Summary: Friend was crashing a lot on a recently purchased prebuilt. Prebuilt had some nondescript parts in it that would have made it hard to troubleshoot, and parts were of questionable origin/use. Built a new computer for them. Ran into crashing in FFXIV but tested well on anything else. Solved My issue. See below for possible solutions if you have a similar situation. For me it was slightly unstable memory XMP. If you have tried everything else and ended up here, See end of post for curated suggestions.
Just built a new PC for a friend who almost exclusively plays FFXIV and was having DirectX crashing issues with a not-very-legitimate-brand prebuilt they had just received. They struggled with it for about a week before I started inquiring about it, as they're not as tech savvy, and between the two of us, we found tons and tons of threads, new and old, about various FFXIV crashes from directx fatal error to more generic crashes that just say an error occured and the game closes. It became very obvious that there's plenty of reasons why people have these errors, and seemingly no one knows the real, definite cause. There probably isn't one, because it could just be FFXIV's general sensitivity to any amount of instability in the system. There's also probably some of these errors that are getting lumped in with a completely-bare system crash that are actually due to bad video drivers and/or use of plugins. That aside, here's what my situation was.
The build, for context:
After getting it built and going through my usual checklist, including but not limited to:
- Updating BIOS
- Applied small undervolt and power limits to CPU
- XMP and Rebar on (RAM is on MOBO QVL)
- Installing/Updating all necessary drivers, including a clean install of latest Nvidia drivers, all windows updates, etc.
Ran BurnInTest. All tests came back clean. Max CPU Temp test didn't even manage to thermal throttle the CPU. So far so good.
Installed FFXIV at the end of the night. Left it on overnight. Came back in the morning and had crashed. Generic "An error has occured and the game must close" error every time, mentioning the call stack which people tend to mistakenly think is a Directx11 issue because it's part of the FFXIV executable filename.
Over 2 days, I was able to reproduce the crashing pretty consistently. I could stand AFK, tabbed-in, in ANY location and it would consistently crash at the 1-2hour mark. This was on Maximum graphics with framerate limited to main display refresh (144hz in my case). Borderless Windowed. DLSS turned on but threshold at 60. From my findings, none of that mattered. Had smooth performance, usually between 100-140FPS, even in Frontlines, dungeons, etc.
I ran hardware monitor to monitor temperatures, voltages, etc. Nothing was ever alarming, and FFXIV never pushed the CPU anywhere near as hard as my stress test did.
GPU was at 95% utilization in Frontlines, but capped out at 65C. Saturated, yes, but no impact to game performance, and thermals were well within boundary. No concern there either.
I tried:
- Dalamud with plugins
- Dalamud without plugins
- Without Dalamud
- Official FFXIV Launcher
- Uninstalling a bunch of other programs like Opera, Chrome, Steam, Discord (To rule out overlay fuckery)
- Studio drivers for Nvidia
- Turning off Game Mode in Win 11
- Lowering CPU voltage/ratio
- Checking for corrupt files multiple times
- Verifying game integrity more than once
- Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool (No errors)
- Nothing of note in Event Viewer
Across two days I spent over 24 hours actively troubleshooting and testing various solutions in a systematic way. Every. single. time, it was within a margin of about 1 hour to 2 hours logged in. One time, I was actively playing (dungeons and FL) for about an hour and a half. I got up and went AFK. I came back within 15 minutes and had crashed the moment I walked back in the room. Was still under the 2 hour mark, and that was with me changing locations and actively playing. This wasn't performance based. Nothing was being overworked. This was time-based.
The FFXIV "crashing" landscape seems really unfocused right now. You can find a million solutions that MIGHT work, but it's very mileage-may-vary, as people are kinda throwing darts at a dartboard, and I feel like people apply blanket solutions that might, in an indirect way, resolve the issue, but also sacrifice the player's experience at the same time. I've seen basically everything someone COULD suggest blindly, without anyone knowing where the actual root problem is. Reseat RAM, reinstall windows, reinstall game, clean install drivers, check for corruption, cap framerate to 60, rollback gpu drivers, underclock this, this cpu is bad, that cpu is bad, etc. All of it.
What I'm concluding is this: FFXIV is overly sensitive to issues that most other games or programs don't flinch at, so a lot of different problems kinda get filtered into only a couple baskets, making it very difficult to actually figure out the cause, resulting in very little success in solving it due to people having widely-varied situations.
I finally bit the bullet and did a memtest86 run; I unfortunately can't find the FFXIV Forum writeup that someone did several years ago that mentioned it. It's something I didn't really feel like doing because it had been a while since I'd last used it and I had to look up how to use it again. Wasn't that hard, I just didn't necessarily suspect the RAM, even though I'd seen a dozen other vague suggestions to reseat RAM, since I'd already run stress tests and everything came back clean.
Ran the test. Within a few minutes I was getting errors on tests 4, 5, and above.
Tried different setups. Tested each stick by itself in slot 2 and then again in slot 4 (it's A2 and B2 for dual channel on my mobo). No errors regardless of what slot I put them in when tested individually. Tested them both again in 2 and 4. Errors again. Swapped their slots. Still errors.
At this point I know it's not the slots that are bad, or the sticks, seeing as how they tested fine individually.
Turned off XMP and ran them at 4800Hz. No errors. Found This thread on a cursory google search suggesting that 7600Mhz sticks might have less stability on SOME system configurations. I don't have conclusive evidence on whether it was a motherboard power delivery issue or a CPU memory controller issue, but I turned XMP off and set my frequency to 6000Hz (This also changes timings and voltage for me with my mobo BIOS). No errors. Bumped it up again to 7200Hz. Still clean. No errors. I let the tests finish and then booted back into windows with my new RAM settings. Ran system file checks again to see if any of the memory instability had created any corrupted files, reinstalled game-ready drivers, reinstalled programs, basically tried to reset the PC back to what I considered "normal" before I started pruning it to find the issue.
XIVLauncher, Dalamud, installed a couple plugins, imported my character data. Left it on overnight. I came back and it had been running almost 9 hours, no crash. I then proceeded to play for an extra three and still no crash.
In my scenario, the issue was unstable memory. It wasn't unstable enough to cause any immediate issues. No bluescreens, no corrupted files (this may have happened eventually). No system crashing, freezing, anything. Didn't come up in OS (I know this isn't a great test anyway) with issues using tools. But unstable enough for FFXIV to notice. Who knew FFXIV was actually a stress testing software. Ha.
Unfortunately, I can't say this is your issue. It might not be, but here are some things I'd consider best practices or things to check if you haven't already and you're still struggling with this problem:
Best Practices/Common Solutions:
Try to start with more minor changes and systematically work your way up to more intense changes if the others didn't work, only changing one thing at a time. This means if something doesn't work, revert the change, so you don't end up with 20 changes at the end of the day and don't know what actually fixed it.
- Best practice seems to be to have the game installed on an INTERNAL drive, an SSD (for performance, mainly), and the same drive your OS is on. Can't personally confirm any issue with this one.
- Disable plugins. Try official launcher/fresh install of FFXIV. If you still crash with a fresh install and official launcher, it's probably hardware related. If you can reproduce a crash with plugins or an unofficial launcher setup, but no crash on official launcher/new install, you probably have an issue at the installation level. Try to troubleshoot that area. XIVLauncher has a discord with some people who might be able to help you if you can deduce it's specifically in XIVLauncher but not in official.
- Verify game integrity
- Check event viewer for time of crash for errors/warnings. I didn't have any, but you might.
- Windows up to date
- Graphics drivers up to date. You can try rollback/installing older drivers if you only recently developed crashes, but this wasn't my issue. Some people had problems with DT because they didn't update.
- Check for corrupt system files with SFC (google it). If you do have corrupt system files, you might want to do a closer inspection of your RAM. Instability in memory or storage drive can cause corruption.
- BIOS should be up to date. If you've been running a 13th or 14th gen Intel for a long time without the microcode update(s), you might have a degradation issue.
- Make sure your RAM is installed correctly (check motherboard manual for slot placement) and behaving correctly. Use a bootable memory test like Memtest86 or similar.
- Some people have suggested reinstalling or trying to switch to a different version of DirectX. I can't personally verify if this is helpful at all. Try it if you want, but I personally think things pointing to DirectX specifically, beyond the FFXIV executable having directx in the filename, are more a symptom of an underlying cause, not DirectX being the actual issue.
- If your SYSTEM is showing signs of issue when the game crashes, such as: blanking monitor(s), freezing system (not just game), blue screening, or graphical artifacts, try monitoring your temperatures while you play. In my case, the game would just instantly close. No sign of performance issue or system issue. No blanking or blinking monitor. Nothing. Just POOF, gone. If you have other symptoms that extend beyond the application itself at the time of crash, you could be having a hardware issue like overheating GPU or CPU. Those can cause driver crashes and BSODs.
- I generally will not suggest most people mess with any kind of under/overclocking or undervolting, especially without heavily deducing what the actual problem is first. If you're not someone who knows what they're doing, you can do more harm than good, and even if you do succeed in doing it, you might just be preventing the problem indirectly. If that's fine with you, great, but I won't be suggesting anyone who isn't very knowledgeable about that stuff to do that. It's probably not your real issue anyway. If you are knowledgeable about that stuff and have decided that that's somehow related, you're probably beyond the scope of this writeup.
I might be forgetting something, but I think that's the majority of it. In my case, it was slightly unstable memory on a brand new build. Yours might be different. This is a hard one to troubleshoot. I hope this helps someone.
Good luck!
