Game crashing after Windows 11 24H2 Update

[Lord Potence]

Information​

I have verifed my game files (Steam only)​

Yes

I have disabled all mods​

Yes

I am running the latest game update​

Yes

Required​

Summary​

Game crashing after Windows 11 24H2 Update

Description​

Hi, since updating to Windows 11 24H2, me and many others, whom I've been in contact with via the forum's thtreads encountered problems with Crusader Kings 3. The game either crashes during gameplay or won’t boot up at all. When it freezes, I can’t use Alt+Tab or Ctrl+Alt+Del to close it, and I have to shut down the PC directly from the power supply. Below I will list my system specs and troubleshooting I tried so far.

System specs:

GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070 TI
CPU: Intel i9-10900KF
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X
RAM: 32 GB

Steps I've tried:

Clean reinstall of Windows
Uninstalled the game with Revo Uninstaller and reinstalled on different drives
Added the game as an exception in Windows Defender
Ran both Steam and CK3 as Administrator
Confirmed graphics drivers are up to date
Moved my save files to another folder to rule out corrupted saves
Verified Visual C++ (ver. 14.40.33816.0) and .NET Framework (ver. 4.8.1) are up to date
Changed the Windows “Energy Plan" to “Performance" (I'm not sure if this affects desktop PCs, but I'm out of ideas)

As a side note, I contacted Microsoft support and they reported and I coute "it appears that this may be a compatibility issue after a computer system update, requiring the game developer to also make in-game updates for the new version of the system." And they instructed me to either wait or to downgrade to 23H2.

Steps to reproduce​

I've been playing well for over 320 hours and when Windows 11 24H2 came out I decided to update, since then the game constantly crashes on boot. It loads for a while, I see the loading screen and as I described earlier the whole PC just frozes, not even being able to CTRL ALT DEL, and having to shut down the PSU.

Game Version​

1.14.2.2

Platform​

Windows

Additional Information​

Affected Feature​

• Crashes

Save Game​

Other Attachments​

View attachment pdx_settings.txtView attachment error.logView attachment dxdiag.log.zip

 

[Chaotic Raven]

Hello there!
Thank you for your report! I would like to ask for additional information, if it is possible:
* Your crash folder, which should be available in [...]\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings III\crashes

 

[Lord Potence]

Hi!! So I replicated the crash 4 times, but no file generates in C:\[...]\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings III\crashes. I'm guessing maybe due to the crash of the whole PC it dosen't get to generate? If there is something I can do to force it I'll be glad to try.

 

[LuckyPichu]

To any support personnel, same issue. I posted the same issue to tech support, not knowing there was a bug reports thread. Here is the post:
"""
ike the title says, I've been crashing quite frequently since Roads to Power was released, and I'm not quite sure what's going wrong. I've tried validating my game files, some suggested fixes regarding playing in windowed mode, and one or two other things that I can quite remember at the time of posting.

Looking at the 3 most recent crashdump in windbg:
All three of the most recent crashes have been NULL_CLASS_PTR_READ and the faulting instruction and the faulting instruction & memory dereference is at r13+0x18.

Regarding the context of these crashes, I believe one was while closing the player character screen, another was when an event popped up while I was opening the schemes tab, and I'm not certain enough about what I remember about the oldest crash.

Fault Address (Offset Variations) observations:​

• Most recent Dump: Crash at ck3+0x349320f.
• Second-most recent dump: Same address as first dump, ck3+0x349320f.
• Third-most recent dump: Slightly different address, ck3+0x349283f.
• While all are in close proximity, the third dump suggests a different code path leading to a similar null dereference. The first two games were played in multiplayer, the last was a singleplayer game.

I'd love to know what's going on at r13+0x18. I figure it's a bug at r13+0x18, but I wanted to know if its conditions are dependent on my specific hardware configuration or entirely out of my control. I've included the dumps for your reference.

"""
I have also attached the referenced crash dumps.

 

[Benjewels]

Hi there,

same problem here, since 24h2 update.
I've tried every tips I found on the forum, doesn't do anything. Game crashes, image freezes and I have to force reboot my computer, as I have access to no other possibilities, like ctrl alt supp, or anything...

 

[Putuhead]

Hi there,

same problem here, since 24h2 update.
I've tried every tips I found on the forum, doesn't do anything. Game crashes, image freezes and I have to force reboot my computer, as I have access to no other possibilities, like ctrl alt supp, or anything...

Hey, same here, started after 24h2.
And as an addition: it randomly started to get laggy again when zooming in/out (On details map mode)

 

[Sean705]

Having the exact same issue, crash to desktop with no crash log after 24h2. I can consistently reproduce by attempting to start a new game, choosing create you own ruler, and as the world history attempts to load, the game will CTD.

Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics 3.80 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB (27.9 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Edition Windows 10 Home
Version 22H2
Installed on ‎4/‎9/‎2022
OS build 19045.5131
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.19060.1000.0

 

[Divine]

To any support personnel, same issue. I posted the same issue to tech support, not knowing there was a bug reports thread. Here is the post:
"""
ike the title says, I've been crashing quite frequently since Roads to Power was released, and I'm not quite sure what's going wrong. I've tried validating my game files, some suggested fixes regarding playing in windowed mode, and one or two other things that I can quite remember at the time of posting.

Looking at the 3 most recent crashdump in windbg:
All three of the most recent crashes have been NULL_CLASS_PTR_READ and the faulting instruction and the faulting instruction & memory dereference is at r13+0x18.

Regarding the context of these crashes, I believe one was while closing the player character screen, another was when an event popped up while I was opening the schemes tab, and I'm not certain enough about what I remember about the oldest crash.

Fault Address (Offset Variations) observations:​

• Most recent Dump: Crash at ck3+0x349320f.
• Second-most recent dump: Same address as first dump, ck3+0x349320f.
• Third-most recent dump: Slightly different address, ck3+0x349283f.
• While all are in close proximity, the third dump suggests a different code path leading to a similar null dereference. The first two games were played in multiplayer, the last was a singleplayer game.

I'd love to know what's going on at r13+0x18. I figure it's a bug at r13+0x18, but I wanted to know if its conditions are dependent on my specific hardware configuration or entirely out of my control. I've included the dumps for your reference.

"""
I have also attached the referenced crash dumps.

This looks to be unrelated to the start-up freezes that the OP of the thread is mentioning that is related to the Win11 24H2 updates.

However I took a quick look at your crashes and our Vulkan pipeline is for some reason running out of resources when drawing portraits. I would suggest that you use the DirectX11 rendering backend option available in graphics settings for windows as that backend is more mature and stable for the Windows OS and see if you still continue to experience the issue.

 

[Divine]

For the Win11 24H2 freeze issues. We're still looking into this issue. If anyone manages to get a memory dump of when this happens it would be very appreciated but I understand that due to the nature of the freeze that this will be difficult to achieve. In the meantime we're in contact with Microsoft and working in-house to analyze the issue.

 

[Putuhead]

Thank you very much. The game is kinda unplayable right now with random crashes like loose cannon

As for your request, it's not possible (at least for me) to get that memory dump since the only method is to reset my pc...

 

[Galford]

I also experienced intermittent system hangs while launching or in-game just after updating to Windows 11 24H2 and subsequently rolled back to 23H2.
Additionally, I observed micro stuttering while panning the map, and occasional flicker glitches with the right side panels.
Graphics settings are set to Nvidia App recommended for RTX 4070.

My system information:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
Chipset: AMD X570
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070

 

[LuckyPichu]

This looks to be unrelated to the start-up freezes that the OP of the thread is mentioning that is related to the Win11 24H2 updates.

However I took a quick look at your crashes and our Vulkan pipeline is for some reason running out of resources when drawing portraits. I would suggest that you use the DirectX11 rendering backend option available in graphics settings for windows as that backend is more mature and stable for the Windows OS and see if you still continue to experience the issue.

Thanks!

 

[Divine]

We still haven't managed to find the reason for the freeze but I'm sharing some of my observations here.

As someone before has mentioned rolling back to win11 23H2 will avoid the issue.

From looking at hardware used for internal reproduction of the issue and your reported hardware it may only affect NVidia GPU cards - however this is still speculation from the data.

There's some indication from internal testing that the very latest version of 24H2 doesn't fully solve the issue but mitigates it to only be a temporary system freeze rather than a permanent one. You can check your own local windows build version by typing `winver` in a commandline window.

With those observations I would recommend people that don't want to roll back to 23H2 to try the following:
* Make sure your win11 build is at least 19044.5247 or 19045.5247 and if it's not then force a windows update to fetch the latest update
* Make sure your GPU drivers are up to date
* If the above fails a temporary measure may be to run the binary in compatibility mode

I hope that allows you to find a workaround to enjoy the game again. If problems persists we will continue to look for mitigations we can do from our side but this is an issue that at the moment looks like it's caused and hopefully is fixed on the OS/driver level.

I'm super interested in hearing back from anyone trying out the steps above if it solves or mitigates the freeze issues.

 

[GKB]

event viewer shows l1vhlwf hypervisor not available to user. microsoft seems to fix this issue with updates to some games according to their website . i did not see paradox listed there though

 

[Putuhead]

Windows updated to latest
Nvidia driver is also up to date.

After testing for one and a half hours, i didn't experience any permanent system freeze, however as you said, temporary ones still randomly occur (1-2 secs every minute)

The game seems stable now but still not enjoyable with those freezing. I guess we have to wait further OS fixes for a solid solution.

 

[Yaroslav_33]

With the same issue I've faced when played Victoria 3. Only rollback helped me.

 

[Putuhead]

I rolled back to win11 23H2 and tested for about 2-3 hours, the issue is completely gone. This is true also for another game which had the same issue for sounds only.
Better wait for some solid patches / fixes from Microsoft before rolling to 24H2 again.

 

[48848:AbundantSwing72]

The option to rollback is not even available to me anymore. Now I can't play past June of 885 without it freezing and causing the game to crash.

 

[Yaroslav_33]

Windows 11 KB5048667 install fails, performance, gaming issues. Windows 11 24H2 affected. Last update caused this issue.

 

[Blofeld2000]

Same here after 24H2.