Hi all,

I mistakenly wrote the original post in the Bugs forum (https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/114-bug-reports/thread/24277-crash-black-screen-during-space-combat) but it's a technical issue so forgive the post here too.

Obviously we're still at alpha stage, but my game crashes early on, and often just before getting into, a battles. The only time I've been able to see a battle through has been on a fairly simple one on one battle. Anymore ships than that and it crashes to black screen and I need to alt tab.

Crash reports are in the other thread, but my info is below:

> Installed latest video drivers

> Installed latest Windows updates

> Verified game files

I'm using Windows 7 64bit on boot camp on a 27" mid 2011 iMac (I know, I know). 3.1ghz i5 quad core, 8gb ram, AMD Radeon HD 6970M. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The battles are one of my favourite bits!

All the best.

I think your computer stretches the limit of what we can make work as far as hardware goes. Have you tried the DX10 compatibility mode? Might be a little less demanding. Simply add "dx10" to the command line in the Steam properties for the game.

Hope this helps!

Hi there. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Ok I'll give that a go and get back to you. My computer ran the previous ES game really well and other things like Skyrim Special Edition (a different sort of game I know) so I was a bit surprised it was a hardware issue, but it is a few years old I guess. Is it quite obvious where to add the DX10 thing in Steam?

Cheers.

Are you forcing the AMD card via the CCC?

No idea what that means lol. The card works fine on lots of other things so I haven't had to tinker with anything up to this stage. 

Combat_Sheep888 wrote:

No idea what that means lol. The card works fine on lots of other things so I haven't had to tinker with anything up to this stage. 

https://www.howtogeek.com/175281/how-to-force-graphics-options-in-pc-games-with-nvidia-amd-or-intel-graphics/

Depends on the game but for laptops forcing games to use the proper AMD/Nvidia cards is a fairly common thing that needs to be done.

Ah well it's an iMac running Windows so it's an odd mix between desktop and the odd laptop parts, like the GPU. I think it has intel as well but it always uses the AMD GPU.

Hmm, I've tried opening launch options for the games in Steam and adding "dx10" but it doesn't seem to do anything or acknowledge DX10 us being used. I launched the game but it still crashed during a battle. It looks like some other people have a "-" or a "+" before whatever they type in?

I've done a bit of reading and it seems that the HD 6970M was in the second generation of AMD cards fully supporting DX11, so not really sure what's happening here. When it crashes to black screen and I alt tab to desktop there's always a message saying the video card stopped responding or couldn't be found or something like that. Sure this isn't a bug?

Hi there,

Have you tried running the game with the lowest quality setting (Fastest), just to see if ti behaves differently?

Thanks

Hi there,

Yep, turned everything right down and it still happens. It's a bit confusing as I run the new Skyrim Special Edition at full with God rays and reflections and everything but these battles crash 9 times out of 10, sometimes right after clicking to start the battle. The message after I alt tab out seems to indicate the GPU momentarily 'disappeared' and stopped responding. Another tip I was given was to run the game in dx10 mode via launch options in steam, but either I did that wrong or it didn't work. Not sure what the issue is as I know it's an older card but it's shown it's still very capable.

It does stutter when you have that nice zoom around a system you just discovered, but again, graphically it doesn't look like that it's something that should do that given the other things my GPU happily runs.