Intermittent CTD during gameplay

[Sybot]

I am getting an intermittent CTD during gameplay of Stellaris (also getting the same issue in EU4, but not in HoI4) on my laptop. The overall performance of the games is fine, I don't encounter any lag or graphical issues, but randomly the game will freeze, the sound will start to stutter and then the game will crash and I have to manually kill the process.

The issue is not replicable as best I can tell. It seems to occur when I take an action in the game, i.e. open a menu or click on a object, but exactly what action and when isn't consistent. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes, other times I can play for an hour without it crashing. Simply letting the game run has not caused any of these crashes.

Any thoughts on what might cause this? I have attached the files from the crash folder (system/error logs didn't have any entries from the time of the crash).

Windows 10
Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz 2.42 GHz
Installed RAM 16.0 GB
Graphics Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics
Disk NVMe INTEL SSDPEKNW512GB (200GB free space)

 

[MordridBlack]

Ok there are quite a few models of the Intel Iris XE Graphics so I can't say with 100% certainty which one you have in your PC


But if what I'm seeing is right, your GPU is way underpowered to run Stellaris, which would likely be causing the crashes

 

[AndrewT]

The crash in exceptions.log is clearly in the Intel video driver. As the above user says, that is not supported hardware for this game, but OTOH that normally just makes a game run slow, not crashes it.


Check with your Laptop vendor for an update to that driver, failing that Intel:

Download Intel Drivers and Software

Download new and previously released drivers including support software, bios, utilities, firmware and patches for Intel products.

downloadcenter.intel.com

 

[Sybot]

That's a shame, I didn't buy this laptop for gaming but then I discovered that it actually had better performance for PDX games than my PC, except for this one issue. I hadn't assumed it was a graphics problem because there weren't any obvious graphical issues in game before the crash.

I will install the latest drivers and see if that fixes the issue, and if not then I'll have to go back to my old clunky PC and see what I can do about upgrading it.

 

[Sybot]

To close out the thread, updating the drivers on my laptop didn't help, so I bit the expensive bullet and upgraded my PC, which has drastically improved the performance. I am still disappointed I won't be able to play PDX games on the move unless I shell out for an actual gaming laptop too, but that's a purchase for another time.