a set of things to try:
Fixing Crashes
1. If you are not running the DirectX 11 client, which is 64-bit, then you should switch to it. This has the ability to use much more memory than the 32-bit DX9 client. 2. Check for corruption in the GGPK file that contains the game resources. How you do that varies if you installed with Steam or stand-alone.
Steam Client
You should Verify Integrity of Game Files in your Steam client. This will check that all files, including the GGPK, are correct, and download any that are wrong again. WARNING: If you run packcheck.exe on the Steam client, it will update the GGPK file. Steam will then consider that file wrong, because of their internal model, and redownload it. Just use the Steam check instead.[/span]
Stand-Alone Client
In the game directory, find packcheck.exe and run that. This will verify the GGPK looks correct, and should fix most errors. This isn't as thorough as the Steam check, however, and will not replace DLLs or other files. You may want to try a full reinstall as well, just to improve confidence. 3. Delete the shader cache directory content in the PoE install directory. WARNING: Deleting the content of the shader cache has (apparently) resolved similar issues for others, but it should not be necessary, and it will reduce performance as the system needs to recompile each shader the first time it was encountered. Try it once, and once only. Do not do this on a regular basis. 4. In the nvidia control panel, if available, set "debug mode" to disable factory overclocking. 5. If you have in any other way overclocked your GPU, CPU, or memory, step down at least ten percent , and see if the problem continues. This includes BIOS level “automatic” overclocking. 6. Check fans are functioning correctly and clean, and ventilation working as expected in case. 7. Check this isn't a power supply to the hardware issue. Voltage drops to the video card are a common cause of this sort of behaviour. 8. If you have a PCI-E video card, grab GPU-Z, and verify that your video card has a PCE-e 16x connection. If it is a PCE-e 1x connection, you should reseat your video card, to correct the connection type. 9. Disable and/or remove anything that gets in the rendering path, or pokes the graphics card, such as in-game overlays, notifications, and helpers. Common candidates are: * the Twitch client * ReShade or GemFX * FPS displays and performance monitors * "game DVR" style features including Windows Game DVR, NVIDIA ShadowPlay, or AMD Raptr. * Voice and chat client notifiers such as Discord, Teamspeak, Mumble, etc. * Corsair Link. 10. If you use Discord, ensure it is not in a voice or chat session while running the game. None of those helped with my crashes! If none of that helps you, you can help further debug this by grabbing listdlls, loading PoE, entering a regular zone or map, then running that tool against it. Post the list to pastebin or equivalent, and link it from here. That'll help narrow down what common elements are in the crashes. This is how we helped a number of people track down an unexpected root cause and stop crashing entirely. PoE is lagging, rubber-banding, or unexpectedly disconnecting! Unfortunately, the design of both Path of Exile, and the Internet, mean that there can be an awful lot of different causes of lag, rubber-banding, super-speed, or unexpected disconnects.
...but <other thing> works fine, it isn't my Internet!
There are several reasons why PoE can show problems that are not noticed with other games: The first reason is that PoE is probably the most aggressive user of your network, and will be the first to show problems that exist. Most other games run only in "predictive" mode, which hides network issues. PoE prefers "lockstep" mode, which has some advantages, but does mean that any network delay is instantly noticeable. If you switch PoE to "predictive" you may experience better results for exactly this reason. Things like web browsers and streaming video are even more forgiving than games are. You probably won't notice if sometimes part of a webpage is slow, and video buffers specifically to cope with network hiccups. These are specifically designed to hide these problems, while PoE ... just can't. The second reason is that PoE uses an extremely aggressive disconnect timeout, far lower than most games do. This is both a technical and design choice by GGG, and their hosting provider, but means that an issue that another game may recover from leads to PoE disconnecting you. (It also means that sometimes you get kicked for "too many actions" because of a network hiccup packing them all together.) The third reason is that many companies host things in different places, and there are a great many different paths from your computer to a server and back. Just like a traffic jam on one freeway doesn't block up other freeways, your connection to PoE may have issues while your connection to other game servers is just fine. Please, believe me: it may not be your Internet. You are absolutely correct. Step one is to find out if it is, or is not. Then we can look to step two, fixing the issue.
Debugging Lag, rubber-banding, or disconnects
Some of these are GGG problems, some are issues with their hosting provider, some are issues with your Internet connection, and some are caused companies that you have never heard of that just happen to be involved in the process of moving packets from your ISP to GGG. By narrowing down where the problems is happening we can ensure that we focus on the correct place to solve the problem. GGG technical support will ask you about this exact same thing, so even if you do want to talk to them, having done these tests first will make things move much faster.
What do you mean, 'companies you I have never heard of?'
The Internet is complicated. Most of your traffic passes from your ISP to a company they contract to provide "bulk transit", who pass it to one or two other companies via contractual agreements, until it finally gets handed to SoftLayer, the company GGG pay to host their servers. If you would like to see a visual representation of where your traffic goes, you can use this free visualization tool to plot those addresses on a map. Just follow the instructions on the page. First: run a test to determine if, and where, network issues are happening In order to figure out where the issues are located, we start with a basic network diagnostic. There are two tools you can use for this, WinMTR 0.94 or later, or PingPlotter (free for personal use). The goal here is to capture the trace from your computer to a GGG server while the problem is happening. We will initially test against the login server for your realm, which is a good general purpose test. More detailed tests may follow, but this will show 99 percent of all problems. For WinMTR, there is a good guide here: How to: WinMTR / trace route. I'm not going to duplicate it, just follow the guide and you are good to go. IMPORTANT: Once you have those results, make a new top level thread in the the Technical Support forum. Do NOT post in an existing thread. Double-plus do not to say "I have the same problem", since the entire point of those threads is to work out which, exactly, place the problem is happening for individual users.
Which one should I use?
I personally prefer PingPlotter. The graph at the bottom showing errors over time helps highlight clustering of failures in a way that WinMTR simply can't. However, GGG support have expressed a preference for WinMTR traces, so you might want to generate those to simplify that deal. Ultimately, both tools produce roughly the same data, and anyone who can read one can read the other, so it doesn't matter that much which one you choose to use, right now. That WinMTR guide includes the details of what login servers are used. If you do decide to go with PingPlotter, just grab the address from the WinMTR thread and plug it into PingPlotter instead. For PingPlotter, the details are basically the same: enter the address of your login server, run the trace while the problem happens, and then post the results. Ideally, post a screenshot of the application including the trace section, and the graph. Testing a specific instance server
You don't need to do this unless asked
It is rarely necessary to test an individual instance server path, rather than the gateway path. If we ask you to, or if you suspect that something is unusual about a specific instance server, you can find the address of the specific machine and trace your way to that. To do so: 1. Open your PoE folder, when the executable lives. 2. Open the logs folder inside that. 3. Open the client.txt file, which contains the client logs. 4. Hit the bottom of the file and search upwards. You are looking for a line that reads like this: 2017/04/11 17:25:08 67672437 d5 [INFO Client 6840] Connecting to instance server at 216.52.30.76:6112 The IP address in there is the specific server for the instance you entered at that time; lines near it tell you the (internal) instance name, etc, so you can confirm which one it is. If you have done this, please also paste the relevant lines from that section of the client.txt file in a pastebin, or your thread. If it is necessary to know about the instance server, the connection times reported, etc, are also helpful. Also, if you are doing this, be absolutely certain to get a /bug number screenshot, and include that with your report. That tells GGG which specific instance hosted on that machine you were talking to, and allows them to correlate your trace with their debugging data. Without that you may as well throw darts in the air, for all the good it will do. Last edited by SlippyCheeze on May 10, 2018, 3:36:47 PM Last bumped on May 10, 2018, 3:54:45 PM
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hi,
re rebooting i'm pretty sure i've done most of the above over the past couple of years and it has not helped. i find this exercise so complicated. could giving my pc to a local, brazilian, tech be of any help? i could not locate thread on pc always rebooring? advise please thanks for your interest |
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" Yes. If you let them know that you are having restarts while playing PoE, as in the computer hard-resets, and they should be able to go through and do appropriate diagnostics. |
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" If you have computer that reboot itself, I would stay away from Brazilians and suggest to call the local Mexican Maid. Tell her to pull that thing apart and dust it good. A computer shutting off/rebooting without error message is a safety reaction to overheating. Something more common in laptop or very poorly cared for desktop. |
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I randomly get errors with uncompressed files all the time in steam client. I validate integrity of game files and it always downloads the entire game again. Over the years I've never had it download just the affected files. It's like 2+hours of waiting for a complete download everytime.
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" This is extremely unusual. Do you ever run the packcheck.exe in the steam client? Steam has a very fixed idea of what the content should be, and will treat the GGPK file after packcheck has finished as "corrupted" because it is different from the upstream version. (Also, steam verification of the file is equivalent to anything packcheck can do, so there is no need to do both.) If not, you should consider this a sign that something is corrupting files on your disk, either Steam, or something else, and follow up on that. |
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Also if you use a program like corsair link you may want to uninstal that, it can be the cause of GFX related crashes and some BSoD's.
At first i has assumed that it was just a driver problem but it seemed that for whatever reason that it stalling doing whatever it was it needed to do caused the system to lock enough to go into a bsod or kick the crap out of the gfx. Also between updating the GFX driver and windows you can encounter a problem where the FPS is tanking even in town where before it was fine, you may need to restart he PC again, you may need to delete any gfx profiles you made for PoE and start fresh and you may need to launch the game as admin to "fix" the problem (the last 3 windows updates and 2 gfx driver updates have caused issues which were fixed with the above) Ancestral Bond. It's a thing that does stuff. -Vipermagi
He who controls the pants controls the galaxy. - Rick & Morty S3E1 |
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" Thanks. I added that as a specific example, and mentioned the general class of software. |
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" done my head in that one, i mean all it should do is allow you to tweak the colour of the LED on the cooler and adjust some profiles and fan speed settings, it wasn't anything specifically GFX related. And even worse i'd had it for months with no problems and then it just started happening randomly, fortunately the event logger managed to catch it so i could goggle the error it was chucking out. Ancestral Bond. It's a thing that does stuff. -Vipermagi
He who controls the pants controls the galaxy. - Rick & Morty S3E1 |
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