Off Topic?

[Silvaqua]

The topic is the game has crashed for years for me and based on my research, numerous others. It's literally "Game Randomly Crashes Help Thread". How could I be more on topic than explaining that the game has been crashing, the system that has been running the game, the randomness of the crashing making it hard to figure out, and the way to successfully diagnose and solve the issue??

If that doesn't belong in the Technical Help forum where does it belong?

Like for real.. I have thousands of hours in dozens of games and this is the only one to give me these random sudden crashes and I finally figured out that Factorio's mishandling CPU and GPU resources in a way causing a kernel exception and try to put that somewhere reputable so people can identify and fix it. Is this forum not here to help people with that? Jeez..

[Loewchen]

If you have an issue follow 52433.

[Koub]

In case you didn't see, the first post you did was rejected with this comment :
Follow: viewtopic.php?f=49&t=52433

I suggest you give it a try, it really helps.

[Silvaqua]

Search first

I have searched. In fact I have searched for more than a year.

Before making a report, try updating to the latest version, the issue might already be fixed.

I am and always have been up to date with the game and all mod versions when I have played with mods.

Make a useful title

The title describes the issue and is unrelated to version number, just like this other one that was posted by Dirty Dan and approved

Game crashing on launch

. To any regular Factorio user the only thing they can tell is that the game crashes unrelated to a repeatable step and there are no game logs or error messages. Therefore the title "Game Randomly Crashes Help Thread".

Describe the problem as best as you can

I described that the problem was seemingly random, the system that was running into the issue, the steps tried to fix it that were suggested elsewhere and failed, and the process of diagnosis that were unsuccessful and successful.

Provide Attachments

There are no relevant attachments and I don't feel like making screenshots for every step as it would be helpful but unnecessary.

So what part of "52433" exactly have I not followed. Stop just pointing me at it and say exactly what's wrong with it. Or just say outright it's not worth my time to help people with this type of crash that I have found multiple posts over the years describing with no given solution...

[Koub]

I can't know what was in your first post, because it was not approved. Right now, with the little information you provided, I can't imagine someone finding the root cause of your issue.
Yet, chances are there is an issue on your side, I think we'd have heard if every Factorio player experienced the same thing as you.

There is no guarantee someone will find the root cause, but the more data you provide, the higher the chances. The rest is up to you, you're the one facing the issue, not me.

[Silvaqua]

Here I was thinking you could see the post so you clearly do not have the context I thought in this back and forth... I fully described the issue which is not with every player as I mentioned in the post. It is however with a vocal enough number of players that I have found descriptions of the same random crashing over uneven play times before crashing, without being in response to actions taken in the game. It is unaffected by mod or not mod, in map or not in map, and other applications running or not running. Sometimes the game would crash after seconds, sometimes hours. Sometimes it would crash somewhat consistently after a few minutes of starting.

There would be nothing in Factorio's crash logs about it, and there were no error messages after the crash. It simply exited. In googling over the years I found other posts describing that and time and time again I saw the developers say, "check your RAM" or "rma your motherboard". None of the posts described having found the root cause or solving it.

Finally I decided to run a complete diagnostics on my memory with memtest86 (everything passed), stress tested GPU with FurMark (no overheating or errors), and stress tested the CPU with Prime95 (once again no issues). I also checked for any problems with bad sectors on my disks with CrystalDiskInfo (none).

A friend recommended that if there were no crash logs from the game to try looking through the Windows crash logs using Windows Event Viewer. I was able to use that to identify that the game was causing a kernel exception, error code 3 subcode 7, which indicates that the CPU performance was exceeding what the GPU could handle (unrelated to resource utilization which I mentioned in my original post). The fix for this I found was to enable maximum performance in the nvidia control panel > manage 3D settings. I had also previously underclocked the CPU to 3.5 GHZ which appeared to delay the crashing but because of its random nature I could not confirm this. I'm about to revert it to the sale default of 3.9 GHZ "turbo".

It's incredibly frustrating that I typed up a whole report on these findings that could have helped those others that were running into the same described situation and that it can't be accessed............

[Rseding91]

... and I finally figured out that Factorio's mishandling CPU and GPU resources in a way causing a kernel exception and try to put that somewhere reputable so people can identify and fix it.

I'd love to see what you found. As far as I know user-space processes are not capable of causing kernal level exceptions. This is a core part of the Windows operating systems and if it is a real thing then there's a serous bug in the operating system.

However on the tiny chance we have some issue in our code I'd love to see what you've found so I can fix it.