Game gets unresponsive after playing for 10 to 30 minutes

[OrsoPedro]

Interesting - I myself never had any problems before with my 560 and I didn't know about the power management mode.

Good luck!

[yandexx]

Yeah, it was quite a popular issue, NVIDIA have even run a survey to gather stats about how severe it was. And some people would revert to older 2xx.xx drivers to avoid the issue or something

Huh, wow, that was back in 2011, time flies: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic...ecovered-/

[eratanz]

I tried changing the power management setting with no success, unfortunately (I have another thread on this forum, and a 560Ti as well with the same issue)

Anything from Frictional staff, yet?

[yandexx]

Yeah I just tried that too, hanged for me 12 minutes into the game.

If someone's interested, I've attached another output from WinDbg. The only active thread is 0, and it's doing stuff in the NVIDIA OpenGL module. The rest are just waiting.

I'll try to push with the escalation on the NVIDIA side.

[Spirit Juice]

Somehow after updating my drivers, checking SOMA's cache integrity, and completely reinstalling the game managed to fix my hanging issues... but now the game is super choppy on Xsplit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh well, at least I got the to run better.

[yandexx]

After a suggestion from NVIDIA support, I tried the game on the lowest settings.
I left the game idle for 30 minutes, then ran around a level for 15 more, there were no issues.

I now think that hangs and crashes happen when the card runs out of VRAM and starts swapping to system memory. I only have 1 GB, and thanks to Process Explorer I can see that on the lowest the game needed around 500 MB, on Medium it fits right under 1 GB and on High it also additionally consumes 300+ MB of system memory. At that point the game starts to stutter often, especially when quickly turning the camera.

Changing to Medium textures/shadows is probably the workaround for me, but I have to test this further. It is also probably a good idea to close apps that consume VRAM: Chrome, GOG Galaxy (again, you can check via Process Explorer).

This still leaves the question whether the game is at fault or the drivers. Hoping NVIDIA will be able to tell, investigation still ongoing.

[Mudbill]

I believe 1 GB of VRAM is the minimum system requirement for the game? Considering that, it would make sense that it'd be possible to run at the lowest settings (using the lowest requirements). Having 2 GB instead would surely allow you to use the higher settings in that regard, but if that's not an option you might have to settle with the lower ones. Can't really expect high settings on a low system.

[yandexx]

Yeah I know, but really a game is not supposed to crash or hang if your GPU runs out of VRAM. The performance will be bad though, yes.
Much like your PC doesn't crash when you run out of RAM, stuff is swapped to disk instead.

[nebej]

As you say the game is not suppose to crash when you run out of VRAM. It should just swap with normal RAM and there might be some framedrops.

I have passed this info to our Nvidia contact.
Our Mac porter found a similar issue on some mac computers with nvidia. He said that it was an issue with the driver so it is most likely the same here.

[yandexx]

OK I've played on the the settings that the game auto-suggests:
- Medium textures.
- Medium shadows.
- AF 2x.

The resolution is at 1920x1080.

I've played for 1.5 hours and had no hanging or crashing. And the game also fits into 1GB VRAM with these. If you have hanging/crashing like described in my original post, try this workaround (if you're fine with blurrier textures).

Reasons are still unknown though.

Update [07.11.2015]: It was all good and well for like 4-5 hours (apart from sluggish framerate at times), but at one point later in the game I still had hangs three times, had to kill the process and start from save game.
VRAM usage was at 650 MB. So maybe it's not VRAM swapping after all.