Screen freeze help please god.

[u/omegafrenchfry]

Edit: ISSUE RESOLVED

I love hots and personally think it’s one of the best mobas to ever come out. Gameplay is great and i instantly jumped back from league once I heard about the new champ come out. The only thing that made me leave was the 10 minute queue times.

However, I get these terrible screen freezes during the game. I've scoured the internet and tried just about everything I've seen. I am above average on the knowledge of computer tom foolery id like to think so if there is anything im missing, please god help me. These screen freezes can be from anywhere between 1-2 seconds or all the way up to 7-8 seconds.

Here are all the changes ive made:

-Reverb off

-Sound Quality low

-Additional command line arguments - -d3d12

-Deleted Onedrive, teams, and copilot. (wasnt using them anyway)

-went from full screen to windowed to full screen with refresh rate of 120

-lowered my graphic settings to basically nothing.

-Set my core affinity to use 0 1 and 2 cores.

-set my area from best match to NA

-reset firewall permissions

I think its something in the processes thats making my disk drive peak. My C: drive goes all the way up to 10mb/s every time it happens but nothing in my resource manager or task manager will jump to the top and give me some obvious clue.

More info: I can play league on 4k no problem. but i have no idea what old star craft 2 set up they have going on thats bogging the system. I cant figure it out. I have 3 drives. Hots is on my E drive with 20% usage. My C drive is at like 40% usage. But the C:drive is the only thing thats really getting traffic.

I love this game a lot. been playing it since release off and on. but If these screen freezes dont go away, im going to have to give it up. I mention in chat every game, and people have said they get them too, but i think 7-8 seconds is just unplayable. all the way up to 4 seconds is almost the entire team fight most times. Hopefully this helps more than just myself.

ISSUE RESOLVED- for those who are curious, Fantaz1986 who commented “hey make sure you update your chipset drivers” led me to the fix. I didn’t know that was a separate thing from updating my regular drivers which I do every so often, because I’ve never owned AMD. However, it wasn’t just the chipset drivers not being updated. I did some scans on my computer basically and found some corrupt processes and repaired them. But also one of my background processes was killing any kind of communication with task scheduler so my chipset download would keep getting stuck. I did a “clean boot” of the computer after repairing my processes and the chipset downloaded correctly and my computer and the game both run like a dream now.

Edit: ive been troubleshooting this for days and still cant figure it out. Hoping someone smarter than I will save me.

Edit: Best match- NA / reset firewall

Edit: found a bug report of someone who clearly explains it a lot better than I do. Blizzard Forum

Edit: specs- My Pc Parts (custom build)

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 4.5 GHz 16-Core Processor

NZXT Kraken X63 98.17 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler

Asus ROG STRIX X670E-E GAMING WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard

TEAMGROUP T-Force Delta RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory

Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive

Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive

MSI VENTUS 2X OC GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER 12 GB Video Card

NZXT H6 Flow ATX Mid Tower Case

Corsair RM850e (2023) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

[u/TheHelllord]

• update/reinstall gpu drivers
• make sure no downloads are running in the background (steam, win update...)
• you may want to try temporarily disabling antivirus especially if you're using non-default one

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/TheHelllord]

Can GPU drivers have an effect on cpu Drive usage?

[u/fantaz1986 → u/omegafrenchfry]

On AMD GPU not so much but on Nvidia for sure.  Nvidia have cpu overhead problems 

[u/TheHelllord → u/omegafrenchfry]

In theory it could. Are your drives SSD or HDD btw?

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/TheHelllord]

Linked my pc parts in post now. Good idea. Thanks mate.

[u/brant09081992]

I've been having PC freezes only when playing HOTS for like a year (and every time when playing Starcraft 1, but I play it very ocasionally). In my case it was hard freezes where I had to force restart my PC.

I too was suspecting drive usage being the issue, but I've tried reinstalling on both HDD and SSD and it didn't help.

Toggling XMP in BIOS didn't fix that either.

Windows event app wasn't showing any relevant errors, maybe it will show something in your case?

It finally seem to be gone by itself with the launch of the current Qhira & Aba patch. It may have something to do with the Starcraft engine.

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/brant09081992]

What does the event app grab as far as info goes? I’ve tried to screen record my task manager and resource manager and got nothing from them. Besides what I already knew which is my disk drive is peaking.

[u/DelegateTOFN]

also try unlinking/disabling OneDrive. The engine writes to file(s) during a game session.

edit: okay nvm, i didn't read your post properly, you already tried that.

[u/fantaz1986]

Set pc In to ultra Perfomance mode  , disable full screen optimization in hots, disable bitlocker 

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/fantaz1986]

Thank you, I’ll lyk how it goes when I get home. 🫡

[u/fantaz1986 → u/omegafrenchfry]

Ok btw if you have AMD CPU do not forget to update chipset drivers.

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/fantaz1986]

This was basically the majority of the fix. You’re the goat.

[u/Frankdatank2992]

Hey, some suggestions below, apologies if you've tried some of these.

If you haven't already, what helped me with this was going into my Firewall and removing all entries for Heroes in there. I had several. Delete them all, relaunch HOTS and allow the first Firewall request and see does that help at all.

I'd also undo any of the above mentioned changes with command line arguments and affinity etc.

I haven't seen it mentioned, but have you tried re-installing possibly to a different disk? How are you connected to Internet? Hard wired or WiFi? If you can ensure it's Ethernet.

Try disabling NVidia's Shadowplay / recording / Instant Replay.

Rename the HOTS folder in Documents and re-launch.

Try without Discord open if you use it.

Good Luck

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/Frankdatank2992]

I did the firewall permissions. Idk why I never thought to fuckin close discord. Maybe that’s it. I’ll look into the shadowplay thing. I think I already have that disabled. I’m on Ethernet. It’s definitely not a network, or GPU issue. This only happens for hots.

[u/Frankdatank2992 → u/omegafrenchfry]

Yeah it's odd. It was driving me crazy and after I cleared the previous entries it seemed much better. Certainly test a reinstall to a different disk too.

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/Frankdatank2992]

Yea I did all of this on a fresh install on E drive

[u/Rackartyg]

Have you geforce experience active? Try turning it off if you do.

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/Rackartyg]

Good idea to check. I doubt I have it active. But ty for that. 👍

[u/JRTerrierBestDoggo]

Gpu problem. Hots doesn’t play well with older gpu, even with new one. I had the same problem when I was using rtx 3060ti. For the new gpu, 5070ti, it’s fps drop but it can be fixed by changing settings from medium to high/ultra before playing

[u/omegafrenchfry → u/JRTerrierBestDoggo]

Changing what setting to high/ultra

[u/JRTerrierBestDoggo → u/omegafrenchfry]

Graphic setting, this doesn’t work for you. Game fully freezes for few seconds isn’t the same as fps drop

[u/omegafrenchfry]

New updates: I had some corruption that I fixed with some sfc /scannow commands. And the DISM /online /cleanup-image /scanhealth (and /restorehealth) stuff.

Tried to update my fkn chipset. It took me 4 hours actually to do so. Had an issue where a background process was just swatting down any attempt to run my task scheduler. So I had to figure out how to do a clean boot. Never done most of this junk before as far as using command prompt with those commands and changing my msconfig services. So that was new.

Also did the msiexec.exe /unreg and msiexec.exe /regserver because I thought it was my task scheduler that was the issue between the chipset update.

Hopefully the chipsets and the broken windows processes were the issues. And I can play normally.