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Everything you need to know about the possible fixes and reasons for the God of War Ragnarok D3D device crash error on PC.
God of War Ragnarok’s PC debut has been quite smooth. The game is quite well-optimized for the platform and offers a plethora of options for players to get the most out of their hardware. However, following the recent title update, many players have reported poor performance and other issues with the title. Chief among these issues is the “D3D device crash” which pops up after a few hours of gameplay. The crash report mentions GPU drivers being outdated or overheating being the primary reasons for the crash. However, this is happening to players who have the latest drivers installed. Furthermore, players have also reported overheating as not being an issue for this error.
In fact, in most cases, the crash happened under perfectly normal CPU and GPU operating temperatures. Weirdly enough, the crash replicates quite easily as it happens regularly after roughly 2-3 hours of gameplay. While such issues might hint at some form of “memory leak,” that’s not the case with God of War Ragnarok. The game, even when it freezes and crashes, stays well under the VRAM limits.
Thankfully, there’s a way to potentially fix this issue, albeit with a major caveat attached to it. Here’s everything you need to know about the God of War Ragnarok D3D device crash, including the potential reasons and fixes.
Possible Fixes for God of War Ragnarok D3D Device Crash Error on PC
The D3D device crash error is mostly happening to players with Nvidia GPUs, with many facing it after the latest Nvidia GPU version 565.90 driver update. Essentially, after a set amount of time (roughly 2-3 hours) God of War Ragnarok would freeze, with only audio playing in the background. The game doesn’t crash immediately, instead stays suspended in the frozen state. You basically have to alt-tab out of the game and stop the application either via Steam or the task manager. If you launch God of War Ragnarok after the crash, it works perfectly fine, but only for another 2-3 hours. After this, it freezes and crashes again.
As of writing this article, the only remedy for this issue according to us is to roll back our drivers to 561.09. However, that introduces its own set of issues. With the 561.09 drivers installed, we found the game stuttering when traveling between realms or while loading into a new area for the first time. While the Valhalla mode seems to work perfectly fine, stutters are present in the base game. It should be noted that we did a clean install of the older drivers. That being said, the stutters weren’t frequent enough to hamper the moment-to-moment gameplay experience.
You can roll back to the previous driver version by downloading it from Nvidia’s official website. We also highly recommend running Steam’s game file verification tool for God of War Ragnarok before launching the game after a crash. Lastly, make sure to restart your PC after downgrading your GPU drivers.
Will God of War Ragnarok Get Any More Updates on PC
At the time of writing this article, God of War Ragnarok has already received 5 major title updates on PC. These updates addressed some of the major issues that were present in the PC port. However, since its release, the stream of regular updates seems to have halted. This isn’t surprising considering Jetpack Interactive, the studio that ported God of War Ragnarok to PC, has a fairly small team. Furthermore, with the last title update, the team has addressed most of the major issues that were present in the game. The D3D device crash error is mostly due to Nvidia’s recent GPU driver update. Hence, it’s highly unlikely that Jetpack Interactive will release an update for this particular error.
However, given how PlayStation’s other PC porting studio, Nixxes Software, pushes updates months after the release of their games, Jetpack Interactive might be working on a few more updates for God of War Ragnarok. While the PC version of God of War Ragnarok is quite well-optimized it still has some underlying issues related to volumetric effects, SSR quality, and general stability of the application. Hopefully, Jetpack Interactive will be able to iron out most, if not all of the current issues present in the PC port.
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