SC2 Black screen & crashes graphic drivers

StarCraft II Technical Support
1

Hello!

I’ve recently bought an acer predator 300 with an i7 9750 and rtx 2060

I am encoutering an issue with SC2, meaning that after anywhere inbetween 5 to 15 minutes in an actual match, my screen goes black and i have to use task manager to kill the process.

When trying to launch the game again, I get an error saying that the graphic’s device is not available at this time, and I need to restart my computer to be able to launch the game again, usually leading to a blue screen with the CRITICAL_DXKRNL_FATAL_ERROR message.

The temperatures are very good, and I have tried reinstalling the graphic drivers along with .net, directx and even tried older versions & windows reinstall.

Note that this issue only happens in sc2, and I can’t seem to reproduce it other games, that are a lot more demanding.

2

Hi, Robert88! o/

Blue Screens are never good. A Blue Screen is Window’s way of saying something went really, really wrong. The error message you get points to a problem in DirectX’s Kernel, which is Window’s graphics API, as you probably know.

So you seem to have the right idea about where this may be coming from (drivers, temperature, DirectX and so on). In this case, I would recommend trying a clean reinstallation of the Graphic Drivers. In order to do this, you’ll need a program like DDU to uninstall the current drivers completely.

Another thing that could be causing this issue is a conflict between SC2 and some other program. To resolve this, I would try to close background applications, but this can take a while, so I would try first the drivers.

If your computer has any Overclocking, even if it’s done by factory, try disabling it, as it can sometimes cause issues (if you are not sure about this, check with the manufacturer).

Finally, since the computer is a recent purchase, I would check all the components. If you have a diagnosis tool provided by the manufacturer, start with that. Then, ScanDisk, Defrag and System File Checker.

If you still experience the issue, you can try a Memory Check, but I must warn you, this takes hours (you can’t use the computer while it’s being done), and it can seem to get stuck at many points, so do it when you are not going to use the computer for a while (to give you an idea, last time I did one on my computer, I left it the whole night, and it finished just after I woke up the next day).

3

Hi Agaleith!

Thanks for your quick reply.

As mentioned, I have already reinstalled the drivers multiple times and tried older versions to make sure that this is not the cause, obviously by using DDU in safe mode to remove the previous ones, and with internet disconnected.

I do not tend to have any background applications running, I have tried with pretty much everything, even some windows services turned off while playing, no effects.

My computer only overclocks when it is in turbo mode, which I never even tried using in SC2 as it is clearly not needed.

The components of the computer were tried over and over again, everything from the latest games to at least 5 different stress test tools, it performed greatly on all of them with no sign of issues.

I have tried running sfc /scannow multiple times, checked ssd health, defragged hdd, reinstalled windows two times, once from bootable usb, once from iso…

4

Hi again! o/

If you tried all that I mentioned to no effect, I can’t really think of much else, but we could have a look at your msinfo file. Follow these steps to create it, and then, copy and paste the result in a page like pastebin. Post here the link to it (if you can’t post links, you can use the preformatted text option, the button that looks like this: </>), and we’ll have a look to see if we can figure out what may be the cause.

5

Hi!

Here is the pastebin of MSInfo

pastebin  dot  com/EHENM2jg

Windows dump file is also attached below
gofile dot io/?c=mNNTtm

Meanwhile I have also created some posts of the microsoft community and acer community hoping for a new idea, I would really like to have this issue fixed as I really enjoy SC2.

6

Hi again, Robert88! o/

As I expected, the msinfo doesn’t give us much new. I’ve been thinking, though. There’s a known issue with Overwatch and Nvidia RTX cards. Can you try this? Sounds silly, and I haven’t heard it affecting SC2, but I guess it’s worth a try.

Alternatively, we can try to run the game with the card on debug mode:

  1. Right click on an empty space of your desktop
  2. Go to the Nvidia Control Panel
  3. Click on Help, on the top right
  4. Activate Debug Mode

You could also try the game in windowed mode, and see how that goes.

Other than that, I can only recommend you to make sure these two are up to date:
-Killer Network Manager
-SteelSeries Engine

And to enable the Secondary Logon (but it’s never the Secondary Logon).

And that’s all I can think of. We can’t really handle Windows’ dump files, but Microsoft should be able to give you more information about the information in there, so hopefully, between these and the help they may be able to provide, you can get this solved.

7

Hi again! o/

I knew I was forgetting something >_<

Your GPU drivers for the Nvidia card are up to date, but you also have an integrated Intel card. While you are playing with the Nvidia one, it isn’t a bad idea to update the drivers for the Intel. I think these are the ones, but you can also use their tool for auto-detecting updates. Again, it’s probably not this, but worth a try.

8

Hi Agaleith!

Sadly the microsoft community is the first one that I’ve contacted for help, and to this day it has 0 answers lmao.

My intel drivers and pretty much everything is always up to date after a couple of windows reinstall, lmao.

I had the good idea of contacting nVidia support and with the help of Shailendra, I followed these steps:
nVidia Control panel -> global settings
Power management mode – prefer maximum performance
• Ambient Occlusion – Off
• Triple buffering – off
• Threaded optimization - ON
• Vertical Sync – Off

Seems to have fixed it, or at least I was able to play 3 matches of 40, 11 and 17 minutes tho.

// EDIT
It worked for yesterday, going back to same error right now :confused:

9

Hi again, Robert88! o/

It’s a shame that didn’t work :frowning:

I was digging through our database, and checking any error reports that may have arrived our way, and I found something that may be worth trying:

  1. Press the Windows and Q keys together
  2. Search for CMD
  3. Right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator
  4. Enter the following commands, one at a time, pressing Enter after each and waiting for it to finish:
    net stop winmgmt
    winmgmt /resetrepository
    net start winmgmt
    exit

This will rebuild the WMI repository, which has caused some crashes in SC2 for other players.

Other than that, I checked with a few colleagues, and we’ve been unable to identify any other possible cause that we haven’t covered already. At this point, I would check with Acer’s support and see if they can offer you any more insight into what may be the issue.

1 Like
10

I just did that, will report results back.

Thanks a lot for trying to help me with this :slight_smile:

//I’ve also installed a new update for the intel ones, had to clean again with DUU in safe mode, otherwise it would tell me that its incompatible for some reason, I got my hopes up with these 2 changes

//Edit 2:
Just tried with the newer Intel Drivers and the latest solution you’ve posted, crashed within 3 minutes of the first match, like really fast

I did not get a blue screen this time, screen just got stuck on black and had to power off, could not open task manager either.

Had to restart 15-20 time before having to boot again, I thought that my pc was bricked for a minute :frowning:

1 Like
11

starcraft 2 does not like laptops with 2 active gpus for some reason. it expects optimus but your gpu does not support that. your integrated gpu might however be strong enough to run the game well. you could try to run it on that.

12

I have not had this issue the past 2 days ever since newer graphics drivers came out.

I hope it was just a compatibility issue or something that’s been fixed.

13

Many thanks for your help Agaleith, I also have the same intermittent issue and your winmgmt work around does work, but it needs to be carried out afresh on each computer boot.

All drivers are up to date, etc.etc.

Cheers for the help

14

A SOLUTION:

Use your Windows Device Manager and disable (but do not uninstall) the non-main graphics drivers on your device, before starting Starcraft.

  1. Type “device manager” in the start menu and the option will occur. Click it.

  2. Find “Display Adapters” and open it up. It should show at least two options; see my screen shot

  3. Right click on whichever one is NOT your main graphics driver, and select “Disable”. Your screen may reset or windows may rerender. Don’t worry.

  4. Launch Starcraft 2, the game should run because SC2 now only uses the single main driver rather than trying to mix and match between the two.

Screenshot: I can’t include links in my post :frowning:

15

Hey, I had this same problem and I dug up on another forum that it is an overlay issue causing it.

If I have Discord running it crashes Starcraft 2 to blackscreen with audio after a random amount of time. But with Discord closed it never happens.

16

If someone has this problem now, I had the same problem. My nvidia experience had set resolution for the game higher then the resolution of my screen, it always worked, but now it doesn’t work anymore. Now I have to set the actual resolution of my screen. I had to change it in the game settings for starcraft II in the nvidia geforce experience program and problem was fixed.

1 Like
17

I had the same issue until I changed graphics from ‘Fullscreen’ to ‘Windowed (fullscreen)’. It’s not easy changing settings when the screen turns off every 2 seconds but what you do it

  • Press ESC
  • Click the first option which is ‘Options’
  • Graphics settings are the first option and you get a dropdown, change ‘Fullscreen’ to ‘Windowed Fullscreen’
  • Click ‘Apply’ at the bottom of the page
18

better than blizzard thank you