Crash to desktop before the logo movie, related to audio settings

After the latest engine patch, I started having CTD issue. Right after launching the game, screen goes black as usual, but before the logo intro movie starts, game crashes to desktop without error messages. Was working fine before the patch.

Windows Event Viewer indicates problem in MMDevApi.dll. I managed to "fix" the problem by deleting Path of Exile config file in My Games folder, essentially resetting the game to factory defaults. From there, I managed to gather the problem is probably caused by audio settings in the original config. I use Steelseries Sonar which splits the physical headphones into multiple different audio devices for Windows and allows to configure them independently for different purposes, ie. one for FPS games, one for media, one for chat applications etc..

The way I have set audio up is for "Sonar Gaming" audio device to be Windows default, and "Sonar Media" as the one Path of Exile uses in PoE Audio Settings. This crashes the game to desktop.

After resetting PoE settings, the game runs fine as I stated previously. But as soon as I try to change the audio device to "Sonar Media" in PoE settings, the game crashes to desktop. Interesting side note, if I change Windows default audio device to "Sonar Media" and run the game on default configuration, the game runs fine and uses that audio device. So it's not actually the audio device that's conflicting somehow. It seems setting PoE to use device other than Windows default which seems to crash the game.

Hopefully this helps fix the bug. Wasn't really planning to play the game at this point of the league anyways, just testing if there are bugs. It's a good time to do big engine update now, far better now than during league launch. Keep up the good work.

I launched the game today and noticed as well that my PoE client crashed directly after the black screen with the two cog-wheels. Thanks for posting this! Deleting the config file worked, and now the game is launchable again.

I don't really have any virtual audio splitter drivers or anything like that though, just using the default headset option and I had normal sounds when launching before/after.

The only sound related software I use is Elgato Sound Capture, but I haven't set PoE or Windows to use the Elgato virtual Output as default.


EDIT:

Okay I started changing some settings again, and activating DX12 makes it crash immediately, and after the black loading screen with the two gears

so might be a different bug entirely?

I've been hit by this as well. Removing just the `audio_device_id=XXX` line in the config file reset it. Some other notes:

It was working fine through my speaker setup, I switched to my headset and it was fine, but switching back to speakers (both windows and PoE settings) would crash. If I switched to headset in windows, I could start the game, then set windows to speakers while the game would stay in headset. If I ever tried switching back to speakers in game, it would crash on clicking "SAVE." After having issues with PoE crashing in towns at league start, I switched from vulkan to DX12 and have not switched back to Vulkan. I would assume DX12 drivers is using direct sound for audio and may be an issue selecting the right device there? Maybe some device settings are not being properly re-created on selected a new audio device? I'd start with what information is cached about selected audio devices as it happens on startup as well.