Bluescreens and freezes after installing Win11 24h2

[exi123]

Hello everyone,

I am playing Victoria 3 since launch on the same Pc. It always ran pretty stable, there were some crashes relating to mods, betas and bad patch day builds, but it never crashed my whole PC. After installing Win11 24H2 it is not able to play further as 30 minutes into the game until the game totally freezes my whole PC.

Are there any known issues with the new Win11 build? There were other severe problems reported with this update and other games, so it is not unreasonable that under certain conditions the game also has problems with the update and the underlying changes to the OS.

As someone who works in the IT sector, issues with ram, heat, drivers etc can excluded, the system runs in a fine state. Before the crash appears, it is visibile that the monthly saves are lagging hard with cracking sound and the game including my whole system freezes. A crash like this does not produce any crash log.

 

[AndrewT]

Are there any known issues with the new Win11 build?

Yes there are! it is a severely broken Windows update that has caused problems across the whole gaming - indeed computer - industry.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/game-crashing-after-windows-11-24h2-update.1718749/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/bluescreens-and-freezes-after-installing-win11-24h2.1725554/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/continuously-crashing-under-windows-11-24h2-with-exit-code-3221225620.1712339/

Certainly make sure you have the latest MS updates for it installed, but if that doesn't help all you can do is revert to 23H2 if you still can.

 

[exi123]

Yes there are! it is a severely broken Windows update that has caused problems across the whole gaming - indeed computer - industry.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/game-crashing-after-windows-11-24h2-update.1718749/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/bluescreens-and-freezes-after-installing-win11-24h2.1725554/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/continuously-crashing-under-windows-11-24h2-with-exit-code-3221225620.1712339/

Certainly make sure you have the latest MS updates for it installed, but if that doesn't help all you can do is revert to 23H2 if you still can.

What a mess. Thanks for the info, at least I can stop searching the web for hours to fix it on my side. Hopefully MS gets their sh*t together soon. The game is basically unplayable at the moment for me, I highly recommend Paradox to issue a open warning in their social canals that players should avoid installing it at the moment.

 

[Telauvs]

I found a fix:

Just launched victoria after two years of not playing it, and had problems playing as usual.

I managed to play for about 30 minutes before first crashing, and both times after having the pc frozen.... yet "looping" usb mouse input. I strongly suspect that the issue lies with interruption signals flooding the CPU cycles as it clearly buffered and reprocessed the same input buffer many many times...

With this in mind I restarted my PC and relaunched paradox games launcher and pressed play. Once the game process started, I went in to task manager -> details -> victoria3.exe -> right click assign affinity -> Enable all minus the two first and two last CPU numbers.

First time I removed a few random ones but that made the game crash soon after. However, after doing this and having somewhat sluggish game window interaction for the first minute after loading back my save, I managed to play for over five hours straight without any freezes.

For further troubleshooting / help for Paradox, here are things I think might be relevant:

Secure boot is disabled on my PC. (I suspect this could be the root cause. Installing W11 without is/used to not be possible be by default without secure boot enabled, event log seems to show a correlation)
SVM/Virtualization enabled
Virtualization based security is off
TPM is ON
I have Riot games Vanguard anticheat running on my PC
I have 24H2 update & latest Nvidia drivers.
I have an AMD Ryzen 5800x3d CPU.

If other people having this problem could post their configurations, perhaps we could try to find a common root cause.

I have included event-logs. Everything after the *final* error-41 critical kernel-power event is behavior that happened after I got the idea of adjusting CPU-affinity (which includes one application crash, but not a total system freezeup). Everything before will show errors relevant for two forced shutdowns with the powerbutton, which was necessary for me to turn the pc off (in other words, what happened during gameplay before i started troubleshooting).

Interesting to see logs of APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) occouring right about the timestamps when my pc hangs up.... I can't for sure say if it's the smoking gun.... But APIC is as far as im aware able to send interrupt signals inbetween cpu threads, so my theory is that removing some cores/threads from cpu affinity assignment prevents a total cpu interruption "blackhole".

If a Paradox community manager or developer sees my comment, kindly delete attached logs from the forum upon downloading them.

 

[exi123]

I found a fix:

Just launched victoria after two years of not playing it, and had problems playing as usual.

I managed to play for about 30 minutes before first crashing, and both times after having the pc frozen.... yet "looping" usb mouse input. I strongly suspect that the issue lies with interruption signals flooding the CPU cycles as it clearly buffered and reprocessed the same input buffer many many times...

With this in mind I restarted my PC and relaunched paradox games launcher and pressed play. Once the game process started, I went in to task manager -> details -> victoria3.exe -> right click assign affinity -> Enable all minus the two first and two last CPU numbers.

First time I removed a few random ones but that made the game crash soon after. However, after doing this and having somewhat sluggish game window interaction for the first minute after loading back my save, I managed to play for over five hours straight without any freezes.

For further troubleshooting / help for Paradox, here are things I think might be relevant:

Secure boot is disabled on my PC. (I suspect this could be the root cause. Installing W11 without is/used to not be possible be by default without secure boot enabled, event log seems to show a correlation)
SVM/Virtualization enabled
Virtualization based security is off
TPM is ON
I have Riot games Vanguard anticheat running on my PC
I have 24H2 update & latest Nvidia drivers.
I have an AMD Ryzen 5800x3d CPU.

If other people having this problem could post their configurations, perhaps we could try to find a common root cause.

I have included event-logs. Everything after the *final* error-41 critical kernel-power event is behavior that happened after I got the idea of adjusting CPU-affinity (which includes one application crash, but not a total system freezeup). Everything before will show errors relevant for two forced shutdowns with the powerbutton, which was necessary for me to turn the pc off (in other words, what happened during gameplay before i started troubleshooting).

Interesting to see logs of APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) occouring right about the timestamps when my pc hangs up.... I can't for sure say if it's the smoking gun.... But APIC is as far as im aware able to send interrupt signals inbetween cpu threads, so my theory is that removing some cores/threads from cpu affinity assignment prevents a total cpu interruption "blackhole".

If a Paradox community manager or developer sees my comment, kindly delete attached logs from the forum upon downloading them.

Maybe a bit late, but now had some time to test this and was able to play four roughly an hour without crashes. There were freezes, but those were not fatal for the game or the OS.

The performance is horrendous but at least it is playable... some kind of.

To complete the infos, am also running an AMD based system:

AMD Ryzen 7800x3d
Nvidia RTX 4090
64gb ram
Win11 24h2, searched and updated daily.