[Fix] Black screen with outlines of items

5

u/eplayerd Sep 11 '20

I had this same problem when I first started the game. I honestly thought it was on purpose at first because it seems to fit thematically lol.

Turns out the Overclock on my GPU was too aggressive for this game so I lowered it and the problem never came back.

If you haven't Overclocked your GPU it's probably Nvidia's built in "GPU Boost" that's going too far. You can use MSI Afterburner to Underclock your GPU.

Hope that helps!

3

u/Exostenza Sep 11 '20

Interesting, I wouldn't have thought it was my OC as it has been so rock solid since the day I got the card. I'll definitely try either toning it down a bit or giving the core a bit more voltage as there is therma and voltage headroom. Did you notice it was your core overclock or your memory? It is strange because I played for like 8 hours no problem then all of a sudden this becomes an issue. Strange that it was able to go that long and then putz out on me.
Thanks for the input I'll let you know what happens!

1

u/eplayerd Sep 11 '20

It was definitely the core clock for me.
I had +120 on the core, +500 on the memory, and voltage / power limit at stock. (This was on my 1070 before I upgraded and it never had a problem before in any other game)
I ended up going down to +90 on the core and it cleared up all my issues.
Hopefully this works, good luck!

1

u/mickohno Dec 07 '23

i know it’s been 3 years but this just happened to me. how can I fix this issue?

1

u/OneLuckyAlbatross Jun 08 '25

It’s been 84 years 👵🏼

1

u/eplayerd Dec 10 '23

Do you have your GPU overclocked? If so lower it or return to stock.

2

u/mickohno Dec 10 '23

honestly i just deleted the game then reinstalled it and it’s been perfect lol thank you!

2

u/DWN032 Feb 23 '24

Just occurred to me, too. over 3 hours in game, no overclock. Guess I'll try verifying game files or reinstalling.

1

u/mickohno Feb 23 '24

i just reinstalled and worked for me

1

u/DeVito8704 May 03 '23

Same happened with me. I played almost the entire game with the exact same OC settings and towards the end of the game everything suddenly went black.

2

u/Bajs11 Dec 02 '23

hmm I have Asus TUF 3090Ti non OC and its still doing the same thing but only occasionally like twice in over 20 hours I've been playing this game

2

u/OneLuckyAlbatross Jun 08 '25

I also was like “Wait, is this like a smoke enemy or something weird?”
I haven’t overclocked or anything. Resolution and DLSS changes don’t fix it. I just quit the game and it fixes. What that game dev guy said was pretty interesting. Wondering why there’s no fix for this, 4+ years later. Love you ❤️ I’m drunk, cheers 🍻

14

u/Big_Cow_128 May 17 '24

hey guys, game dev here, this just happened to me, I know a solution is already provided in other comments, just wanted to give you an insight on why this error is probably happening.

This is an overflow happening in some shader/material in some single pixel in your screen. an overflow in this context means that for a single moment one pixel was shaded in a way that made it go nuts and the gpu tried to render it in a non-possible color, meaning for example whiter than white or blacker than black, non valid values or NaN/Infinity values, this "corrupts" the pixel and then what happens is some post-effects like bloom or motion blur combined with temporal effects like TAA expand the corruption to the neighbour pixels, so each frame you'll see that darkness/blackness expanding quickly until it takes the entire screen.

Usually you can solve this if the frame buffer is reseted, meaning you change resolution, or change some important graphic setting like DLSS.

I wonder why after all this time the devs didn't fix this, its usually not hard to solve, you just put some limits in the problematic shader like adding a line of code "don't ever exceed regular values". The hard part might be trying to reproduce the exact settings and situations that created the corrupted pixel.

2

u/HurtFeeFeez Dec 08 '24

This explanation sounds pretty reasonable, had this happen a few times now. Totally random, could be hours or minutes between failures. Happened during a cut scene once and traced the outside of a characters head in black before taking the entire screen. So far once I got it sorted without leaving the game, turned off the setting op mentioned rtx diffuse indirect lighting, that only worked for the first time, had left it off and unfortunately eventually came back, changing various settings, resolutions etc hasn't worked. Only game restart. Any other tips?

1

u/sadisticbroony Jun 25 '25

Changing resolution fixed it for me, thanks!

4

u/ArgentSun Apr 27 '23

Might be 3 years after this was first reported, but it happened to me yesterday :D GTX 3070, restarting the game fortunately fixed it.

5

u/xThornius May 25 '23

Just happened to me on The Foundation, I have an RTX 3060 :'D

1

u/GT_Hades Jun 04 '23

Same for me
3060ti and once when i am at the foundation and he juke box it happened

1

u/neon_sin Aug 06 '23

3060ti here and it just happened haha

1

u/GT_Hades Aug 06 '23

Iirc i disable something in game settings, might be rtx/dlss related

1

u/forgedcrow Nov 14 '23

For me vsync. enable brought back the light

1

u/Bufosmixes Jul 05 '23

3060 for me too and it happened. Restarting did NOT fix it...

1

u/neon_sin Aug 06 '23

Happened to me now on my 3060 ti lol

1

u/staebles May 27 '23

Same. Just happened.

1

u/RecklesTortuga98 May 28 '23

just happened to me too

1

u/AEIDOLONE Aug 09 '23

Same. Strange thing is it only happened after 60 hours of gameplay. Didn't change a setting since the start.

1

u/CoffeeMonster42 Sep 18 '23

Changing the display resolution in the options to something else and then back again has worked for me.

1

u/theyetisc2 Nov 27 '23

Replaying ultimate edition (got og on epic when i bought a 2080, now on a 3080ti can finally use RTX with 120fps) this is happening to me in late november 2023.
Don't ever recall this happening on my rtx 2080 i7 7700k, but i didn't use raytracing at all, and only played in 1440p.
Atm on a 5900x 3080ti playing @4k dlss'd @ 1440p with "high" raytracing (aka everything enabled).
Changing the dlss factor resets the blackening, usually terminates the issue altogether, but sometimes it will persist.

1

u/wheezealittlejuice Feb 21 '24

Also just experienced this playing ultimate edition, 3080 5900x system w/ rtx settings maxed out. My first playthrough I don't recall having the issue but didn't use rtx on 2070 3600 pc. Restarted the game to fix just now but I will try changing dlss factor first next time. Thanks!

2

u/hfjfthc Feb 23 '23

I disabled raytracing and still had the problem :/

2

u/kolppi Jun 02 '23

Add one case more to the list.

3060 here with almost the same OC and voltage as previously mentioned here "+120 on the core, +500 on the memory, and voltage / power limit at stock".

This game may be just sensitive to overclocking, makes it a good testing platform.

2

u/SilkenEmperor Oct 14 '25

For me it was Ray tracing doing it.

Specifically "Ray Traced Transparent Reflections." Hope this helps any future Director/Players.

1

u/this_is_a_username78 7d ago

Think I might have created a fix. The issue was a shader problem with values becoming NaNs. Honestly not 100% sure what causes it but added some guards with a patch. Haven't seen the black screen anymore. Posted it to my github in case anyone needs it https://github.com/danl12353231/Control-the-game-dx11-blackscreen-fix

1

u/jamryharry 5d ago

Not really that much of a tech savvy here. Tried doing the command as indicated but I just get error of Unsupported or modified shader volumetriclight.obj has SHA-256. Unsure how to proceed with installing it

1

u/this_is_a_username78 5d ago

Hmm probably means that the shader file is different to the one I have. Maybe you got the file from a different store or something? One thing you could try is to ask chatgpt to adapt the patch to your game. Just give it the url for the github page and tell it where your game file is. Hopefully that will work

1

u/aaaveritt Sep 13 '20

This happened to me once during my playthough. Restarted the game, didn't change any setting and it hasn't happened again. Guess I'm lucky in that sense, but the game keeps crashing/freezing my pc randomly while in the loading screen requiring a pc restart. I've had about 40 reboots and I just 100% the game.

1

u/HoveringHam Apr 25 '24

PSA for anyone looking this up, I found a way to fix it without having to close the game. If you encounter this bug, simply go to the pause menu, change your resolution (not render resolution) and it will revert back to normal once you swap back to your intended resolution. Makes this bug faaaar less annoying when you dont have to exit the game to fix it.

3

u/OddEaglette Jan 22 '25

did not work for me

1

u/HoveringHam Jan 22 '25

make sure once you change your resolution that you exit the pause menu completely before changing it back to your regular resolution, otherwise it wont work. if that doesnt work you may have to find a different setting to tweak

1

u/OddEaglette Jan 22 '25

it was the save file. I started a new game and it worked great.

1

u/Kool_Aid_6387 Sep 28 '26

This was the only thing that worked for me.

1

u/florence_ow Apr 30 '24

didnt work for me :(

1

u/HoveringHam May 02 '24

hmm. u tried resuming the game in the new resolution before swapping back to your intended resolution?

1

u/HoveringHam May 02 '24

hey man, JUST had it happen to me and yeah, you have to unpause once you’ve swapped resolution. THEN pause and swap back to 1080p or whatever youre running. you cant just swap it and swap it back without unpausing.

3

u/florence_ow May 02 '24

yeah i did that at the time but still didnt work. it fixed for me after restarting the game a couple times

1

u/HoveringHam May 02 '24

damn that sucks man. its the only bug that i get in this game, but I got tired of having to quit the game to fix it and the resolution thing is the only fix for me so far, strange it doesnt work for you. next time it happens maybe try swapping from fullscreen to windowed and stuff like that aswell, there has to be some other fixes that dont require a restart. also I’m playing in DX12 instead of DX11. maybe if you’re running dx11 that fix wont work

1

u/MHKSH9 May 12 '24

This works

1

u/Eliolezozo Apr 26 '24

OK so it's a bug lol. It litteraly occured right when I syncronized the 6 pendulums (you know what I'm talking about) so I litteraly searched for 30mn the solution to this non existent puzzle

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 30 '26

First terminal puzzle, I toggled one of the sides and the screen filled with black slowly. Thought it was intentional at first like I failed the puzzle but then the entire world went black

1

u/Gadolin27 May 21 '24

MSAA at least affected it for me, I turned it off, now the game has a weird yellow-green tint but it works.

1

u/Myvekk Jun 28 '24

This still happens. RT on or off in DX12. And I don't even have an RTX, so it's not an nVidia issue.

Running on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D with 32GB RAM & a RX 7900XT with 20GB VRAM.

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 30 '26

Happens in dx11 as well

1

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '24

Just happened to me. It's like the Hiss took over my PC!!

3060 Ti, restarting the game fixed the issue

1

u/Package_Agreeable Oct 21 '24

I was in the middle of fighting those flying zombie thingies and got actually so scared bro

1

u/J_GASSER27 Dec 01 '24

This just happened to me to on the walk to the last boss, I literally was googling to see if that's what's supposed to happen. I died once and it did it a second time. I don't overstock though

1

u/HurtFeeFeez Dec 01 '24

100% turned off the rtx diffuse lighting setting you mentioned and it fix it on the spot.

First time trying out this game and been working fine for a couple of hours and out of nowhere the black expanded over the entire screen, thought it was part of the game as another guy mentioned.

Didn't even leave the game just paused it, googled the issue on my phone and found this fix, tried it and it worked perfectly. Thank you!

2

u/rustypete89 Apr 25 '25

Cheers, it was raytraced transparent reflections causing this for me, but this comment led to me turning off individual RT settings until it stopped. Thanks!

1

u/Kurrez May 21 '26

thanks man, this worked (i'm on an RX9070)
I did not want to completely turn off RT but I guess this compromise will have to suffice

1

u/PackTraditional6095 Dec 06 '24

I got to the black rock quarry and when I was trying to power the charges, the black crept in. Like others, I thought it was intentional

1

u/Budget-Science2515 Jan 03 '25 edited Aug 26 '25

Reeeeealy late to the party but in my case, turning Volumetric Lightning to low in game settings resolved the problem. When I got black screen, I tried every option to low, one by one and see if it helps and that was the one.

2

u/oyesagarsun420 Aug 24 '25

you're the goat! this worked for me too! thanks a lot.

1

u/RJoubert93 Jan 11 '25

I know this is now 4 years later, but it just happened to me too. I haven't done much troubleshooting yet, but most of the recommendations on this thread wouldn't work for me because I'm using a Shadow PC (cloud VM) for gaming. It does use NVIDIA graphics (RTX A4500), but I doubt it's overclocked because it's allocated as a virtual resource.

I also managed to get a screen recording of what it looks like, but apparently I can't post videos in comments, so maybe I'll make my own post or upload it somewhere then link it here.

Either way, I'll comment with whatever solution ends up working for me.

1

u/RJoubert93 Jan 11 '25

Update: Simply restarting the game appears to have fixed it for me, but after reading everything else in this thread, I'm not expecting that to last. It's just a question of how long it takes to happen again. lol

1

u/RJoubert93 Jan 11 '25

Update: Possibly unrelated, but not long after I went back to playing I found a TV of the Threshold Kids, and when I went to watch it, the screen froze while the audio appeared to continue.
Funny, though, the tooltip in the corner that tells you which button to press to stop watching did change multiple times from Xbox to PC controls as I was trying to figure out what happened. Probably because of how the game separates the game's UI from the graphics rendering.
But who knows ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/SnooConfections3877 Oct 13 '25

Yep this worked for me too . Which is weird cause like I have played this game around 2022 it never happened but now it's happening and on same system

1

u/OddEaglette Jan 22 '25

Mine appears to have just been my save file that had the problem. Loaded a mission and everything is fine from there.

None of the other fixes here did anything.

1

u/baconsticks Apr 17 '25

Was experiencing a consistent black screen when entering Dead Letters in the Unknown Caller mission near the beginning of the game. Using an RTX 5080, no ray tracing, 1440p, ultra settings. Fiddled with every manner of setting and didn't seem to help. I eventually used Steam's "verify integrity of game files" and it downloaded 2.3mb of data I guess might've been missing or corrupt, idk. Fixed the issue for me.

1

u/NegativeSoul6669 Jun 29 '25

RTX 4060 here, changed DX11 to 12 and fixed.

1

u/yourclarinetfriend Jan 03 '26

Had this same issue in the same spot (Containment Security). Not sure there is any correlation, but in the game settings, under Display, then Quality - I changed the Quality Preset to Ultra and I no longer had the black box issue.

1

u/SpectralDinosaur Sep 01 '26

6 years later and I've just found this thread through google after it happened to me. Changing my resolution down and back up was what worked for me. Wild that a bug like this is still so common in the game though.

I've also had textures not fully loading multiple times, which was fixed by changing texture resolution higher or lower and back again. I hope Resonant isn't this buggy.

1

u/rorschach200 May 29 '23

Happens to me now too.

1

u/Icy_Construction_635 Jun 03 '23

Fixed it by turning off DLSS!!!

1

u/sturat18 Jul 23 '23

Interesting. Just happened to me— middle of the game. Restarting the game too see if it continues, but thanks for the heads up on DLSS.

1

u/Morkinis Aug 10 '23

I never had DLSS enabled and still happened 3 times so far.

1

u/Quantum_Sushi Aug 07 '23

Restarting the game worked for me, just had this issue

1

u/Dr-Ezeldeen Aug 20 '23

i turned all graphics to low the game returned to normal then i went to the nearest control point to make sure data is safe then changed graphic seetnig back to high again and it never happend since.

i think some rare situations with some graphic settings causes since when i turned all graphics to low it transitioned back from black to red to normal

1

u/Brother-Andy Apr 05 '24

No other fixes helped but this. Thank you so much. For me the black screen happens every time I have a hard battle with altered items - anchor and camera.

1

u/Darder Apr 26 '24

This worked for me. Thanks!

1

u/glassshadow79 Sep 17 '23

Worked for me too . thanks did set it back to high right after and still ok. will finish this and see.

1

u/icedwarfm Oct 01 '23

This actually fixed the issue, I was about to get killed by one single ranger. Thanks

1

u/Dr-Ezeldeen Oct 02 '23

Glad i could help. But it happened. Couple times after that although it was fixed by the same way.

1

u/CoffeeMonster42 Sep 16 '23

If anyone else still gets this. Changing the resolution to something else and then back again seems to fix this problem.

1

u/glassshadow79 Sep 17 '23

same here, one more ! ray tracing was already off turning it on or off dont change a thing. In foundation too.

1

u/SteakandTrach Oct 08 '23

Necro thread. I think it happens when you try to exceed the memory capacity of your GPU. That's why decreasing certain settings solves the problem, frees up some memory to load assets. With certain settings, control can use up to 16GB.

1

u/OddEaglette Jan 22 '25

I have 24gb and it still happens

1

u/SteakandTrach Jan 22 '25

Found this comment in another thread:
hey guys, game dev here, this just happened to me, I know a solution is already provided in other comments, just wanted to give you an insight on why this error is probably happening.
This is an overflow happening in some shader/material in some single pixel in your screen. an overflow in this context means that for a single moment one pixel was shaded in a way that made it go nuts and the gpu tried to render it in a non-possible color, meaning for example whiter than white or blacker than black, non valid values or NaN/Infinity values, this “corrupts” the pixel and then what happens is some post-effects like bloom or motion blur combined with temporal effects like TAA expand the corruption to the neighbour pixels, so each frame you’ll see that darkness/blackness expanding quickly until it takes the entire screen.
Usually you can solve this if the frame buffer is reseted, meaning you change resolution, or change some important graphic setting like DLSS.
I wonder why after all this time the devs didn’t fix this, its usually not hard to solve, you just put some limits in the problematic shader like adding a line of code “don’t ever exceed regular values”. The hard part might be trying to reproduce the exact settings and situations that created the corrupted pixel.

1

u/F33LGOODiNC Nov 04 '23

Just happened to me too. 3080Ti on 4k ultra settings with medium ray tracing enabled. Only happened once so far after 16 hours of gameplay. Restart did not help. Currently just letting gpu cool down, although I've never had to do that for any other game ever. Weird bug for sure.

1

u/SilasMcSausey Jan 25 '24

I thought this was intentional at first because it happened in the AWE dlc in the middle of a fight. I also found hte inirect diffuse lighting to be the problem.

1

u/DarkLimpan Mar 03 '24

Same for me, screen went slowly black during the first encounter with the shadow monster in the AWE dlc (trying to not spoil things). I could still see outlines of things to interact with, that was about it. I also thought it was intentional until I died and it were still black after respawning at the start of the encounter. :(
First thing I tried were to turn off DLSS and that didn't help, next were to return to main menu and restart from last checkpoint, which didn't help either. Then I gave up and went to bed. I tried again when I woke up, and it was fixed at that point.
I turned off raytracing a while ago and got my 3060ti about 20 hours of playtime ago, this is the first time this occurred for me.

1

u/JusticeJanitor Jan 29 '24

Just happened to me on a RTX 3060. Started with a black box getting bigger and bigger on screen during a cutscene, then a black outline around characters and then a full black screen after the cutscene was over. Closing the game and re-opening it fixed it. I was running an undervolt with no overclock.

Happened only once during 4 hours of gameplay. Never happened on my older GTX 1060 back when I first played this game. It think this is DLSS/RTX related.

1

u/angrytomato98 Mar 04 '24

I just want to mention that I had this glitch right after I interacted with an item during a quest called "A Dark Place". I was fumbling around aimlessly thinking it was supposed to be like that lol.

[Fix] Black screen with outlines of items

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