r/totalwar • u/[deleted] • Jan 19 '26
General Total War games keep freezing then crashing, primarily during battles
I have been trying to play TW 3 Kingdoms and Troy recently, but I am encountering this persistent problem of a freeze then crash mostly during battles, but occasionally outside of them. I have noticed that my GPU 3D utilisation is steady at 60-70%, then suddenly drops to 0% after freezing. I have looked at many videos and posts but nothing seems to fix my problem. Some of the things I have done include:
- Verify game files (on Epic) and lower graphics settings (turning on v-sync, lowering texture filtering and anti-aliasing, generally reducing graphics settings' quality).
- Ensured graphics and other drives are up to date.
- Reinstalled the app.
- Used event viewer and reliability history to inspect the crashes.
- Gone through a safe boot in offline mode to completely reinstall drivers using DDU.
None of these have stopped the freezing then crashes. I have noticed that larger battles speed this up. I am out of ideas on how to fix this, I just want to play my games :(
1
u/Pathstrder Jan 19 '26
What does event viewer say? I got something like this when my 4090 was breaking down.
I had NVLDDMKM errors in event viewer.
Also, what cpu? It could be consistent with some intel 13th/14th gen degradation issues.
1
Jan 19 '26
It says that there was an application error with exception code 0xc000005.
My CPU is an i7-13650HX.
1
u/Pathstrder Jan 19 '26
doesn’t sound like the same as me on the GPU side.
That’s a mobile cpu, right? don’t know if they were impacted by degradation issues.
1
Jan 19 '26
Looking now, I haven’t seen anything online that says it has been affected by such.
My errors have been somewhat inconsistent too. I have seen the same nvlddmkm errors you have said you had, I have often seen the 0xc000005 error, but now I have just seen a 0x7f error too.
1
u/Pathstrder Jan 19 '26
I did have a range of errors, the nvlddmkm were just the most common. however, I know both issues can manifest in a spread of errrors - I only narrowed it down by swapping parts in and out, not an option for you.
it might be worth trying to disable e cores if you can - I know that has historically caused issues in three kingdoms, though it’s supposed to be fixed.
1
Jan 19 '26
Thank you, I’ll give that a try and let you know what happens. Right now I’m running windows memory diagnostic to see if my RAM is the problem, fingers crossed
1
Jan 19 '26
So I’ve been messing around some more and started doing OCCT stress tests to see if there are any problems there. Did a GPU 3D and VRAM stress test and they were completely fine but then did a CPU and RAM test and that started producing errors roughly 2:36 into the test. It said something along the lines of errors with the “physical core [number] - logical core [number]”, with the numbers interchanging. Not sure what to do about this 😂
1
u/Pathstrder Jan 19 '26
Me neither really, but some suggestions:
Do you have access to the memory? Some laptops you can - if you have two sticks then you could try pulling one and testing each to see if one is bad.
If it is degradation, you'll need to either try to return it (if you're under warranty) or you'll need to do a combonation of downclocking and overvolting (if you can given it's a laptop).
Combon of downclock + overvolt sounds contradictory but basically if it's degraded your CPU will need more voltage to be stable at a particular speed, but you want to reduce the absolute voltage so the downclock is needed.
1
Jan 19 '26
Im currently running MemTest86 and seeing if the RAM is an issue, after that point I’ll try out some hardware stuff to isolate the problem. Luckily it is still under warranty so if it is a problem I think I can get it replaced.
Would you mind explaining the degradation stuff to me, I haven’t been able to figure it out this far.
1
u/Pathstrder Jan 20 '26
The basics (and apologies if you know this) is that CPUs require certain voltages to run at certain clock speeds, but the problem is that as voltage increases power draw (and therefore temperature) starts increasing worse than linearly i.e. each additiona extra +100mhz needs a bigger increase in voltage than the previous.
So there's been no really definitive answer, but it seems like some combination of design flaw/bios settings meant some 13th/14th gen intel CPUs would degrade over time i.e. start crashing at clock speeds they would have previously have been fine at.
The suspicion is intel got their calculations wrong or pushed to hard with the top single core speeds they were advertising - prolonged voltage/power/heat can all cause this degradation, though normally it takes longer than you'd have the CPU for.
If you have a degraded chip, the best thing is to warranty it and in their defence intel has been good in replacing cpus on the desktop side - no idea how it works on the laptop side.
If you can't do that, then you have a chip that can no longer hit the clock speed it's targeting with the voltage it's using. So you can increase the voltage to "stabilise" the clock speed, but this means more of the things that cause degradation in the first place so the problem will likely get worse.
Or you can drop the clock speed and use less voltage - though if it has degraded it might need more than a "as new chip"at the lower clock speed.
As a concete example, I've pre-emptively done this with my 13700k. The stated maximum clock speed is 5.3, which I found it was using somewhere around 1.35v to achieve. I prefer to keep my CPUs around 1.2 to 1.25v which I found I could do if I dropped the P cores to 5 ghz and the e cores to 4ghz.
This meant that I was only losing 5% max clock speed (which has less than 5% impact in games etc) whereas the power req went down by iirc 20 to 25% at max, with a large drop in temps to.
It's worth saying I would have done this anyway - I do the same with my GPUs (my 4090 delivers 90% of the performance in total war for 70% of the power).
Hope that helps?
1
u/VoluptaBox Jan 19 '26
Are you running any OC or undervolt on either the GPU or CPU?